Telecom Italia suspends streaming music service

Licensing issues thought to be responsible for shutdown of Grooveshark-powered Next Music.

Telecom Italia has suspended its Next Music streaming music service for broadband and mobile users, despite the fact that it only launched in July.

The service, which was run for TIM by US firm Grooveshark, offered a catalogue of millions of songs as on-demand streams, which users could sort into playlists.

However, Billboard reports one rather large snag in the service: many of those tracks may not have properly been licensed from the record labels.

It also quotes Enzo Mazza, the president of Italian labels body FIMI: "We notified [Telecom Italia] of the fact that the service contained a huge number of tracks, by both Italian and international artists, that had not been authorised by record labels and we are naturally happy that they have responded so swiftly," he says.

If this is the cause, it would be embarrassing for TIM. Licensing for streaming music can be a complex affair: shortly after Spotify launched its original desktop music service last year, it had to remove tracks after a licensing mix-up, for example.