Michael Robertson, founder of cyberlocker pioneer MP3tunes, unveiled what...
Michael Robertson, founder of cyberlocker pioneer MP3tunes, unveiled what he called “the world’s first radio search engine” Thursday (http://radiosearchengine.com). “A universal web player for the first time connects to and plays nearly every station offering immediate audio satisfaction and unprecedented…
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user control,” he said in an email. By searching for an artist, or genre, a user can locate each station in the country currently playing a song by that artist or every radio station playing that genre. “Tens of thousands of stations are scanned every 3-5 seconds to get the currently playing song,” he said. “This index is used to construct a real-time library of ever changing music on the radio all of which [is] searchable.” While some might think of radio as passe, Robertson thinks “radio is the redhead step child [sic] of the media industries,” he said. “On the business side, radio is a bigger industry than recorded music, books and magazine, yet its [sic] seen only a small amount of innovation of those sectors. It seems like an ideal opportunity to me.” Last year, Robertson filed for bankruptcy protection after a protracted copyright infringement case brought by EMI over MP3tunes, in which a judge said MP3tunes qualified for Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbors but would have to remove infringing songs from its users’ digital lockers. Robertson does not anticipate any legal issues with his new venture, he said. “Many of my inventions have been completely trailblazing like an app store, syncing CDs, physical + digital bundles, but RadioSeachEngine is not quite as novel,” he said in an email. “While a radio search engine is new there are of course Bing and Google which index just about every other media sector (newspapers, books, photos, etc).”