Business News Digital

Michael Robertson adds FreeBeats1 to his 6 Seconds app

By | Published on Friday 3 July 2015

Michael Robertson

Ah, Mickey Robertson, I kind of enjoy his ongoing entrepreneurial efforts that seem to be primarily engineered to piss off as many people in the music industry as possible. And why not I say? Oh, you just thought of six good reasons why not. Oh well.

You might remember that Michael Robertson, founder of the original MP3.com and the sued-out-of-existence digital locker and link sharing platform MP3tunes, recently launched a new app called 6 seconds, which taps into the online radio domain to offer something nearing an on-demand music service.

It basically tries to find a radio station currently playing a track or artist that a user requests, and links you to said station’s online stream within six seconds. Once you’ve heard that track you can stay with the station or quickly skip to another somewhere else on the net playing something different.

Robertson has just launched a new version of the app and in it you will find a thing called FreeBeats1, which tracks what music is being played on the Apple Music station, and then lets people listen to that list of songs by jumping around from station to station, but without ever having to hear Zane Lowe, or any of his colleagues or ads.

Writes Robertson in a recent blog post: “FreeBeats1 monitors Apple’s Beats1 station and plays the same tunes but without the disruptive DJ banter. Unlike Beats1, it does not require an iOS device or registering with an AppleID to listen. Any Android or iOS user can listen and no registration is required”.

So there you go. As with any Robertson-led music venture, this throws up plenty of copyright questions, not least whether there is copyright in playlists (an old favourite, of course), and whether turning thousands of radio streams into an on-demand streaming service requires any sort of licence from rights owners over and above the licences the radio firms already have. Fun fun.



READ MORE ABOUT: | |