Listen to Radio Online? Then You Should Check Out OnRadio’s Search

If you’re a longtime consumer of online music, you’ll remember Michael Robertson’s groundbreaking MP3.com, a music-sharing service that was sued into oblivion by the music industry. Robertson was levied a $53 million fine even though much of what MP3.com offered ended up becoming completely commonplace and legal. (Read about what happened here.)

But Robertson is a serial entrepreneur and has since launched a number of online projects. His latest is called OnRadio, a radio programming search site that sounds very interesting. From Fortune:

[Robertson] is now working on several new ventures, one of which is called OnRadio. The service,introduced this week, indexes all the music playing on more than 100,000 online radio stations and allows users to search across that database and listen to any song. It also lets them share those songs through a variety of chat applications such as Snapchat and Twitter, using a unique URL.

“Because Google doesn’t index online radio streams, radio is invisible to searchers and radio companies are missing out on more than 100 million users per day,” Robertson said in a statement. “Our goal at OnRad.io is to make it one-click easy to find any song playing on the radio and to easily share those songs with friends.”

The service is an evolution of an earlier radio-search feature that Robertson developed, which both scrapes music lists from the web and uses a combination of APIs and other technical methods to generate its database. It started as an offshoot of a separate service he created called DAR.fm, which allows users to record radio programming the way a PVR lets TV watchers record their favorite TV shows.

See what I mean? Keep reading and click on the graphic below to give it a whirl. Let’s see how good it is at searching its indexed radio stations.