Mp3.com founder Michael Robertson launches OnRadio, which lets you search for and play songs from 100K+ online radio streams
a database of every song being played NOW on online radio stations http://fortune.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Michael Robertson has spent his career attacking the same seam of the music business: he founded [[entity:mp3.com|MP3.com]] during the download-era reinvention, built DAR.fm to record talk radio, then saw his follow-up MP3tunes collapse into bankruptcy under the weight of EMI's copyright suit after a jury found him liable for willful infringement. OnRadio is the leaner version of the same instinct — no hosting of files, just a real-time index of what is playing right now across more than 100K online radio streams.
The launch lands in a market where incumbents were already buying their way into live radio: Rdio added 460 Cumulus-owned AM/FM stations to its on-demand service that August amid mounting competition, and MixRadio was relaunching mobile apps under new owner Line months earlier. Robertson's wager is that indexing every station beats licensing a curated subset.
First-order effects
- Listeners get song-level search over 100K+ streams — turning thousands of unstructured broadcasts into a queryable 'what's playing now' database, something neither Rdio's licensed catalog nor MixRadio's app relaunch offered.
- Robertson returns to music-tech as an indexer rather than a host, a structure that sidesteps the file-storage liability model that sank MP3tunes.
Second-order effects
- Services like Rdio that license individual stations face a framing problem: if one site can surface every stream for free discovery, paying for bundled AM/FM inventory looks less like differentiation and more like overhead.
- Broadcasters gain a new discovery surface — being indexed by OnRadio means listeners can find a station by the song it's playing, shifting some promotional value from playlists to live programming.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds toward searchable live audio, the endpoint looks like what Sonos later did by preloading 60K+ partner stations directly into its app: radio streams treated as infrastructure to be aggregated and indexed, not licensed track-by-track — with rights questions attaching to the metadata layer rather than the music files.
The trend: Live radio is being converted from a listening medium into indexed, searchable inventory that aggregates alongside on-demand streaming catalogs.