In the wake of news that
Universal Music has filed a million-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against the music streaming service
Grooveshark, internal e-mails written in 2009 by Grooveshark chairman Sina Simantob, are made public.
The e-mails reveal the questionable profit-making strategy that Simantob had put in place at his company. In one e-mail, he wrote, "We are achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels. We use the label's songs till we get a 100 (million) uniques, by which time we can tell the labels who is listening to their music, where, and then turn around and charge th em for the very data we got from th em, ensuring that what we pay th em in total for streaming is less than what they pay us for data mining. Let's keep this quite [sic] for as long as we can."