14 DAY TRIAL // Grooveshark may be one of the biggest streaming sites out there, with some 20 million users, but things aren’t exactly perfect in paradise if we’re to believe one particular source.
An anonymous alleged Grooveshark insider who’s afraid of getting sued exposed a lengthy list of troubles inside the corporation.
On one hand, he explains, in the past couple of weeks, over ten people have been laid off, both from the pool of new employees and from the group of senior engineers that had been with the company for a while.
The issue goes deeper than this, the insider says. In fact, recently, the company’s leadership banked on the idea that they’d manage to attract funding and started hiring new people even though the company was “barely scraping by.”
“This used to be a really fun environment instead of a corporate hellhole. All our perks are gone or meaningless too and we've all got paycuts. Morale was low before, but now it's in the dumps,” writes the anonymous employee.
He also slams Sam Tarantino, one of the Grooveshark co-founders, saying he lied about the company’s valuation back in October. “He told us point-blank we were worth $375 million (€274.7 million). [Redacted]. We barely rake in $13 million (€9.52 million) a year and we're being sued to hell, how the hell are we worth 28x that?” he asks.
Furthermore, he claims that Tarantino was caught uploading pirated music to his website, so half the cash from the $60 million (€44 million) Series B money raising effort will likely go to pay off major music labels.
“The rest will be spent helping us pivot from being ad-based to subscription-based in a market full of strong competitors that aren't being sued to hell,” he writes.
On top of all the lying that’s allegedly being done inside the company, there’s more going on outside of it. In fact, the reviews posted about the company on Glassdoor, a service that allows employees to post opinions about their workplaces, are mostly fake, he accuses.
“Our positive Glassdoor reviews are nearly all fake. Really. If you scroll back through to the reviews written in February, you'll see a bunch of ‘Work here! It's awesome!’ reviews that Adrian-Hayes Santos [Senior Recruiter] ordered out of us since HR was convinced no developers wanted to work at Grooveshark because our Glassdoor rating wasn't high enough,” he writes before linking to a more “honest” review.
The anonymous Grooveshark employee has promised to take his leave as soon as he finds another workplace where he “won’t have to sell my soul anymore.”
While the entire comment was made anonymously, some parts of it seem true even to someone that’s not involved with the company, such as the Glassdoor reviews, while others seem quite fabricated.
We’ve contacted Grooveshark and will update this article if there’s an answer.
You can read the full text posted below.