Michael Robertson is a longtime provocateur of the music business. A decade ago, the music labels successfully sued his landmark startup, Mp3.com, over a feature that gave users a digital copy of any song they could prove they owned on CD. In 2007, Robertson walked into another nest of litigation with Mp3Tunes.com, which allows consumers to upload their songs into cloud-based digital music lockers and then stream their tracks to any smartphone or computer.
Now the San Diego entrepreneur is lobbing another sonic grenade. Robertson is taking the wraps off his newest startup, DAR.fm—short for digital audio recorder—that he planned to launch on Feb. 23. It'll be a centralized Web-based TiVo (TIVO) for radio. Users can go to DAR.fm to search through the programming schedules of about 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record up to four hours of any broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then deposited into a user's password-protected account that can be accessed from any PC, smartphone, or Internet-connected radio. "Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting," says Robertson. "The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035568306.htm
