Earlier this year, hacktivist group Anonymous stirred up serious shit when they crashed some major music industry sites in protest of the shutdown of Megaupload. Now, they have launched the latest phase in their war against the industry's old guard: their own music service.
The platform, which is called Anontune, has already launched, although it's currently only a rudimentary prototype. It's essentially a massive aggregator that finds streaming music from various sources around the internet and collects them into one easily searchable service, allowing users to create playlists. This means that it won't be hosting any copyrighted content, so its legality is somewhat ambiguous.
Wired reports that it currently only draws from YouTube and SoundCloud, although the makers plan to incorporate more sources, such as Bandcamp, MySpace and Yahoo Music.
It's an intriguing concept, to be sure, since there is certainly a lot of free music out there (much of it legal) if you know how to find it. Anontune may face a major hurdle, however, in overcoming Anonymous's anti-industry reputation. Artists and labels are unlikely to play along, and Wired points out that users ought to be careful about running code created by a hacker group.
The makers of Anontune have responded to some of the criticism here.
Watch a video about Anontune below. The video claims, "Rather than focus on the music itself, Anontune will instead focus upon information about the music. Information like where music being distributed, how it is being used, and how it is discovered."
The platform, which is called Anontune, has already launched, although it's currently only a rudimentary prototype. It's essentially a massive aggregator that finds streaming music from various sources around the internet and collects them into one easily searchable service, allowing users to create playlists. This means that it won't be hosting any copyrighted content, so its legality is somewhat ambiguous.
Wired reports that it currently only draws from YouTube and SoundCloud, although the makers plan to incorporate more sources, such as Bandcamp, MySpace and Yahoo Music.
It's an intriguing concept, to be sure, since there is certainly a lot of free music out there (much of it legal) if you know how to find it. Anontune may face a major hurdle, however, in overcoming Anonymous's anti-industry reputation. Artists and labels are unlikely to play along, and Wired points out that users ought to be careful about running code created by a hacker group.
The makers of Anontune have responded to some of the criticism here.
Watch a video about Anontune below. The video claims, "Rather than focus on the music itself, Anontune will instead focus upon information about the music. Information like where music being distributed, how it is being used, and how it is discovered."
