Michael Robertson Bucks the Music Industry Again

Michael Robertson's DAR.fm -- short for digital audio recorder -- will 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." The free service -- Robertson says he'll eventually try to sell ads -- works by recording audio right off a radio station's own website. About half the 10,000 stations in the U.S. stream their live broadcasts on their home pages. (DAR.fm will only record feeds that do not use encrypted media-streaming formats such as Microsoft's (MSFT) Silverlight.) When instructed by a user, DAR.fm can, for example, visit the site of KOH in Reno to record Sean Hannity's daily talk show, navigate to an ESPN Radio affiliate such as KTIK in Boise to get Jim Rome's three-hour drive-time sports rants, or grab several hours of alternative rock from WPBZ in West Palm Beach, Fla., or KITS in San Francisco. The feature that may be most appealing to consumers and irksome to music executives: DAR.fm identifies individual songs in a broadcast and allows users to download them to mobile phones or iTunes music libraries. (The audio quality is much lower than music bought on iTunes.)