if that were the case, why would they then say:

"Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can."

also,

> they take a loss for licensing up front

doesn't seem like the correct interpretation, because they say

"we are achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels"

That's exactly what he meant, they don't pay a dime because they offset it by selling data.

To me, the phrase "let's keep this quite [sic] as long as we can" implies you know you're doing something wrong.

No it doesn't. It implies that you don't want people to know about it. But there's plenty of things in business that are legal and ethical, but you still want to keep quiet. For example, Google kept their search revenue quiet for a long time and intentionally did so. Were they doing something wrong? I'm sure Apple would like to keep their supplier deals quiet.

If you're getting a good deal with competitive advantage, you often want to keep that quiet -- and it doesn't imply you're doing anything wrong. Now if they statement ended with, "or we could all up in jail" then that would imply they were doing something wrong. This just sounds like they found a sweet deal and wanted to make sure they could milk it with as little cost for as long as possible.

I don't know about that, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt since this is all on Universal's words, they provide an amazing service, have license agreements with EMI and lots of smaller labels.

Is there a list somewhere of all of the actual artists Grooveshark has legal agreements with? I'd love to see the percentage of streams of unlicensed artists vs. licensed artists and how much each contributes to their total stream output per month.

Grooveshark didn't start licensing anything from major labels until extremely recently. They built their userbase on unlicensed music.