• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 1, 2015

The music streaming service Grooveshark shut down on Thursday in order to settle a long-running lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Grooveshark, which operated a music service since 2007, said in a statement posted on its site that it “made very serious mistakes.”

“We failed to secure licenses from rightsholders for the vast amount of music on the service,” the company wrote. The statement goes on to direct people to a site offering links to dozens of online music services, including MTV.com and Amazon's MP3 store.

The settlement agreement, which was filed with the court on Friday, includes a $50 million judgment against Grooveshark's parent corporation, Escape Media, but not the individuals who operated the site. The deal resolves a lawsuit dating to 2012, when the record industry sued Grooveshark for allegedly infringing copyright.

Grooveshark allegedly built a library of music by inviting users to upload songs to the service. The company, which supported its service through online ads, made streams available to its 24 million users for free, the record labels said in court papers.

“Because its business model is built on stealing, not paying, Escape’s policies are not consistent with copyright law,” the RIAA argued in court papers filed last year.

Grooveshark argued that it was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which generally provides that Web services operators aren't liable for copyright infringement by users. But that law only protects Web services operators who follow certain obligations. Among others, they must implement a policy aimed at preventing the same users from repeatedly infringing copyright.

Grooveshark contended that it used a “one strike” policy that prevented people from uploading new music files after they were accused of infringement.

But U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan in New York ruled in March that Grooveshark didn't follow that plan. “Perhaps the strongest indicator of Escape's failure to terminate the uploading privileges of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances is the undisputed facts showing that hundreds or thousands of users were not stripped of their uploading privileges after receiving notices of infringement,” Nathan wrote in a decision awarding the RIAA summary judgment on some of its claims.

She added that 1,609 users received takedown notices for uploading a file after having received a prior takedown notice.

“These 1,609 users submitted 2,339,671 files that are still available in Grooveshark's active library,” she wrote. “At least 3,323 users for whom there is documentation of infringement in Escape' s database still have their uploading privileges enabled.”

The 2012 lawsuit wasn't the first battle between the record companies and Grooveshark. The company also was sued in 2009. That case resulted in both sides signing a distribution agreement, but the deal later unraveled.