Playlist.com is a domain name that formerly hosted a commercial-free Internet radio service called Playlist, which had approximately 60 million users. The domain is owned by Playlist Media, which operates under the brand Playlist. As of mid-2017, the website lists only Jam Music, a streaming service and iOS app available in the United States.

History

Playlist was founded in February 2006 by Jeremy Riney for the purpose of putting more music on Myspace and other social networking sites. From a userbase of less than 500,000 in mid-2006, it grew to more than 20,000,000 users as of June 30, 2008 and 50,000,000 users by June 30, 2011. It was originally known as Project Playlist with the

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

of projectplaylist.com, before it acquired its current

of playlist.com and became known as Playlist.com. On February 1, 2013 Playlist Media, Inc. acquired playlist.com and on July 1, 2013, Playlist.com relaunched as a personalized radio service. In June 2015, the Playlist.com personalized radio service was brought offline.

Legal issues

Playlist experienced legal issues early in its history. Those issues have been resolved. On April 28, 2008, the RIAA and a coalition of nine record labels filed a lawsuit against the company for contributing to mass copyright infringement. However, two similar cases against MySpace and

Imeem The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by Streaming media, streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by ...

were largely the opening moves in settlements which would see these music sites licensing the content and compensating artists for the use of their music. At the time of the lawsuit, Project Playlist already had begun contracts with Sony BMG. On December 19, 2008, MySpace quickly began removing the Project Playlist music player from all profiles and subsequently leaving the affected users a message in their inbox which notified them of the removal. This amounted to a temporary ban of Project Playlist, largely due to complaints brought forth by the artists, asserting that Project Playlist should be paying royalties. Facebook also later banned Project Playlist from its site. On May 11, 2010, it was reported that Playlist reached a settlement with

Universal Music Group Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as just Universal Music) is a Dutch– American multinational music corporation under Dutch law. UMG's corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its ...

and

Warner Music Group Warner Music Group Corp. ( d.b.a. Warner Music Group, commonly abbreviated as WMG) is an American multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate headquartered in New York City. It is one of the " big three" recording companies and t ...

for an undisclosed amount. On February 1, 2013, the site playlist.com was acquired by a third party free of outstanding legal issues with the music recording and publishing industries.

References

{{reflist Internet radio in the United States Companies based in San Francisco