Grooveshark: Awesome, But Will It Last?

I recently (a few hours ago) switched to Grooveshark as my primary music player. In case you haven't heard of it before, Grooveshark is a great up-and-coming web-app that lets users play just about any song they want from any computer with an internet connection. On top of that, it offers great radio functionality, so even if you can't decide what to listen to or don't have time to set up your playlist, you'll still be hearing tunes that will (most likely) satisfy.

For a while, I was hesitant to switch to Grooveshark from Lala (now bought out by Apple) because they don't yet offer Last.fm scrobbling. Fortunately for me, a dude named Sami Samhuri developed a tool called scrobbleshark that fixes that problem. EDIT: Another tool called Rumpus by Michele Palmia appears to be a bit more reliable. Also, it can apparently send your loved tracks on Grooveshark to your favorited tracks on Last.fm, a feature that Sami Samhuri also plans to include in future versions of scrobbleshark, though I haven't gotten this to work yet.

Anyway, I am now using what is pretty close to the ideal music player - one that allows me to play anything from anywhere at any time, whether I know what I want to listen to or not, and records it all to Last.fm. It is this fact, however, that worries me. It is not legal in the US to play copyrighted material whenever I want unless I've payed for it. The one advertisement to the right of the Grooveshark player (which I block with Adblock Plus) and very cheap payments from "VIP" users don't seem like they could possibly be enough to finance deals with record labels. In fact, the people at Grooveshark have already been dealt a couple lawsuits. An optimist would say that the record companies are just using the lawsuits as bargaining chips in their deals with the online music prospect, but a successful one could be the end of the service entirely. Either way, I respect the people at Grooveshark for sticking to their goals: "To improve the connection between people and music. To change the music industry in ways they seem so unwilling to consider. To have fun."