Soothing music by which to listen to Vic Toews promote Bills C-30 and 51 while gnashing your teeth?

Anontune: The New Social Music Platform From Anonymous

Thursday, April 19, 2012



In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet.

The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits.

Reached by e-mail, one of the creators of Anontune told Wired the project was started by a group of anons who met online six years ago on what was then an underground hacking site. The group, mostly focused at the time on “cracking,” began discussing music, favorite artists and what they would do to fix current music business models.

“We would say stuff like, ‘People really use YouTube as a music player yet it really sucks for that purpose … it’s too unorganized,’” the anon wrote to Wired. “And then, ‘YouTube does make a good music player but you can’t play all your songs on it since the obscure ones aren’t uploaded,’ then eventually, ‘Hmmm, what if you were to combine music websites like Myspace, Yahoo, YouTube and others?’”

On the ever-sprawling internet, music can pop up anywhere — Tumblr pages, blogs, The Hype Machine (to name but a few). Almost any song is available at any time, whether posted by legitimate sources or uploaded by fans or pirates, and Anontune would tap into that rich reservoir.

It wouldn’t be the first time Anonymous squared off with the record industry: When popular file-sharing site Megaupload was shuttered by the Justice Department in January, Anonymous retaliated by attacking the websites of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Department of Justice. The DDoS attacks provide an undeniable look at what Anonymous can do in a copyfight, but if the creators of Anontune succeed, they could make something far more disruptive to the music industry.

The Anontune concept remained nothing more than talk until one day in early December, when an anon posted a link to Anontune and said he planned to make their ideas a reality. The others looked at the site.

Although it wasn’t very good, the working prototype got enough people interested in the project that they “formed a team that day and stopped hacking,” the anon said.

The platform has been in development for just a few months, according to the video above (titled “Message From Anonymous: Music Has Changed”). Although Anontune is still very rudimentary, the service is meant to improve the way music is played online.

“It has come to our attention that the state of online music has been sabotaged by the fat hands of corporate involvement,” the Anontune video’s voiceover states. “These changes have led to a world in which your enjoyment of music is controlled and billed by the minute.”

Clarification

The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, DMCA the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a scarecrow in a suit a lawyer.