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Real-Time Radio Search Engine From Music Industry's Nemesis

Posted by timothy on from the gadflies-love-being-swatted dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From the guy who brought you CD syncing and the original music locker (both of which saw lawsuits from record labels) comes the latest invention to rock the music world: a real-time radio search engine. 1000s of worldwide stations are indexed in real-time and users can search and play most any popular artist — even the digital holdouts (Tool, Led Zeppelin, etc) that are unavailable on paid services like Spotify. (Kinda wonder why Google hasn't done this.) Link on main page points to an API for those who want to build mobile and web services."

6 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Innocent? by malchus842 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sure. Pass new laws that make it illegal....or include it in the new Trans-Pacific treaty, along with every other wish they have on their list.....

  2. Re:Innocent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It probably depends on individual countries.

    It doesn't look like they are actually capturing any data for rebroadcast:

    About half are internet only stations and half are simulcasters who are transmitting their AM/FM station online as well.

    ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uxzNqPIZE0R_DJiMSR-NA5-yoc6APgt56odOixFlNZ0 )

    That may not make them safe however as they appear to be embedding the streams rather than linking to an appropriate page on the streams source. Depending on the country you're in this is a bit of a grey area - you could be found to be infringing or liable for damages if you cause service/load problems for the original host or losses in revenue.

    Whether they could be extradited from the US to another country for such a crime is also up for debate but it certainly seems possible depending on the terms of the extradition treaties.

    Disclaimer: IANAL: But IP law, especially as it's applied across countries - is messed up.

  3. Curious about the technology they use by vikingpower · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How do they do it ? Do they use a near-real-time indexing technology like elasticsearch or Apache Lucene ? Did they build something by themselves ?

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    1. Re:Curious about the technology they use by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

      the number of songs is pretty finite.

      True. Not only do ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC control a limited number of musical compositions, about 10 or 20 million at my last count, but the whole set of possible musical compositions is limited to a couple hundred million at most. If you want, I can explain further. (Hint: lawsuits alleging 8 note similarity, 14 possibilities for each note after the first, 14^(8 - 1))

      But the number of recordings of these songs is effectively unbounded, as is the number of ways stations can distort any particular recording. Different stations use slightly different level compressors on the signal, with slightly different methods of compensating for what the combination of level compression and FM preemphasis does to the "s" sound. And a lot of stations appear to use a 6% speedup, which pitches the music up by a semitone and allows fitting a few extra commercials in each hour. The matching metric had better be pretty robust.

  4. moskva.fm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know there is a Russian service that does this really well (http://moskva.fm, you need to understand the language). It's like a 24/7 DVR (well, DAR) combined with Shazam and extensive hyperlinking (so you can do things like "which stations played this song"). Pretty neat, but sadly I agree that RIAA lawyers have already been summoned to draft lawsuits.

  5. /robots.txt by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    except for the idiot in Brazil who is spidering the site and will be blocked in 3, 2, 1

    You appear to have no valid /robots.txt file on the site. This won't stop intentionally misbehaving spiders, but right now, you don't even appear to indicate at all (in a machine-readable manner) that spiders aren't welcome. But before drafting /robots.txt, you need to make a decision: Do you want your result pages to be in Bing and Google, or do you want to hide your site from users of general web search?