via wired: 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?"
The stated central aims of the services creators are to provide a flexible, open platform for users to listen to music without having to pirate it or face legal repercussions read Anontune's white paper. True to form, users of the service can largely remain anonymous.
Although the site is still very crude and its origins obscure, the idea of Anonymous even a few far-flung members of the group tackling online music is compelling.
The project is not so much a response to Megaupload but a response to the tycoons from the RIAA shutting down music services, the anon wrote to Wired. "You may have heard about what Anonymous has done in Operation Payback. We believe the underlying reasons for the revolt were (mostly) correct, however their approach is unlikely to change anything in the long run."
