Aurous wants to step into the gap left by Grooveshark.

A new music streaming app based on a decentralised BitTorrent search engine promises to offer all the music available on the internet – even Taylor Swift – at no cost.

Aurous is built on similar technology to Popcorn Time, the not-exactly-legal movie and TV streaming service that’s become a popular free alternative to subscription service Netflix.

Rather than using external servers for its main features, Aurous relies on a scan of archives on illegal P2P file-sharing sites where files are usually hosted by individual users, or ‘seeders’ – think old school applications like Soulseek and Napster.

The developers think their big selling point is the lack of annoying audio ads currently endured by Spotify’s ‘freemium’ tier users. Aurous will also offer music that Spotify doesn’t have, including streaming refuseniks like Taylor Swift and The Beatles.

Coder Andrew Sampson developed the app from his existing BitTorrent search engine, Strike Search. “What sets Aurous apart is its ability to allow users to search for music, all over the BitTorrent network, using the very same technology that powers Strike Search,” Sampson told Torrentfreak.

“The app itself is decentralized, nothing routes through any external servers for the primary features. Even if as a project, development stopped and we shut down our website, the app would still continue functioning without any problems. It can look through entire BitTorrent archives in milliseconds to get individual files.”

The app will be free, but “from time to time you may see a banner-based ad or sponsored content,” he added. “However none of these will interrupt your streams/music playback, nor will you ever hear an audio advertisement.”

Aurous will enter a public Alpha stage on October 10, with plans for availability on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS devices (if Apple approves it, which seems unlikely).

The arrival of the app is another headache for the music industry, which finally managed to take down Grooveshark earlier this year. But it won’t be easy to halt Aurous should it find similar success – Grooveshark’s developers were collared for uploading copyrighted material themselves, not for creating a search engine to locate illegal files. [via Music Business Worldwide]

Read this next: Streaming might be the future, but is it an unfair economy that hurts artists?