While updating the 2004 podcast entries for my old radio show “mediageek” I was reminded that I used to post the episodes in both a 64kbps mono “broadcast quality” MP3 and a 16kbps.

The reason why I posted such a low bitrate file, containing relatively low fidelity, was to make the show accessible to listeners who did not have access to broadband internet, or whose access was limited. You see, in 2004 broadband penetration in the United States was just barely approaching 50%, meaning that half of households with internet were still using dial-up modems.

In the best case scenario, it would take a 56kbps modem user about 35 to 40 minutes to download the weekly half-hour “broadcast quality” MP3. That’s longer than real-time, and assumes a very quiet phone line, good connection and no internet multi-tasking, like checking email or surfing the web while downloading. Though I actually had DSL broadband when I launched the show in 2002 and began posting shows online, listeners from around the world had emailed me asking for smaller files.

I first settled on 16kbps because the typical show was about 3.5 MB, or about a fifth the size of the “broadcast quality version.” That file could be downloaded in nine or ten minutes by a modem user.

As I alluded, the sound quality of that 16kbps file isn’t great. But, it’s also perfectly intelligible. Fidelity-wise I’d compare it to shortwave radio, and utterly adequate for a talk program, which is what “mediageek” was.

Hear 16kbps for yourself:

I quit posting those low bitrate files in the middle of 2005, in part because of the extra effort it required, and in part because I assumed that listeners’ internet connections were improving. Turns out, I was mistaken on the latter point. I received several emails telling me that only having bigger 64kbps files was making the show inaccessible, with one listener suggesting that 24kbps files would be an acceptable compromise between file size and fidelity. The sound was more like AM radio than shortwave. So I resumed creating smaller files at this bitrate.

Here’s what one of those 24kbps files sounds like:

The Magic of Shortwave, Online

As I mentioned in my post about the history of internet radio, this is the kind of sound quality I was accustomed to when streaming audio from around the world in the mid- and late–90s over my home dial-up connection. The experience then was very much like the first time I used a shortwave radio as a child. It was pure magic to hear live radio from thousands of miles away, or on-demand recorded shows that I’d never otherwise have the opportunity to hear before.

Though the fidelity was shortwave-quality, the listening experience was more rock-solid. No signal fades, static or lightning strikes intruded on those early internet broadcasts, provided nobody else picked up the phone. I happened to live alone in a one-bedroom grad student apartment, and so was lucky not to have to compete for the line.

Since that time most people with internet access are now accustomed to getting better bandwidth oner 4G mobile connections than we did with modems or even early 2000s cable and DSL home broadband. It’s no problem to stream high quality stereo music from Spotify or Pandora on the go. Certainly makes those 16kbps MP3s seem obsolete.

Or are they?

Low Bitrate Streaming Today

Internet bandwidth is not unlimited, especially over mobile connections. Many folks either pay by the gigabyte or have firm bandwidth limits every month with stiff charges for going over limit. Until this past October my own mobile plan limited my wife and me to 2 GB combined, which required me to limit the podcasts and music I streamed or downloaded over mobile broadband. Podcast files clocking in at 50 MB or more really do add up quickly.

I wonder how many listeners would gladly trade in some loss in fidelity in order to moderate their bandwidth usage? Moreover, many rural communities across the U.S. are still considered “broadband deserts” where home and mobile speeds are very slow, or where dial-up is still the only option. Bitrate and file size can still be a matter of accessibility.

Offering lower bitrates is less of a sonic compromise today than it was 15 years ago, due to advances in codec technologies. MP3 is relatively ancient compared to the more modern AAC, which has many variants, including a “high efficiency” (HE) version designed specifically for low bandwidth applications. This is great for streaming, but still not so hot for podcasting. That’s because MP3 is pretty much the de facto standard for the medium – for a variety of reasons – and while most modern podcast players can play other file types, MP3 guarantees the broadest compatibility.

But sticking with MP3 significantly limits low bandwidth sound quality, which is why I’m reluctant to reduce the bitrate for the Radio Survivor podcast in order to get smaller file sizes (right now the show averages around 26 MB).

However, I recently noticed that Mixcloud, which streams DJ mixes, radio shows and podcasts, uses AAC-HE, likely for the purpose of conserving bandwidth costs. A recent episode of Radio Survivor hosted there is actually re-encoded to 49kbps variable bitrate mono AAC-HE file; our normal MP3 podcast file is 64kbps mono. It sounds just fine to my ears:

I don’t know if the platform adjusts bitrates for lower bandwidth users – I tend to doubt it. However that 49kbps bitrate is just low enough that you can probably stream it over a modem or 2G mobile connection, perhaps with some initial buffering. (That’s not something I can test, since I don’t have a modem or landline.)

Where Are the Low Bitrate Stations?

To see if there appears to be any demand for low bitrate internet radio I checked out the directory at Shoutcast, which is one of the only directories where you can easily sort stations by bitrate. Just looking at the top stations list I can see more than three dozen stations streaming at under 64kbps, with 32kbps seeming to be the most popular low bitrate, using both MP3 and AAC. Looking only at talk radio stations, there are even more low bitrate streams.

It’s not just about accessibility. It also helps to control bandwidth costs for the station. But seeing the wide availability of these streams tells me there are still people listening to them. They may not be specifically looking for low bitrates. They might just be selecting particular streams based upon whether or not they play readily and easily over their connection.

True to my analogy, many international shortwave broadcasters offer low bitrate streams. For instance, the BBC World Service offers streams as low as 48kbps.

In any event, while low bitrate streaming may not be much needed by many of us with always-on broadband connections, there still seems to be a need, even if the format flies mostly under the radar. The ability to squeeze down an audio signal into a tiny stream means we can still get internet radio broadcast from far away places or receive it in places where internet is still a limited commodity.

In that way, the spirit of shortwave radio is still alive on the internet today.

The post The Shortwave Radio of the Internet: Low Bitrate Streaming appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Today is the Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality. Radio Survivor is a supporter because we understand clearly how the internet is a powerful medium to disseminate diverse and independent voices. As an independent online publication and podcast Radio Survivor fundamentally relies on a free, unfiltered internet to exist and communicate with fellow radio lovers around the world.

But our support of net neutrality is about more than self interest. The distance between broadcast radio and internet radio gets narrower every day, as more people tune in on their computers and smartphones, even if they’re listening to the online stream of a terrestrial station. For many listeners public radio and podcasts are nearly synonymous, choosing to listen to “This American Life” on demand, at their own convenience, rather than when dictated by a broadcast schedule. Millions of other listeners turn to internet stations to hear music and genres that are almost impossible to receive over the air.

The internet’s low barrier to entry has resulted in an explosion of audio options, with a very long tail made up of independent broadcasters, podcasters, DJs and producers who each may only attract a few dozen listeners. But for each listener their artistry is a welcome escape or a needed entertainment, if not a lifeline, supplying music, information or ideas that would be nearly unfindable in the pre-internet era.

Net neutrality is the principle that every bit of legal data and content on the internet should be treated equally. Mapped onto radio, this means every internet radio listener should be able to access her local college radio stream as easily as iHeartRadio. Every podcast fan should be able to download an obscure show about tabletop games just as quickly as an ESPN show. Any online audio listener shouldn’t find it harder to get independent DJ mixes, shows or streams than content from a bigger company that paid for the privilege of disproportionate access to your ears.

Crucially, listeners and broadcasters alike should have equal access across both wired and wireless internet connections. Your listening choices shouldn’t me more constrained simply because you’re using a mobile device or smartphone.

The FCC has guaranteed and enforced these protections since February 2015 when it passed the Open Internet Order. But new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai intends to overturn these rules. That is why hundreds of organizations and thousands of internet users are coming together for this day of action.

You can do your part by submitting your comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality. As my colleague Matthew Lasar pointed out, public comments really do matter, because they are a part of the public record, which can be cited by lawmakers, in legal briefs and even in legal opinions.

It’s most effective if you can cite personal experience or testify to specific circumstances that are relevant in your community. For instance, Chairman Pai argues that the Open Internet Order has stunted the roll out of high speed internet across the country. But is that true in your community? I can attest that in my city both local ISPs have rolled out higher speed service in the last year, including a significant rollout of gigabit fiber.

Facts matter, especially to courts. If Pai succeeds in passing his ironically titled “Restoring Internet Freedom” order, undoing net neutrality protections, that decision will most definitely be challenged in court by public interest advocates. They will dive into the public comment record looking for facts and testimony that support net neutrality.

Resources to Take Action

BattleFortheNet.com and SaveTheInternet.com both make it easy to submit your comments.

As some background to help frame your comments, here are the protections that the Open Internet Order provides:

• No Blocking: broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
• No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
• No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind—in other words, no “fast lanes.” This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates.

Back in April Gizmodo did a handy rundown of “the worst lies” in a speech that Pai gave announcing his plan to undo net neutrality. In short, he claims that net neutrality is bad for online privacy, has harmed online investment, exacerbates “digital redlining” keeping access from disadvantaged communities, and that the there were no problems with blocking or throttling access prior to the Open Internet Order passing in 2015.

For your own comments, consider arguments and facts that disprove these arguments. How does net neutrality enhance, or at least not harm, privacy? Do you see evidence of broadband investment and rollout in the last two years?

To the last point—that there was no blocking or throttling prior to 2015—consult this handy list of pre–2015 net neutrality violations that Free Press logged. Perhaps you have some examples of your own?

The post Why Radio Survivor Supports the Day of Action for Net Neutrality appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Tuesday AT&T, the nation’s second largest wireless carrier, announced that it is activating the FM radio chips on Android smartphones subscribed to its service. Beginning in 2016, subscribers buying new compatible phones will be able to use the free NextRadio app to listen to both terrestrial broadcasts and those stations’ internet streams.

Sprint, the fourth largest carrier, was the first US carrier to support FM in smartphones, beginning in 2013. Still missing from the FM team are the country’s number one and number three carriers, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Since most Android smartphone manufacturers include an FM receiver chip in their devices by default, the issues has always been whether or not the carrier that sells the phone specifies it should be activated. That means that most Android smartphone users in the US have had FM radios on their phones that are rendered useless by their service provider.

By comparison, the small percentage of Americans who buy unlocked Android phones rather than buying discounted ones that are tied to their wireless contract, have mostly been able to use the radios in their devices. And in Europe, where carrier-tied phones are much less common, FM radios have been turned on by default for years.

The US wireless carriers’ refusal to activate the FM radios in smartphones has always been kind of a mystery, since the cost to the carriers is next to nothing. The only conceivable reason why the carriers keep the radios turned off is because that forces customers to use wireless data to listen to streaming radio, which is something they can charge for.

I’ve had smartphones with FM radios in them and have always been a fan not only because the radio doesn’t use any expensive data, but it also uses a lot less battery power than keeping a constant internet audio stream going. It also means when traveling I don’t need to bring a separate radio. When I’ve been overseas and without a local data plan I can still get some local information and entertainment, for free.

It’s not yet known what caused AT&T to have a change of heart. The 2013 deal between Emmis Communication–the company behind NextRadio–and Sprint required the radio company to give $15 million a year in advertising industry to the carrier, along with a 30% share of any ad revenue generated by the NextRadio app. It wouldn’t be surprising if AT&T got a similar deal. AT&T also likely wants to head off any FCC or Congressional mandates regarding the FM chip, even though FCC Chairman Wheeler has said he prefers the wireless and radio industries to work it out themselves. Perhaps, then, the Commission helped to grease the skids a little.

iPhone users, however, are still out of luck, no matter which carrier they use. Although long rumored, there is no evidence or acknowledgement that Apple has ever included

The post Digital Watch: AT&T Android Phones Get FM in 2016 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I started listening to Apple Music’s new Beats 1 Radio this morning at 10 AM PDT, two hours after the new service launched. On the face of it there is nothing particularly innovative about the station. Even though Apple unsuccessfully tried to find a new word for “radio,” Beats 1 is just that.

The most standout feature that the press has latched onto is the growing lineup of celebrity DJs, including Dr. Dre, Elton John, and St. Vincent. No doubt, Apple must have invested much more money in Beats 1 than most broadcasters spend on any one station.

However, to me the station’s most distinctive aspect is that it’s trying to be truly global in a way that very few, in any, music stations are. It’s not just because Beats 1 has DJs spinning from London, New York and Los Angeles–that’s the least interesting part.

Rather, as I heard DJ Zane Lowe explain it during his show this morning, Beats 1 is scheduling its anchor programs for global listening. The program schedule shows Zane Lowe’s LA-based show, Ebro Dareden’s NYC show and Julie Adenuga’s London show each play twice a day, twelve hours apart.

While most internet radio is available worldwide, most of the time the programming is scheduled around a home time zone. Sure, I can listen to the BBC’s digital 6 Music or terrestrial BBC 1 services–which Beats 1 is not dissimilar to–here in the US, but I have to accept hearing the morning show during the afternoon and adjust accordingly.

In this way Beats 1 more resembles international shortwave broadcasters, like the BBC World Service, which schedule programs based upon which part of the world is awake and listening. Beats 1’s twelve-hour repeat doesn’t strictly target many regions, although it does make it easier for someone in both New York and Sydney to catch the anchor DJs during normal waking hours.

It must be noted that it’s programmed for English speakers, and so far has an Anglo-American bias. However, I did hear a French-language song during Lowe’s set, “Tout les Mêmes” by Stromae.

Right now, however, the station’s celebrity shows have just one scheduled time. St. Vincent’s and Josh Homme’s shows broadcast only at 10 PM ET on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively. If Beats 1 adds more celebrities from outside North America and the UK I wonder if those shows will be scheduled for the convenience of the star’s home countries. Or perhaps the celebrity programs also will get repeated.

Musically, so far the station has played a mix of current pop hits across genres like rock, hip hop, electronic and even house. Though I hope DJs puts their own imprint on their sets, I’m curious to hear how widely the mix varies. Lowe definitely played some British artists that are new to me–he hails from London even though he hosts his show from LA.

When the broadcast shifted from NYC to London at noon Pacific Time the change was radical, by pop standards, featuring distinctly London genres like Drum n’ Bass and Grime. At the same time there is definitely a rotation that cuts across locales–I heard three tracks repeated across the three sets I heard originating from LA, NYC and London. I appreciate the localized variety, but I question if all listeners will.

If the mix varies too much show-to-show then Beats 1 faces the same problem that college, community and many public stations face in having eclectic schedules. That is, while there is an audience that enjoys eclecticism, or is willing to tune in specifically for a favorite program, the average radio listener is trained to expect one format per station, and often will only give a station one or two chances to play something she likes before rejecting it altogether.

The simplest way for Apple to address this problem is to splinter Beats 1 into more narrowly formatted stations. Of course, this runs counter to the proclaimed globally unifying ambitions of the station. Also, it’s more common for music radio outside the US and Canada to be a little more eclectic and not ahdere to so tightly to genre. So perhaps the global audience will find Beats 1 more instantaneously familiar, while US listeners may enjoy the slightly different approach.

The other way to make Beats 1 more user friendly is to offer shows on demand. Again, that seems to run counter to its ethos. But it sure would satisfy that St. Vincent fan in Edinburgh who can’t stay up until 2 AM local time to catch her Beats 1 set.

Despite my cyncism about the fact Beats 1 isn’t particuarly innovative, it is nevertheless an ambitious undertaking. When it was announced I mused if it–and all of Apple Music–would be a threat to independent internet radio. So far, I don’t think so. There are programs I want to check out, but on the whole I think Beats 1 is more of a threat to your local CHR station or global pop stations like BBC 1 than any college, community or indie station I’d listen to online.

It’s still an open question as to whether it will catch on after some of the newness wears off. Moreover, celebrity DJs likely will come and go as obligations like recording and touring take precedence. Will a Queens of the Stone Age fan remain a Beats 1 listener if Josh Homme’s show goes on hiatus or ends? Who knows.

Beats 1 Radio is available for free to anyone with an iOS device and an Apple user account, and is certainly worth checking out. It does require updating to iOS 8.4, which just became available today.

Beats 1 also will be available to anyone using iTunes on Windows or MacOS, as long as you have an Apple account. The service requires iTunes 12.2 which is scheduled to be available sometime Tuesday, but has not yet rolled out as of noon PDT.

For those who feel like they’re missing out because they don’t have an iOS device, don’t sweat it–it’s not worth buying an iPhone for. It may be worth installing iTunes for (when 12.2 becomes available), since it is free.

I’ll share more thoughts about the music and sound quality, along with the newly launched Apple Music service, in tomorrow’s Digital Watch feature.

The post Apple’s Beats 1 Radio Is Interesting Because It’s Purposely Global appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The company behind RadioSearchEngine have ported some of its key features into a new mobile app, with a slightly different hook. Launched in 2013, RadioSearchEngine does what the name implies: it lets you search just about any streaming radio station for artists, songs or shows, and then plays it on demand.

The free 6 Seconds app brings similar live streaming music search to your mobile device with a slick, minimalist interface. When you start it up it presents you with its logo and indicators to swipe down to bring up “faves”–which is a shortcut to station formats and your favorite stations or songs–swipe down to search, and swipe left to skip songs. You can start listening right away by tapping the logo, which plays a random Top 40 station by default the first time you run the app, or on subsequent uses it plays the last format or favorite you listened to.

The name “6 Seconds” comes from the app’s promise to deliver most songs from within six seconds of its beginning, rather than starting you off after the second chorus. It’s other selling point is the ability to have unlimited skips, skipping songs as often as you like, as many times as you like. It’s aimed directly at Pandora, which limits skips to six times an hour (there’s that number again) up to 24 skips a day for free account users.

The 6 Second Test

First I took the 6-second-start feature for a ride, and I was impressed at how well it seems to work. Aside from songs that I am intimately familiar with it was difficult to judge if the six second mark had been strictly crossed, but when I did a search it rarely seemed as though more than a single verse had passed.

I decided to throw the app some curveballs by searching out artists that are less frequently heard on the radio, but not utterly obscure. Looking for King Crimson brought up only one station playing the band. The song was “In the Court of the Crimson King,” which was just in the midst of the opening mellotron line. Going with the royal theme I also looked for the rising young hard rock band Kyng, whose “Burn the Serum” was also playing on just one station. 6 Seconds joined in the middle of the first verse.

Picking current charting songs like Maroon 5’s “Sugar” or Mark Ronson’s and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk!” provided darn near-instant gratification while missing only a few beats. In most cases these songs were playing on three or more stations at any given time. They could be anywhere in the world–6 Seconds claims a database of 100,000 digital stations that are being continually indexed.

Once in a while the app appeared strangely prescient, streaming the station seconds before the song even started. I figure the cause is the station’s metadata (information about what it’s playing) is actually running ahead; sometimes a stations’ metadata can be delayed, too.

The Skip Experience

Skipping a track takes you to another song in the same genre or format, but playing on a different station. To some extent 6 Seconds is dependent on stations’ playlist and adherence to style. Skipping Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” brought me Human League’s 80s synth pop hit “Don’t You Want Me” coming from a soft rock station in Indianapolis that has both songs in it rotation. Of course, that was easily remedied by skipping again, bringing up Ariana Grande’s “Love Me Harder,” streaming from Radio Tau in Bologna, Italy.

Since these songs are streaming from actual stations, you may also encounter DJ patter, commercials, news and weather updates. Again, you can skip those anytime with left swipe.

The experience is kind of like having an infinite seek button. It’s addictive for the side of me that has a little bit of attention deficit. The app also seems much quicker than RSE was the last time I tried it. I can distinctly remember having a stream fail to start several times while using RSE. Over the course of dozens of searches and skips that didn’t happen to me once while using 6 Seconds.

Limitations

Despite the skip limitations, Pandora does have a couple of advantages over 6 Seconds. Building custom stations is not something 6 Seconds replicates. So if you’ve invested a lot of time getting your stations just right, you’re probably not going to be enticed by 6 Seconds. What 6 Seconds does let you do is favorite stations or songs for each access later.

The second limitation is minor: there’s no pause button, something that Pandora does have. Given that 6 Seconds is just playing live streams this makes sense. Though it would be kind of cool if the app had some kind of limited DVR feature, letting you pause a live stream. Even the iPod Nano lets you pause broadcast radio for fifteen minutes, and Robertson’s own DAR.fm supplies an online radio DVR service.

6 Seconds doesn’t sport all the functionality of its parent site. RSE lets you search for artists, genres, shows (including podcasts) and stations, while 6 Seconds is limited to searching artists. However, since the app is so streamlined this doesn’t feel like much of a limitation. I think I’d mind it more if songs didn’t start streaming so darn quickly.

Who’s It For?

The big question for 6 Seconds is similar to what I asked about RSE: who is this for? Despite the unlimited skip feature, I doubt it will pull away all but very casual Pandora users. I’m not sure it’s even a sure-fire replacement for users of free accounts with Spotify, Slacker, or iTunes Radio. I can certainly make a case for why someone might choose 6 Seconds instead–being able to skip commercials being one key advantage. But I’m not convinced that makes enough of a difference.

It can be a good alternative to a radio listening app for someone who doesn’t have a particular station in mind, but is in the mood for an artist or format. Compared to TuneIn or iHeartRadio it’s simply easier and faster to start streaming right away with 6 Seconds.

Like RSE I think 6 Seconds is an impressive feat of clever engineering. My question about who might use it aren’t a critique of its functionality, but rather an acknowledgement that it enters a very crowded and competitive field.

Then again, streaming radio and music is a growing sector, with new listeners to attract. The fact that it’s free and pretty much just works as promised are good reasons to try it.

The post Digital Watch: 6 Seconds Puts Radio Search w/ Unlimited Song Skips on Your Mobile appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Ever since the early days of Record Store Day (RSD for short), I’d wondered why there weren’t more collaborations between record stores and radio stations on a day heralding the importance of local, independent businesses and media. Over the years various radio stations did set up tables at record shops during Record Store Day and even this year college radio station WSOU-FM is doing a remote broadcast from a nearby record store. Given all of that, I was interested to hear about yesterday’s launch of Record Store Day Radio on Dash Radio. We recently wrote about Dash Radio, as the Internet radio start-up will also be the home to a revamped East Village Radio (see my 2008 field trip here).

According to Record Store Day,

Record Store Day Radio is the only radio station that collects Record Store Day releases in one place and presents them to listeners in a commercial-free format via Dash Radio, the biggest original digital radio broadcasting platform in the world. Tune in to hear exciting rarities, classic reissues, b-sides, demos, and other material that was released to limited quantities exclusively for RSD — some of which is now out of print and unavailable online. The station will also be showcasing new releases that are coming out this Saturday, April 18, for Record Store Day 2015.

After week one, Record Store Day Radio will move into its regular format, playing a diverse mix of fresh and classic cuts alongside Record Store Day rarities. RSD Radio will be playing music that is popular in record stores, highlighting artists and songs that are often neglected by commercial radio. Several programs will be curated by record store owners from around the globe, giving them the control to share their local scenes with the world while creating unique radio shows with the personality of their individual stores.”

Billboard reported in January that, the idea for Record Store Day Radio was first broached by musician Chuck D. According to Billboard,

[Record Store Day founder Michael] Kurtz said the idea to have an RSD radio station was first brought to him by Public Enemy leader and co-founder Chuck D, 2014’s Record Store Day ambassador, at the organization’s Los Angeles press conference at Amoeba Records in March of last year. ‘He kept bringing up that we needed a Record Store Day radio station, so I said, “You really want this to happen?”‘ Kurtz tells Billboard. ‘”It would be so cool, one of the few cool things Record Store Day hasn’t done.” He started the whole conversation.'”

Record Store Day Radio’s Facebook page announced its launch yesterday saying that the station would feature “a whole week of music found on Record Store Day releases past and present.” I took Record Store Day Radio for a spin today on the Dash Radio app and website and heard a bit of The Velvet Underground’s “European Son,” a Miles Davis track, and a pretty song from The Julie Ruin. Take a listen at the Record Store Day Radio channel on Dash Radio.

The post Record Store Day Radio Launches in Time for Record Store Day 2015 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Federal Communications Commission has released specifics on its new net neutrality rules. There are lots of details to pore over. I gave the document a quick scan to see if it had anything to say about sponsored data plans—deals like T-Mobile’s “Music Freedom” plan in which ISP selected Internet radio services (Pandora, Spotify) don’t accrue towards your data limit. Apparently a lot of people commented on the question during the agency’s lengthy Open Internet proceeding. Not surprisingly then, the FCC has given the matter some thought, but is taking a watch-and-wait policy regarding the problem, at least for now.

On the one hand, the Open Internet Order explains, “evidence in the record suggests that these business models may in some instances provide benefits to consumers, with particular reference to their use in the provision of mobile services.” ISPs like T-Mobile and Verizon told the agency that the model boosts choice and lowers costs for consumers.

From the Order:

“Commenters also assert that sophisticated approaches to pricing also benefit edge providers by helping them distinguish themselves in the marketplace and tailor their services to consumer demands. Commenters assert that such sponsored data arrangements also support continued investment in broadband infrastructure and promote the virtuous cycle, and that there exist spillover benefits from sponsored data practices that should be considered.”

On the other hand, various parties argued against sponsored data plans, among them Public Knowledge and even NPR.

From the Order again:

” . . . some commenters strongly oppose sponsored data plans, arguing that ‘the power to exempt selective services from data caps seriously distorts competition, favors companies with the deepest pockets, and prevents consumers from exercising control over what they are able to access on the Internet,’ again with specific reference to mobile services. In addition, some commenters argue that sponsored data plans are a harmful form of discrimination. The record also reflects concerns that such arrangements may hamper innovation and monetize artificial scarcity.”

Bottom line, for the FCC:

“We are mindful of the concerns raised in the record that sponsored data plans have the potential to distort competition by allowing service providers to pick and choose among content and application providers to feature on different service plans. At the same time, new service offerings, depending on how they are structured, could benefit consumers and competition. Accordingly, we will look at and assess such practices under the no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage standard, based on the facts of each individual case, and take action as necessary.”

And what is the “no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage standard,” you may ask? Here is the definition from the Order:

“Any person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage (i) end users’ ability to select, access, and use broadband Internet access service or the lawful Internet content, applications, services, or devices of their choice, or (ii) edge providers’ ability to make lawful content, applications, services, or devices available to end users. Reasonable network management shall not be considered a
violation of this rule.”

At this point I can’t say I know how the FCC will handle the sponsored data question, but the Commission is obviously paying attention to the matter. That’s got to be a good thing.

The post FCC: we are watching sponsored data plans appeared first on Radio Survivor.

FCC Chair Tom Wheeler

It’s all buzzy buzzy out there about Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler’s new proposed net neutrality rules, which rest on reclassifying broadband as a utility, thus worthy of Title II telecommunications regulation. Wheeler has a statement posted on Wired. Those who thought he would never do this are happily eating their hats. The telcos are promising more lawsuits. And the big news/blog sites are furiously publishing their numbered lists of ways that the FCC’s initiative will change everything (mind blowingly, of course).

I’m enjoying The Verge’s list the most, which starts with speculation that this Title II initiative could put the damper on “sponsored data” plans. Basically these allow streaming music or other services to pay ISPs for their content not to accrue towards your mobile data limit. Or in the other instances the broadband provider is just picking winners on its own. The most noted of these is T-Mobile’s Music Freedom plan. We’ve written about it with concern. Basically Music Freedom classifies select streamers (Pandora, Spotify) as incognito when it comes to tracking your data ceiling. Thus you don’t have to fret about getting dinged if you listen to them (The Verge calls this a “zero rating” service).

The worrisome question, of course, is how much of an advantage this sort of program will give big streamers over smaller operations, not to mention public, college, and community radio outfits and all those Low Power FM music oriented stations that will run Internet streams soon. 

The Verge thinks these new utility rules will make a difference:

“Under the FCC’s proposed new rules, so-called zero-rating services like Music Freedom wouldn’t be outright banned, but they’d be examined on a ‘case-by-case basis, says a senior FCC official. The official notes that Music Freedom is a ‘lesser concern’ for prohibition because there’s no obvious harm to the consumer. Clearly, though, that could change: in order for it to be allowed under Title II, it wouldn’t be able to hinder service to any of T-Mobile’s customers, which suggests that there would be no way for T-Mobile to ever deny a music service entrance into Music Freedom — nor would it be able to charge streaming providers for the privilege of being a part of the program.”

I sure hope the aforementioned is how things play out. But if the FCC doesn’t see these plans as “paid prioritization” schemes (a pointed no-no), I worry that its analysts might vaguely classify them as “rate” schedules, which the Commission promises to forbear regulating. I quote from the agency’s news release:

“Rate regulation: the Order makes clear that broadband providers shall not be subject to tariffs or other form[s] of rate approval, unbundling, or other forms of utility regulation.”

The paid prioritization language published today looks good, though, and relevant to the issue:

“No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration – in other words, no ‘fast lanes.’ This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates.”

We’ll have to wait for the full Order to get a better sense of where these questions might go. To what extent will the Commission see Music Freedom style services as “hindering” consumers? Will beneficiaries of Music Freedom be understood as “affiliates”? “The Chairman’s comprehensive proposal will be voted on the FCC’s February 26 open meeting,” the press release notes.

The post Will new FCC net neutrality rules kill “sponsored data” plans? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am enjoying the High School Radio Day Android application, brought to our attention by Kelly Jones of Columbus County Schools. After you download the app, the High School Radio Day logo bounces into the middle of the screen, and then you can pick the high school station of your choice. By my count there are at least 30 to choose from. These include Argo Community High School of Summit, Illinois, “Radio Airlift” of Beverly Hills, California, and KEOM of Mesquite, TX.

Once happily listening to some station, you’ve got your sharing options link, your link to the HSRD Facebook page, and a page that links to additional high school radio stations. When I fired up the application, it immediately sent me to KDHS-LP, licensed to serve Delta Junction, Alaska. The station was playing an old Led Zepplin song, Ten Years Gone, which I have to admit I’d forgotten about for a lot more than a decade. Pleased to hear it again.

High School Radio Day, by the way, is on April 23. Last April’s was the 3rd annual event, celebrated by around 63 such stations around the USA. Now HSRD revelers will have their own interface for secondary school radio surfing. If you want to bring appropriate signals to the app-maker’s attention: send an email to highpowerstreaming@gmail.com.

The post Looking for high school radio? There’s an app for that appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A new streaming music radio platform launched today, Mad Genius Radio. Entering into an increasingly crowded space, Mad Genius differentiates itself by customizing each station to the individual listener rather than relying on data correlated and aggregated across audiences to program music choices.

Founder Eric Neumann is a radio industry veteran with more than twenty years of experience. According to him, “Musical tastes ebb and flow over time. It’s best to have an app flow with a user.” Mad Genius does this by giving users more fine-grained control over songs and artists. They can rate tracks on a 0 to 5 slider, not just by a thumbs-up or down.

Curated genre stations on Mad Genius are based on a rotation, similar to terrestrial radio, but with deeper catalogs. Listeners control the rotation frequency with the slider. “You can lean back and let songs play, and then rate those songs you want to hear more or less of,” Neumann explained.

Listeners can also ban an artist, “but I can un-ban them later, when I haven’t heard them in a while.”

Neumann highlighted Mad Genius’ 140 460 “Time Machine” stations, which are based on actual charts from the era. “You can go back to a season for a particular year and hear it as it was played at the time, such as hip-hop or alternative rock in the spring of ’96,” Neumann said. “You’ll hear songs you forgot about, [and ones] that didn’t become hits. It brings back memories.”

Mad Genius is ad-free and available for a free trial period right now on the web and in iOS and Android apps. Beginning in December the service will be available only via subscription for $5 a month or $48 a year. Neumann said that making it a paid service, without ads, “pays out better royalty rates to performers and songwriters. It’s more fair to the people who create the content.”

He continued to explain that as a subscription service Mad Genius pays “79% more per song than any ad-based model. We pay songwriters 53% 530% more on a per-song basis. And we’re glad to do it.” According to Neumann the rates subscription services pay are 14 – 18 cents per listener hour, compared to 4.6 cents for ad-supported services.

Being a subscription service “leaves us more room,” he said. “We’re profitable with a few hundred thousand paid subscribers. We don’t have to beat Pandora, or even be #5, in order to be profitable and pay the highest royalty rates.”

The post Mad Genius Radio Debuts Personalized Ad-Free Subscription Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On top of that, the carrier has released the results of a poll it took on which application to add next.

“After nearly three-quarters of a million people voted, Google Play Music topped the charts as the most requested service,” the T-Mobile press release says. “T-Mobile is on track to add Google Play Music to the Music Freedom program later this year.”

The apps join iHeartRadio, iTunesRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Samsung Milk, Slacker and Spotify as the cohort of services that users can play “data free,” so to speak. On Monday the carrier announced a plan that quadruples the amount of additional data that a “Simple Starter” plan subscriber can buy: 2 GB for $5 per month

The post Six more music services join T-Mobile music “freedom” plan appeared first on Radio Survivor.

So here comes YouTube Music Key, which will offer a bunch of new stuff for YouTube music listeners, specifically music without those you-can-skip-idiotic-ad-in-5-seconds ads, playback without the video, and some kind of offline play mechanism (I’m getting this from Android Police). Plus it seems likely that Google’s All Music Access will somehow be folded into this new service. The Village Voice thinks it will cost $9.99 a month. “Is the YouTube Free for All Over?” asks VV’s Melissa Johnson.

Nah. It just means that we are another mile into the Two-Tier Internet in which Group A gets to listen to the cool stuff ad-free for a fee and Group B pays with ad-consumed brain cells. A rough equivalent of this YouTube thing is happening at SoundCloud on the content creator end. The stream has added a new tier called “Premier,” offered on an invite basis, which gives artists and labels a chance to share revenue via an advertising program. “The introduction of advertising is an important step for creators,” the SoundCloud blog proclaims. “Every time you see or hear an ad, an artist gets paid.” But first these artists (or their labels, or somebody) will have to pay to be part of the program.

I think I’m going to stick around Group B as a long as I can, basically because (a) I’m cheap and (b) cannot stand the idea of paying Google money for anything. But we will see how long that obstinacy lasts. You can run, but you can’t hide, although that doesn’t stop people from trying. For example, Huh magazine has a response piece titled “Five alternatives to SoundCloud,” and one of them is YouTube. So if you are pissed that SoundCloud is going to run ads, you go to another service that already has ads and now will charge you to avoid them?

Anyway, Comscore has a new report out on mobile applications. It says that most digital media time is now spent on mobile apps. The percentage relationship between mobile and desktop devices is 60/40 in mobile’s favor. Here’s a Comscore chart of the top 25 mobile apps.

Comscore

As you can see, among the top dozen are YouTube, Pandora, and iTunes radio. Shazam is down there a bit, but observe that Pandora has a higher usage rate than Gmail! And on various “time spent” analysis charts, Pandora almost tops every demographic, one or two notches under Facebook, with YouTube just below. And nota bene: “A staggering 42 percent of all app time spent on smart phones occurs on the individual’s single most used app,” Comscore says. “Nearly three out of every four minutes of app usage occurs on one of the individual’s top 4 apps.”

That means that for a huge number of mobile smart phone users, it’s all Facebook and Pandora, with YouTube snapping at the rear. That’s mobile radio circa 2014.

Last but not least, here’s a YouTube about how to make your Raspberry pi an Internet radio device. It’s in German, but don’t let that discourage you.

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

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SoundCloud has announced new subscriber plans. The first two, “Partner” and “Pro,” are expanded versions of the status quo. Partner is for beginners. It’s free. You get three hours of upload and some statistics. “Pro” doubles your upload space for $6 or do unlimited uploads for $15. The tier gives you more stats, priority support, and some other goodies.

Then there’s “Premier,” which SoundCloud offers on an “invite” basis, and gives creators a chance to share revenue (aka money) via an advertising program. “The introduction of advertising is an important step for creators,” the SoundCloud blog says. “Every time you see or hear an ad, an artist gets paid.” It is launching in the United States. “If you’re in the US, you’ll start to experience occasional ads from our brand partners.”

These changes appear to be rolled up in various negotiations with the big music labels, and thus may be fileable in the “lawsuit avoidance” category. Ads won’t show up on Partner or Pro account content, SoundCloud says, only the Premier accounts. TechCrunch reports that ads from Comedy Central, Red Bull, and Jaguar are in the works, to be streamed on various partner accounts such as SONY/ATV and BMG.

The labels are “concerned that online radio stations and others are using Soundcloud’s API to broadcast licensed music for free,” TechCrunch notes. “It’s a problem Soundcloud needs to address, and soon.” Hopefully this solution won’t remove SoundCloud as a resource for innovative online chat room and playlist services that have used it and YouTube as a content base.

The post SoundCloud: now with three tiers and advertising appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Attention all social media music playlist mavens: are you posting your own personal favorite tunes, or are you really favoring content based on how you want others to see you? If it’s the latter choice, you are not alone. An Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland) user study concludes that “being authentic is very important for social media users. At the same time, users also admitted faking parts of their online image in order to conform to social norms and expectations.”

This was particularly true for Last.fm subscribers, the authors of the survey say.

“We found that it was not uncommon for some users to purposely choose to listen to, or indeed not listen to, particular music according to the image that that individual wants to portray to others,” one of the researchers explained in an interview.

This revelation makes me want to break open my old copy of The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life by Erving Goffman, who famously argued that most behavior is performative. “The very obligation and profitability . . . of being a socialized character,” Goffman’s tome concluded, “forces us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage.” I always thought that Goffman’s analysis was a bit extreme. But here it is with a vengeance.

Speaking of questions of authenticity, the Bandcamp blog reports that someone named “Michael Cera” posted an album to the service, and Bandcamp’s proprietors did not believe it was really him at first:

“Confirming this was the Michael Cera, the amiably awkward, witty, and dapper dude from Arrested Development , Youth in Revolt , Superbad , Scott Pilgrim vs. the World , Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Juno , was no easy feat. But thanks to Cera’s persuasive emails, a call from his management, and a  Jonah Hill  tweet, we established that this was not the work of an attention-seeking crackpot.”

Having convinced themselves of Cera’s authenticity, the Bandcampers appear to be quite smitten with his music. I enjoyed the album, too. Some of the doodlesque content strikes me as Paul Simon Lite, but maybe by the second of third album Cera will find a more original voice. In any event, it is great that there is a place like Bandcamp where things like this can happen.

Next, it is once again time for us to visit the Radio Survivor OMG-what’s-going-to-happen-to-Pandora Department. At the beginning of last week Dealreporter.com suggested that Pandora was becoming excellent buyout bait, and everyone got excited and the company’s stock went up. And then nothing happened and the streamer’s CFO Mike Herring said that Pandora “does not spend any time wondering if we’re going to be a takeover target.” So everyone should calm down already.

“We’re really good at this stuff,” Herring declared on Wednesday. “We’ve got the best economists and lawyers in the world. We feel good about it, but it’s a big unknown.”

This reminds me of a joke. It is 1986 and Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterand, and Mikhail Gorbachev are having a drink after a big summit.

“I have one hundred security guards, and one of them is a KGB agent,” Reagan admits. “And I don’t know which.”

“That’s nothing,” Mitterand says. “I have 100 lovers and one of them has a sexually transmittable disease, and I don’t know which.”

“Forget your troubles,” Gorbachev chimes in. “I have one hundred advisers, and one of them is an economist, and I don’t know which.”

Meanwhile The Trichordist has been having a silly-dilly party with the revelation that various key players on the Pandora team have given money to Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and generic homophobic jerk.  “I think with this many high level Pandora insiders donating money to this candidate it’s a reasonable question to ask whether the company has an anti-gay bias,” Trichordist claims. I beg to differ. I think reasonability requires one to consider the simplest possibility first: Pandora is supporting this guy solely because he sponsored a bill that would lower Internet radio performance fees down to what they are for cable and satellite radio. Shouldn’t we acknowledge that before we post a piece titled “Pandora Hates Gay People” . . . ?

Partisan tomfoolery aside, how exactly did Chaffetz get to be a point dude on this issue in the House anyway? I think his bill is dead at this stage in the game, but it was co-sponsored by Jared Polis (D-CO) and uber-liberal Ron Wyden of Oregon in the Senate. Copyright law makes for the weirdest bedfellows.

Last-but-not-leasts:

The RAIN semifinalists for international Internet radio are out, and they include a Ukrainian”underground bunker” streamer, a spoken word Irish station, and radiohhh.com: “Three music channels here: RED (upbeat), BLUE (downlbeat), and WHITE (somewhere in the middle).” Glad they’re keeping things simple.

The Blue Music Group has left Spotify. It pays too little, a representative for the label told a Swedish radio host. “The entire record label’s catalog, containing music collections, among others Bach , Alice Tegnér and Eddie Jefferson, will now be removed from the [Spotify] music service,” a summary of the interview says.

But on the positive side, Spotify is sending out invitations to Canadians!

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

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The Music Machinery blog alerts us to a new Spotify related application, Acrostify, which creates Spotify playlists based on “acrostics,” aka secret word messages embedded in other things. Since yesterday (Sunday, August 10) was the Russian composer Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov’s birthday, I input “Happy Birthday Glazunov” and selected the “classical” format.

Out came this playlist:

I’m not sure how Bowie and AC/DC got in there, but by and large it is a very nice playlist. Once it is done, you can save it to your Spotify account, as I did, and play it to your heart’s content.

Meanwhile, Ofcom has yet another survey of British media consumers, and this piece of it caught my eye:

“Listening to live radio is only the third most popular audio activity for 16-24s, after streaming music and listening to a personal digital music collection. Taking into account all audio-based activities, listening to live radio makes up 71%. However, for 16-24 year olds, listening to live radio comprises less than a quarter (24%) of their time spent on listening activities, with personal digital music and streamed music together accounting for 60% of their listening time.”

Other surveys have produced the same results. The question for me is this: are young people less engaged in radio because they have more time to futz around with the latest music based media applications (like Spotify/Acrostify), or is it because they represent the harbingers of new listening/using trends that will extend into their child bearing/rearing years?

Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know the answer to the question, but I did enjoy this YouTube of an electric piano accompaniment to a Pokemon video game takeover of a radio tower.

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

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My otherwise chaotic Sunday was rescued by the discovery of Gaana, India’s online music and radio emporium. It works beautifully on my Google Chrome tablet and comes with endless streams of Bollywood hits. I strongly recommend the Filmy Mirchi radio channel, which will surely cheer you up under most circumstances. I also love the Perla Nasha “non-stop 90s” stream, which plays those wonderful Bollywood duets in which He endlessly pleads for her and She prances around beyond his reach, but who is anyone kidding—we all know what is going to happen next.

Gaana is available on the web and in all the usual mobile flavors. Tech 2 has a nice summary of the best India mobile music applications. These include Saavn, Tunebash, and, of course, SoundCloud and TuneIn.

Meanwhile, The Wrap reports that Shiiva Rajaraman, the executive setting up YouTube’s music subscription service, is leaving Google for Spotify. He is following YouTube developer Shishir Mehrotra, also a Spotify person now. YouTube is expected to get the music service up and running at some point in the remainder of this year. If it is going to be boring as Google All Access then no rush, I can wait.

Finally, restaurant patrons in Albuquerque, New Mexico will soon be able to cast digital ballots for their favorite dining songs, thanks to Kanoodl. The application will compete with Muzak and Mood Mixes, except that customers will be able to cast “like” votes on tunes via Facebook and even pick songs. I did not realize until I read this article that eateries pay up to $250 a month for those Muzak style streams. The little breakfast/lunch joint that I and a good friend have been patronizing for over a dozen years every Saturday has a cheap old CD box and plays awful seventies tunes. The food is good so we just ignore it, which is easy to do since the box is small and barely audible. So is the restaurant’s physical size, which is why I presume that it is exempt from any royalties requirements. But if it was larger and played radio or Pandora or something like that, that would be a different matter.

According to the National Restaurant Association, if a 3,750+ square foot restaurant streams a radio signal with more than six loudspeakers, or more than four speakers in any room or adjacent outdoor facility, or if charges a cover to get in, the establishment must secure “performance rights” (translation: pay somebody some money). As for Pandora, eateries have to get one from Pandora’s licensing partner, DMX. Here’s the obligatory scary article about a North Carolina grill having to pay over $30k for illegally playing four songs.

But getting back to the voting-on-the-tunes-while-eating question, why would I want to do this? I go to restaurants to (a) eat and (b) talk to people. I’ve got a feeling that this idea will be popular with children, but what will these joints do if a bunch of late-stage rugrats tell them that their music sucks and they want something else? “Look kiddies,” I’d say, “at $12.50 an entree just enjoy your Katy Perry.”

In a future post I will be pondering the impact that Twitter has had on music based social media platforms. Did Twitter put the kabosh on MySpace’s growth? Any thoughts welcome.

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Internet DJ week: When can I vote for Bollywood tunes at my local restaurant? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The formal portion of the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet proceeding has concluded. Tens of thousands of individuals have filed comments, as have all of the major Internet Service Providers. We sparked some controversy last month by calling T-Mobile’s music “Freedom” plan an Internet fast lane. Paul Riismandel characterized it as such because the plan prioritizes select streaming services (like Pandora) by exempting their use from a T-mobile subscriber’s accruing data consumption rate.

Now T-Mobile has filed its Open Internet comments with the FCC, disclosing what ‘freedom’ means to the telco for itself. “The application of new open Internet regulations to mobile wireless broadband providers is unnecessary and would be inappropriate,” the statement begins. T-Mobile says that wireless ISPs should be exempted from any new non-discrimination requirement that the FCC might impose:

“Mobile providers already have strong incentives to behave reasonably, and any undesirable conduct is effectively constrained by competition and existing legal mechanisms. In contrast, a broad non-discrimination rule would hinder the development of new pro-consumer innovations to the detriment of consumers.”

Much of T-Mobile’s filing emphasizes the allegedly competitive nature of the wireless industry, without mentioning that the two biggest wireless ISPs (Verizon and AT&T) control almost 58 percent of the market. 16.1 percent goes to Sprint, while 12.2 percent goes to T-Mobile. Most importantly, Sprint and T-Mobile are trying to merge. This will mean that, if that transaction goes through, around 86 of wireless broadband in the United States will be run by three telecommunications firms.

The statement also doesn’t mention that the FCC is now investigating T-Mobile for complaints of violations of the agency’s no-cramming rule. The announcement notes that “numerous T-Mobile subscribers have filed complaints with the FCC and the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] alleging that unauthorized charges for unwanted third-party services were added to their T-Mobile wireless telephone bills.” These included charges for “ringtones, wallpapers, and text message subscriptions to services providing horoscopes, flirting tips, and celebrity gossip.”

Apparently neither the current state of competitiveness nor “existing legal mechanisms” constrained T-Mobile’s alleged behavior in this regard. Why then would it inhibit the impetus for discrimination against third party services not owned or in partnership with T-Mobile? Nonetheless the telco insists that no expansion of the FCC’s Open Internet provisions should occur.

Furthermore:

Do not expand the existing transparency rule, T-Mobile says. “Expanding the rule would require providers to make disclosures that could be too complex and technical to be useful, or too vague to be meaningful.”

Do not apply an updated “no-blocking” rule to mobile providers. “The provision of a constant minimal level of service is impossible in the mobile context, and attempting to enforce such a standard would arbitrarily punish providers and their customers.”

To sum up: limit disclosure requirements, don’t require wireless ISPs to provide a minimal standard of service, and most importantly, trust us. To be fair, all the big ISPs have filed comments along these lines with the FCC. But they all boil down to the same message—they want “freedom,” the freedom to prioritize, to set up road bumps, and to manage their networks without meaningful scrutiny.

This has crucial implications for radio services that rely on (or would like to rely on) high speed Internet to reach the public. The reclassification of broadband as a telecommunications service will give the Commission the authority it needs to address those concerns.

The post For T-Mobile, ‘freedom’ means a closed Internet appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I apologize for what some might experience as the presumptuous headline query, but I am unable to interpret the latest SoundCloud news otherwise. Here is the lead paragraph in last week’s Bloomberg report:

“The largest record labels are closing in on a deal for a stake in buzzy digital-music service SoundCloud Ltd., in exchange for an agreement not to sue the startup for copyright violations, according to people with knowledge of the plans.”

SoundCloud has a copyright violation notification system in place, but apparently this is not enough. According to the story, ongoing negotiations could lead to Universal, Sony, and Warner receiving a “3 to 5 percent stake” apiece in SoundCloud, plus additional revenues in some future context. These contributions will presumably protect the entity from being beaten to death by copyright lawyers. The Berlin based company is pretty much an all-uploads-all-the-time kind of site. This hasn’t sat well with the labels, whose advocates complain that “their [catalog] is all over SoundCloud, and it’s essentially too hard to police . . . ”

The rigors of police-work aside, it should be noted that some of these media entities have invested in SoundCloud’s competitors. Warner owns a bit of Spotify. Universal reportedly has a large stake in Vevo. Warner and Universal owned pieces of Beats Electronics before Apple purchased the entity some months ago. Call me cynical, but I think this is part of the bigger picture.

Meanwhile, Canadians are hysterical with joy at the news that Spotify will be gradually rolling out music to that country, and they will no longer have to listen to the service via doofy VPN/proxy sites.

Think I’m kidding about the ‘hysterical’ bit? Here are some tweets:

oh baby, spotify in canada, i no longer have to use a proxy to listen! Woooooo

— brenbren27 (@The_brenbren27) July 10, 2014

and: 

@Spotify SO HAPPY YOU’RE COMING TO CANADA!! AHHHHH!!!

— Maximus Fantastimus (@CtrlAltDelIt) July 10, 2014

Finally, in MySpace-Still-Exists-News, Reason magazine has polled around 2,000 or so millennials (18 to 29) about various matters. Question 62 caught my eye:

Which, if any, of the following social networking accounts do you currently use?

Looky there: MySpace is in the top te-, er, eleven. Hope springs eternal (if you are MySpace).

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Will SoundCloud pay rent to labels as the price for existing? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Spotify’s data gathering subsidiary The Echo Nest has surveyed Spotify users state-by-state for their favorite fourth of July songs—or as Echo puts it: tunes that “are played proportionally more on the Fourth of July than during the rest of the year.”

Here are some state’s Independence Day faves.

Click map for larger image.

For California, it’s ‘America F*ck Yeah’ from the 2004 comedy action film Team America: World Police. (If I am reading the map correctly, the song also appears to have tied in New Jersey with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ [no surprise there], but maybe it’s Washington, D.C.??).

David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ has won over Maryland.

Spotify users in South Dakota vote for ‘Rockin’ in the Free World,’ by Neil Young.

Spotify Oregonians favor ‘Everyday America’ by Sugarland.

Washington Staters choose ‘R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.’ by John Melloncamp.

Pennsylvanians pick ‘Star Spangled Banner’ by Whitney Houston

. . . and a plurality of states prefer ‘God Bless The USA’ by Lee Greenwood (20 by my count), at least Spotify-wise.

How did Echo Nest get this ranking? The survey group’s Paul Lamere explains:

“[We] collected the top most frequently appearing songs on the Fourth of July playlists and scored each song by calculating the ratio  of the play counts that occurred on July 4, 2013 in the U.S. vs. play counts for the song during the following weeks.  Songs that were played much more frequently on the Fourth than during the rest of July get a much higher score.  Ranking songs by this ratio yields the list of distinctive Fourth of July Songs.”

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“We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users,” Google’s press release says, but “over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.” And: “We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products.”

Here’s some of Songza’s announcement: “Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re becoming part of Google. We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.”

So what does this mean? Apple buys Beats Music. Google buys Songza. The big question is who is going to buy . . . .

The post Google buys Songza for Play Music and YouTube appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The tech investment world is discovering 8tracks.com (we’ve known about it here for quite a while). Forbes has a huge story about the music playlist application titled “What if You Became a Big Company, But No One Noticed?” (translation: “no one” equals “people with money”). The piece cites a Comscore survey identifying 8tracks as the third most popular iOS music service, only trailing Pandora and [sigh] iHeartRadio.

VentureBeat has a similar story: “8tracks is an awesome (and profitable) music startup you’ve probably never heard of.” It notes that 8tracks now ranks at number six for the 18-24 Internet music listening audience and is on the same royalty-payment schedule as Pandora.

But what has my attention is that 8tracks now features user forums. The company launched the forum system in April, but I thought I’d wait some weeks to see some results, and they’re quite wonderful. There’s a big discussion about the best movie soundtrack that is now over 250 posts long, with folks talking up their movie playlists, among them “The Dude’s Mix” from The Big Lebowski. Another 8tracks user, having acquired a chicken, now has a “name my chicken” discussion in which she asks for names plus music ideas for a chicken playlist.

The “playlists for the broken hearted” thread speaks for itself. The “TV show inspired mixes” conversation brings back lots of great memories. And I’m surprised (and pleased) at the number of people checking out classic authors such as Wilde, Poe, and Kafka on the “What are You Reading Right Now?” discussion list.

The move to launch a discussion list appears to have been user driven, 8tracks notes on its blog:

“Last year, some of our most active community members formed a group on Facebook — ‘8tracks Friends’ — to facilitate shared conversations and support real-world friendships among group members. These weren’t the only listeners looking to build friendships with other 8tracks listeners and DJs, and we’ve received a growing number of requests for private messaging.”

There’s no point in creating a social music/radio app if your users can’t communicate with each other. And the more they can, the better.

Meanwhile the fashion blogs are pondering the news that Eminem’s ‘Till I Collapse’ is the most popular Spotify workout song. Billboard asked The Echo Nest data group to query 40 million Spotify user accounts for the most frequently tapped tunes during workout/running/training sessions. Here are the top five:

‘Till I Collapse’ (Eminem, Nate Dogg)
‘Levels’ – Radio Edit (Avicci)
‘Remember the Name’ (Fort Minor)
‘Bangarang’ – feat.Sirah (Skrillex)
‘Wake Me Up’ (Avicci)

Later picks include ‘Greyhound’, by the Swedish House Mafia, and ‘Bulls on Parade’, by Rage Against the Machine. If you want some dance tune recommendations, NPR has a SoundCloud top five tapped from its SoundCloud account. Number one: Floating Points’ ‘King Bromeliad,’ number two: Moire’s ‘BBOY 202,’ and number three: San Francisco programmer Avalon Emerson’s remix of Some Ember’s ‘The Thrashing Whip’.

Speaking of SoundCloud, the company’s co-founder and CTO told The Guardian on Thursday that a bunch of “monetisation approaches” for making cash and passing some of it on to musicians are in the works. “We’re testing out different things: throwing a couple of things out there and testing the waters a bit. We’re super-excited about where this stuff can go,” Eric Wahlforss explained.

What kind of stuff? The newspaper asked for specifics, to which came this reply: “I can’t talk a lot in detail about it, it hasn’t rolled out at any bigger scale yet, but we are looking to create a user experience that’s very elegant, frictionless, open and also has an element of monetisation.”

Finally, it appears that the Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks that MySpace still matters. Muckrock.com has uncovered an FBI document titled “Twitter Shorthand,” a glossary of terms used on Twitter, “and other social media venues such as instant messages, Facebook, and MySpace.”

It is actually a very useful guide with 2,800 entries, among them BIOYIOP (“blow it out your I/O port”) and PMYMHMMFSWGAD (“pardon me, you must have mistaken me for someone who gives a damn”). As for MySpace, struggling to make a comeback, this is yet another reason to ALOTBSOL (“always look on the bright side of life”).

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

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If you are a dedicated music application watcher like me, you spend a lot of time reading articles about what Pandora should do (or what should be done to the service). Every new app is a possible “Pandora-killer.” Take The Motley Fool’s Saturday headline: “Did Amazon Just Kill Sirius and Pandora?” Apparently the author is quite smitten by Amazon Prime’s new Amazon Music rollout, asking: “Can these businesses [Sirius/Pandora] stand up to a player whose market power surpasses theirs combined?”

Well, I’ve got Amazon Prime and based on my perusal of the application the answer is yes. I experience Amazon Music as a player app that tries to get me to buy more .99 cent MP3 files from Amazon. Thanks, but that’s not very high on my list of priorities.

Oddly, on the same day that Fool ran that story, it also posted this free advice: “With the Beats Deal Wrapped Up, Apple Should Buy Pandora.”

So Pandora is such a dead duck, Apple should purchase it? No, cancel that, Pandora “is a proven market leader and continues to grow its business from every angle,” the second article says. Whew. Back from the brink of death.

Speaking of which, we got quite a few responses to Paul Riismandel’s piece on T-Mobile’s “Music Freedom” initiative, which will allow T-Mobile subscribers to listen ‘data free’ to the big music streams like Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes.

“Not included are college and community stations, thousands of independent internet stations, and independent music and audio services like Bandcamp and Soundcloud,” Paul notes.

Ditto says Soma FM founder Rusty Hodge in a post on RAIN news: “On casual reading this seems fair and great for consumers. But by initially including only a very small percentage of streaming services, it reinforces the major streaming services at the expense of smaller and independent webcasters.”

Given this news, I suddenly want to be fair to the Pandora-Killer bullpen writers. It does increasingly feel like Pandora can be characterized as a Beloved Application Waiting to Be Acquired in some context or other. Clearly as the ISPs assert their corporate God given right to pick winners and losers on the mobile track, Pandora will be classified as a winner. The big question will be the price of victory.

Meanwhile the historical guillotine came down on MySpace the other day over at the Elegant Hack design blog:

“Modern digital designers are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at digital products. To put it more simply: these designers judge designs as bad or good rather than seek to understand why each decision was made. They are most judgmental when those products are not designed by designers, but by execs, engineers or, worse of all, the users themselves. The hall of shame stretches from Geocities through Myspace to the semi-restrained Tumblr. But surely Myspace around 2007 was the Las Vegas of the internet; garish, inexplicably popular and abhorrent to designers. It has, like its sister city, been utterly remade more than once, but its name still stands for what is worst in popular taste.”

Take that MySpace as you try to reinvent yourself! Whew yet again. As I often ask: where is it all going?

We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Don’t just stand there Pandora, get bought by somebody! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here at Radio Survivor we’ve discussed how an internet fast lane might negatively affect internet radio, especially mobile internet radio. But we weren’t expecting it to actually happen so quickly.

What I’m talking about is T-Mobile’s announcement on Wednesday that the company will allow customers to stream music to their smartphones without it impacting their data plans. That’s part of its bid to be the “Un-Carrier,” that treats its customers better than the likes of AT&T and Verizon.

At first blush this sounds great, doesn’t it? So what’s the catch?

The catch is that the free data is only for major streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Radio, iHeartRadio, Slacker, Rhapsody and Samsung’s Milk Music. The problem is what’s not included.

Not included are college and community stations, thousands of independent internet stations, and independent music and audio services like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Even some bigger music services like Rdio, Beats and Google Play are not yet part of the plan.

This means that platforms like Pandora and iHeartRadio have a big advantage in reaching T-Mobile customers compared to a WFMU or plug.dj. As the Future of Music Coalition points out, it also means that musicians who aren’t on Spotify or Pandora are also at a disadvantage. For all intents and purposes, T-Mobile customers will pay a tax if they want to listen to music or stations that aren’t part of the so-called “Music Freedom” plan.

Benign Discrimination Is Still Discrimination

Now, I don’t think it is T-Mobile’s intent to exclude music services, streaming stations and musical artists. In part, there are simple practical issues behind the inclusion and exclusion. It’s actually not easy for T-Mobile to know for sure that a customer’s data stream is music or radio, except by seeing where the data is coming from. In order to give a free ride to all streaming music or radio would require the company to have a very good index of all the services out there. But by first going with the most popular services they solve a big chunk of that problem.

Further demonstrating a likely benign intent, T-Mobile is letting customers vote on which services are added to the free data plan next. However, it’s not a write-in vote, and only bigger services like Rdio and Soundcloud are included on the current ballot. That leaves out a boatload of smaller services and stations that aren’t as well known.

Still, no matter how well-intentioned, benign discrimination is discrimination.

Complicating the picture a little more is that T-Mobile also announced its own streaming music service called unRadio, the product of a partnership with Rhapsody. Not unexpectedly, that service is part of “Music Freedom,” too.

unRadio is not an on-demand service like full Rhapsody. Instead it’s a Pandora-style radio stream based on custom stations, but with unlimited skips, as well as no commercials. UnRadio is free for T-Mobile customers with Simple Choice data plans and subscribers to Rhapsody’s full on-demand service. It’s $4.99 a month for all other T-Mobile customers.

unRadio does promise to offer live streaming radio from “thousands of terrestrial stations.” It names KCRW in Los Angeles, KEXP in Seattle, and Chicago’s WXRT as few of them. Now, we don’t know what the other stations are, nor how they are selected. For what it’s worth KCRW and KEXP are both on iHeartRadio, which is part of the “Music Freedom” plan. WXRT is from Clear Channel competitor CBS Radio, which offers its own Radio.com service.

In highlighting a couple of well-respected non-commercial stations we again see an attempt to be inclusive. Yet that only begs the question as to what stations will not be included.

Even if T-Mobile includes the stream of every terrestrial station in the US, that still leaves out an awful lot of radio that’s on the internet. International and internet-only stations don’t fit that bill, for example.

Molehill or Snowball?

I know this can seem like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. T-Mobile is the #4 carrier in the US, so this affects far fewer people than if it were AT&T or Verizon. Plus, in many ways the “Music Freedom” plan is a net gain for customers, who get to listen to a whole lot of music without using up their data plans or incurring overage charges.

Plainly speaking, the problem still is that some internet music services and stations get a toll-free fast-lane on T-Mobile’s mobile internet, while others do not.

Rather than molehill, it’s really a snowball that threatens to avalanche. Imagine if AT&T and Verizon were to try to match T-Mobile at this game. That would put small and independent services at an even greater disadvantage with regard to reaching most of the country’s mobile listeners.

At the moment, this is all legal. It would also be legit under the FCC’s current Open Internet proposals, too. That’s why it’s important for those who care about a level playing field for all internet services–including music and radio–should send comments to the FCC.

If T-Mobile really wants to give its customers a gift, maybe it should just remove data caps altogether. That would be truly “UnCarrier” thing to do.

The post T-Mobile “Music Freedom” Is Actually an Internet Fast-Lane appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I was rummaging around the early recording industry trade journal Talking Machine World the other day, and ran into an item that reminded me of a recent Pandora innovation: its mobile alarm clock feature. The Internet Archive has copies of TMW from the Progressive Era through the 1920s. I quote from a January 1906 edition with the headline “Use Phonograph as Alarm”:

“People whose nerves are jarred by the strident tones of alarm clocks, but who still require artificial assistance in being brought back to consciousness every morning, may now be awakened, if they choose, by the music of a talking machine. There has just been invented a device for connecting an alarm clock with a talking machine in such a manner that the lever of the talking machine will be started at a certain hour, and, instead of the jangling bell of the clock, the sleeper is awakened by sweet music, oratory, or any form of entertainment which a talking machine can ordinarily provide.”

No picture comes with the news story, but apparently the record player included some kind of lever tripping spring connected to a cord that, to quote the article some more: “passes over a pulley and is connected to the starting lever of a talking machine.” The device also came with dry-cell batteries that lit up a lamp when the record began to play.

This all sounds very complicated. The post did not identify the manufacturer of this contraption. I doubt it got very far. But it’s interesting to see that almost a century ago, long before Pandora or even clock AM/FM radio alarms, device makers thought along these lines.

What would 1906 have thought of Pandora? I think the year would have liked it just fine.

In other news . . .

Plug.dj says it is working on a new back end. Requested features that plug.djers can expect to see at some point:

• Improved lobby with a better look, making your communities nicer and easier to find
• Over 60 new avatars with animations that are twice as long and more expressive (with more to come regularly after the initial set)
• Special rewards for all of our passionate music listeners
• A new chat server to resolve connectivity issues and enable us to provide private and community staff chat in the future
• A new landing page to make the welcome experience easier for everyone
• A new login system, including email+password, for improved account recovery

Meanwhile, some weeks ago I mentioned that Tunein aspires to become the Twitter of web radio and offered an updated review of the service. Since then I’ve been paying more attention to my Tunein account, and it has been paying more attention to me. I now have sixteen followers on Tunein. The problem is that I don’t know what to do with them. Besides following them back, how do I communicate with them? So much potential here, but I’m stymied by the limitations.

Finally, congratulations to South Korean rapper Psy, whose tune ‘Gangnam Style’ has hit two billion YouTube page views. This is a record, apparently. As I write (Sunday morning), the YouTube count is 2,002,643,319 views, which is between a quarter and a third of the world’s human population. South Dakota Public Broadcasting notes that this is twice the previous record, Justin Beiber’s “Baby,” with about a billion page views.

To what do we owe Psy’s success? I have no idea and suspect that Mr. Psy doesn’t know either.

“very honorable and burdensome numbers,” he tweets. “With the appreciation, I’ll come back soon with more joyful one!”

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post What would 1906 have thought of Pandora? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We’ve been following the Federal Communication Commission’s latest open Internet proposal, and like my colleague Paul Riismandel, I’m skeptical about it. FCC Chair Tom Wheeler’s plan seems tailor made to forge a two-tiered Internet in which the big ISPs pick winners and losers via priority access “fast lane” deals.

The big question for us around here, of course, is why does this issue matter for mobile radio/music services? I can think of four interconnected reasons. Here they are in rough outline:

First, many mobile radio/music services operate on very tight profit levels. Pandora, Spotify, and other companies pay huge percentages of their revenue for royalties and data costs. Bloomberg just ran a piece titled “Spotify hits 10 million paid users; now can it make money?” Any first strike priority access deal among this circle of competitors with an ISP could tip the balance of profitability towards one party and very much away from the others.

Second, it seems like it is only a matter of time before more of these radio/music providers get absorbed by larger entities. Beats Music is now part of Apple. Twitter almost tried to buy SoundCloud last week, it seems. UK market think tank Generator Research has a fascinating article suggesting that Pandora consider becoming a Mobile Virtual Network Operator. MVNOs partner with big ISPs and resell wireless service under their own brand. While Pandora isn’t making much of a profit, it does have a very good brand. The kind of priority access deals that the FCC seems poised to allow will probably accelerate these sort of acquisitions and relationships.

Third, I presume that the direction that the FCC is going in will almost certainly green light priority access deals that take advantage of the low data caps the big ISPs impose on consumers. In January, AT&T announced a “sponsored data” plan for its mobile customers.

Basically if a company with an application pays AT&T, no data use will accrue to customers using its app. That means no worries that using that app will cause consumers to exceed their data plan cap and incur extra charges. Guess which radio/music apps mobile customers with 1GB data caps are going to bee line for? The sponsored data plan versions, I would presume. Here’s another way that the big ISPs could easily pick winners and losers in the mobile music/radio sector.

Finally, the Commission’s priority access friendly proposals will very likely put the music services that moneyed outfits like Apple (iTunes Radio), Google (All Access), and Microsoft (Xbox Music) offer in the proverbial cat bird seat, and the more independent companies in increasingly untenable situations.

Earlier this month, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and a host of other companies sent a letter to the FCC expressing their concern about Wheeler’s net neutrality proposals. No Internet music/radio outfit with which I am familiar signed the statement. I guess none of them think this is a big deal, or they have more pressing priorities.

Speaking of independent services, I did follow up with Selocial, the app that allows you to take a picture and then attach 15 minutes of music to it. Selocial is a fun beta venture—the music database comes from SoundCloud. In some ways the service reminds me of 8tracks.com, which also allows you to attach a picture to your playlist. But Selocial lines up all the “Selomixes” that users generate along side each other so that you get to see what lots of other people are doing in an interesting Pinteresty way—sort of like entertainment booths on a boardwalk. See my Chopin mix on the left below.

One problem (from my perspective): when you try to share the link for your Selomix, potential listeners are directed to sign up or sign into Selocial, rather than just allowed to enjoy your mix. Even when I’m signed into Selocial, the link directs me to sign in yet again. This is a bit of a chore, I think. I’d make Selocial mixes public from the getgo.

Meanwhile, nostalgia lovers will doubtless enjoy the Hootsuite blog’s recent post titled 7 things we miss about MySpace (it taught us html coding; it is where we first started blogging; it introduced us to the selfie . . . ). It should be noted, however, that MySpace still exists; in fact, in fact the service remains a leading generator of tweets among music applications. Since I missed MySpace in its salad days, maybe I’ll go over and get myself an account now, just for kicks. . . .

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Four reasons why net neutrality matters for mobile radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Latest Sprint buzz: the carrier may try to acquire T-Mobile. This follows Sprint announcing that it will offer six months of Spotify Premium to “all new and existing postpaid Sprint customers” who are on one of its “framily” plans.

This is good news, except that if you take advantage of the aforementioned offer your carrier is Sprint. Last November Consumer Reports dropped the wireless outfit to last, giving it “dismal marks” in all the major categories: reliability, texting, messaging, and overall value.

Sprint Corporate all but agreed with the assessment, telling CNet that “while the findings in the Consumer Reports’ survey are disappointing, they’re not necessarily surprising. We’ve asked customers during the past year to ‘pardon our dust’ as we build out and upgrade our network.”

You can read Phonedog consumer reviews of Sprint to your heart’s content. First three review titles: “Worst company I have ever dealt with.” “THEY SET ME UP!” and “Absolutely the worst phone service ever.”

On the other hand, Sprint does offer unlimited data plans (at least for now), and the “Framily” group subscription system does appear to make wireless more affordable. So if you are a Spotify fan and crave a commercial-free music sharing experience, the trade-off might be worth it.

The post Is Sprint worth six free months of Spotify Premium? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On April 28, Last.fm will shut down its subscription radio stream. That means the company won’t be streaming content through its own servers, just third party stuff, mostly from YouTube and Spotify. “We understand that many of you will not like this decision,” a Last.fm forum post announced on Wednesday. A flood of Last.fm users agreed.

“You’re complete screwing over Canadian listeners,” one complained:

“We don’t have access to Spotify or Pandora, etc. Last.Fm was the only decent service available. As an American living in Canada where everything is off limits or more expensive for some inexplicable reason (other than the CTRC), this is an especially low blow.

I’m really sad. I’m going to have to figure out where I’m going to listen to music. I will no longer subscribe after this month, what is the point? I guess I’ll try Deezer or get an American IP.”

The “get an American IP” generically refers to availing oneself of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) server to make Spotify or Pandora think that it is in the United States or somewhere else where it is available. Why no Pandora in Canada? “Astronomical” royalty fees, says Pandora founder Tim Westergren. Thus there are websites like “How to Get It In Canada” which offer instructions on how to use VPN sites like “Hide My Ass” to access Pandora, Spotify, and other Internet audio/video goodies (I’m not endorsing or recommending these services, just noting their existence).

Canadians are understandably tetchy about all this. Late last year The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about Spotify expansion in 20 countries. Somehow the article included Canada. “You might want to fact check the claim that Canada is one of Spotify’s largest markets,” one reader quickly chimed in. “Spotify is not currently nor has ever been available in Canada. The only way to access Spotify from Canada is to use a VPN or proxy to hide the fact you are in Canada.”

What’s particularly unfortunate about all this is that Last.fm is still popular. Last week we noted a music sharing application tweet counter that placed Last.fm at number three in Twitter mention popularity over the last year and a half or so. This further confirms my already fairly strong perception that copyright and performance royalty rates are the lead ceiling hanging over Internet radio’s head—to some extent a form of protectionism for AM/FM radio.

In a related development, Digital Music News (or as I affectionately call the site, “Rightsholder Music News”) reports that SoundCloud is involved “in serious licensing discussions with major labels and publishers.” Sources? They will “remain confidential,” DMN says. This disclosure was followed by some venting over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

“The rules are pretty simple: as long as a process exists to eliminate content that is flagged by the content owner, SoundCloud steers clear of any legal entanglements.  The only problem is that rights owners are responsible for notifying SoundCloud each and every time an infraction occurs, which is essentially impossible .

But sources insist there are serious steps that labels can take, and according to one of the sources, major labels are not at all comfortable with the ‘DMCA funny business’ arrangement anymore.  ‘Their [catalog] is all over SoundCloud, and it’s essentially too hard to police but that doesn’t mean they won’t start ,’ the source relayed.  ‘If you look at what’s happening over at Google and YouTube, you have [groups like] the [British recording trade group] BPI flooding Google and YouTube with takedown notices’.”

Unlike YouTube, with its considerable staff, SoundCloud doesn’t have the personnel to handle a DMCA takedown notice flood, DMN’s source added: “They aren’t pulling from a pile of billions, which means everything in legal terms,” and so “they can be touched.”

Meanwhile, for those of you unsympathetic to my sympathies for the Internet music streamers, here’s your story. The Street‘s Rocco Pendola has a rant over Pandora as its CTO Tom Conrad prepares to leave. Pendola calculates that since April of 2012 Conrad has “generated proceeds of $43,332,556 mainly by exercising his Pandora employee stock options”—the number estimated via repeated automatic sales over the last two years.

“I’ve never been one to cry a river for musicians and a record industry that claims Pandora’s ripping them off,” Pendola opines:

“I tend to agree with Pandora—the music industrial complex focuses too squarely on royalties, ignoring how the exposure Pandora provides and the data it collects can help market and monetize music in unprecedented and prolific ways.

But what rubs me the wrong away is that, as Conrad, Westergren and others enrich themselves as individuals, they cry poor speaking on behalf of Pandora the company.”

And if that wasn’t enough to get your juices flowing, check out Andrew Leonard’s piece in Salon: “Big Brother is in your Spotify: How music became the surveillance state’s Trojan horse.” Or don’t. After all, the title sort of says it all. Happy listening folks!

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post With Last.fm radio gone, it’s back to Pandora/Spotify VPN tricks for Canada appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“The Student Discount is here,” Spotify announced today. “Spotify Premium is now 50% off for students.” This is for college students, I presume (I sneaked a peek at the discount form; it definitely asks users for their “college”). So qualified college attendees get ad free Spotify for $4.99 instead of $9.99. The discount comes as Pandora has upped its “Pandora One” ad free service from $3.99 to $4.99 a month.

Hooray! Competition! I guess that’s good, but given the huge percentage of revenue both of these services pay to royalties, this discount feels like a short term loss-leader manuever rather than a move towards long term sustainability.

Here’s from Pandora’s announcement: “the costs of delivering this service have grown considerably. For example, the royalty rates Pandora pays to performers via SoundExchange for subscription listening have increased 53% in the last five years and will increase another 9% in 2015.” Can these conditions be that much better for Spotify?

I also wonder whether most college students care that much about ads one way or another (“another” meaning willing to pay even a small monthly sum to avoid them). So here’s a question to you college based music lovers: do you hate ads enough to take the Spotify challenge? 

Update (3/26/2014): Looks like Spotify is already discounted for college students in UK under certain circumstances:

@JamesCridland it's been half price for NUS Extra card holders here for at least a couple of years.

— Steve Bentley (@sdb) March 26, 2014

The post Spotify premium student discount: loss leader challenge to the young? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Mobile sports radio applications don’t always get the attention they deserve. We screened four heavyweights to see which are worth your time when on the run:

ESPN Sports Radio 1080 The Fan

Features: archives, sports ticker, call-in, text-in, alarm clock

Notable hosts: Colin Cowherd, Scott Van Pelt, Mike & Mike

Outlook: If you’re looking for sports talk that’s anything but, this is probably for you. Some DJs on 1080 The Fan (who will not be named) tend to go off on tangents which should never be thought or mentioned in sports discussions. But the app itself is sharp, albeit slow-loading initially, and the text-in feature is nice for quiet situations. The alarm clock is an oddity, because it won’t play radio unless you leave the app open and your phone refreshed. ***

FOX Sports Mobile

Features: box scores, sports-ticker, video highlights

Notable hosts: Dan Patrick, J.T. The Brick, Ben Maller

Outlook: FOX would have more respect if it stuck to sports, this service being an example. The app lets you customize which teams and sports to follow, along with what default page (from five options) you’d like to appear. Strangely, local news is rarely updated and there are no radio archives, but video clips are a big draw. ****

NBC Sports Radio

Features: archives, call-in, email-in

Notable hosts: Amani Toomer, Brian Kenny, Erik Kuselias

Outlook: The simplicity of NBC’s app makes it a gem. The screen you see above is the only screen you’ll ever know, apart from the bombardment of ads. As far as interaction, the “e-mail-in” feature is great when you’re disinterested in school, work, or a date. ****

Yahoo! Sports Radio

Features: archives, box scores, call-in, alarm clock

Notable hosts: Steve Czaban, Dan Wetzel, Sean Salisbury

Outlook: Sillier than FOX and NBC, but more straight-forward than ESPN, Yahoo! mobile rides in the rear but holds its own in entertainment. You can only check scores for the six major American sports, and the alarm is crappier than ESPN’s (a text alert when the app is dormant), but they do offer a direct link to Yahoo Sports! on the web, plus that sleek metallic backdrop. ***

The post Mobile sports radio apps: the heavyweights appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Pandora fans (and presumably Pandora) breathed a sigh of relief on Friday when a federal judge left the music streamer’s copyright tithe percentage unchanged. From back in 2011 through next year (2015) Pandora must fork over 1.85 percent of its revenue to ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), which represent copyright holders. ASCAP had sued for more. Pandora wanted to pay less.

A stalemate of sorts, but there’s more litigation in the offing between Pandora and BMI. And then there’s the question of performance royalties, always a sticky wicket. These fees place a big question mark not only over the future of Pandora, but the entire online music streaming business.

“Pandora’s business model can’t and won’t work,” concludes Generator Research, a United Kingdom based industry assessment firm. It’s pretty simple says Generator: royalties eat up a huge percentage of the company’s advertising revenue, its biggest source of income. The service earns about $0.0072 per advertisement delivered to its listeners. Royalties account for $0.0046 per advertisement, or 63 percent of “ad revenue that is royalty.”

Generator Research

This means that Pandora operates with a much tighter cash flow than, say, Google, or even Sirius XM Satellite radio. Then there are streaming costs. Then there is the difficulty of effectively serving ads on mobile devices.

Bottom line: “Pandora is a really wonderful service, but it is very hard to see anything wonderful about the company’s business model, or even its future prospects if it carries on as it is,” concludes Generator Research’s Andrew Sheehy.

Despite this, Pandora’s stock continues to do well. Its shares jumped almost 150 percent over the last year; up almost a third this year.

“The bulls are hoping for a quick pop in Pandora Media,” noted the OptionMonster stock watching site yesterday. “The stock made an all-time high of $40.44 earlier this month before pulling back, so the bullish spread is looking for a quick rebound from the recent drop.”

Generator Research scratches its head at all this. The market has “not fully understood just how precarious Pandora’s business really is,” the company says, or thinks that Pandora will soon pull something new out of its sleeve.

I don’t pretend to understand this phenomenon. Maybe lots of people are relying on the “buy stock in things you love” wisdom. In any event, here’s hoping that love will find a way.

The post Copyright, stocks, and the Pandora mystique appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here’s the California Broadcasters Association’s input on this question, following a meeting between nine California broadcasters and four top FCC staffers.

“CBA radio broadcasters mentioned the importance of the FM chip and the issue that wireless carriers control the services available in their mobile devices. It was stated that in other countries, the FM chip is automatically activated. In the U.S., most mobile service providers turn it off. Given the importance of radio in times of emergencies, a request was made to look into the situation. It was acknowledged that the Commission’s jurisdiction may be limited here, but that it should nevertheless more thoroughly investigate the situation.”

Ditto says the New Jersey Broadcasters Association:

“Participants discussed the merits of FM chips in mobile devices. In particular, NJBA urged the Commission to promote public access to broadcast signals on cell phones. NJBA believes that broadcast is the best way to reach large audiences during emergencies and that FM chips placed in cell phones would be a vital resource for consumers.”

Neither of these groups went so far as to say, “Dear FCC: please tell Congress to mandate FM chips in mobiles.” But phrases like “in other countries the FM chip is automatically activated” broadly suggest something along those lines (unless someone thinks the “automatic” activation elsewhere happens via biology).

The last time this question came up big time, it was back in 2010. Broadcasters suggested that the best way to resolve the logjam over requiring radio stations to pay performance royalties to musicians was to sweeten the deal by mandating FM chips in mobiles. That proposal went over like a lead Android with the mobile phone industry. Apparently it surfaced again in 2012, and the device makers hit the digital ceiling once more, as per Consumer Electronics Association chief Gary Shapiro’s op-ed in Forbes undiplomatically titled “Dinosaur Broadcasters Turn to Congress to Mandate Their Relevance.”

One would think that all that sturm und drang would erase this hope from broadcaster wish lists. Apparently not.

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Over the last four months SoundCloud has added significant visual, search, and messaging capability to its environment; here’s the rundown:

In late January, SoundCloud released its Visual Player. The Player adds larger graphic backgrounds to your embedded tracks. Below an embed of a tune by Punjabi singer and actor Gippy Grewal. Some embedded visuals seem to lose the upper portion of the graphic, still the effect is fun.

Earlier last month, the application launched a new messaging system. It allows you to send messages with tracks to  other SoundCloud users.

Finally, back in November, SoundCloud launched its “Explore” feature, basically an ongoing cascade of new uploads. Once you are on the Explore page, pick from a wide variety of “trending music” categories: alternative rock, hip hop, classical, you get the idea. You can also opt for “trending audio,” a cascade of podcasts.

The curation on these channels is kind of catch as catch can, but maybe that’s more about me. Some of the “classical” tunes are just homegrown easy listening stuff. And I just don’t get “World” music anymore. Why is music from Punjab India or Egypt “World” music,” as opposed to music from India or Egypt? Having said that, the World channel is quite enjoyable, whatever the category actually means.

Now I can’t resist posting a visual embed of me playing a Bach Prelude (please be kind).

We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post SoundCloud’s progress: Explore, messaging, and Visual appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Federal Communications Commission has opened up a new conversation on net neutrality in light of an Appeals Court’s mid-January strikedown of some of the agency’s Open Internet rules. “We establish a new docket within which to consider how the Commission should proceed in light of the court’s guidance in the Verizon v. FCC opinion,” a public notice released on Wednesday explains. I hope that discussion extends to data caps and their potential impact on Internet radio.

Before getting to that subject, a quick backgrounder: The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit opined that the FCC’s statutory justification for its regulations barring ISP discrimination against “edge providers”—pretty much anybody who offers audio, video, and similar services on the Net—was bogus (which I think it was). But the agency could avail itself of another section of the Telecommunications Act, the court ruled, which classifies Internet Service Providers as telecommunications services.

So back to the drawing board, says FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “We will carefully consider how, consistent with the court opinion, we can ensure that edge providers are not unfairly blocked, explicitly or implicitly, from reaching consumers, as well as ensuring that consumers can continue to access any lawful content and services they choose,” he declared in a press statement accompanying the new Open Internet docket.

I listen to a lot of Internet radio on my smartphone, especially in my car. It is linked via bluetooth to my stereo, so up and down the freeway I’m listening to SoundCloud music channels, community and college stations via TuneIn, and fun podcasts like “Welcome to Night Vale” via Podbay. I keep track of how much data these applications use. Due to the peculiarities of my work schedule, I commute about four hours on various state highways each week. I don’t look at mobile video  much. But despite that, it appears that if my job required driving every day, I’d blow my current mobile data ceiling from time to time, largely due to the additional consumption of Internet audio.

Should this issue be placed at the doorway of my ISP? Are audio edge providers “implicitly blocked” when consumers think twice about enjoying mobile Internet radio too often? AT&T has a plan to let edge companies pay to “sponsor” consumer data use, so that using their application won’t count towards your data limit. Would this constitute the kind of implicit “priority access” rent seeking that the Commission says is out of bounds—an express lane for content providers able to pay?

I am not sure, but I would like to see that conversation happen on this new Open Internet docket. Here is the RSS for the proceeding. Look to the top left and you’ll see links to make long and short comments. The docket number is 14-28. Or, of course, feel free to offer a comment below.

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David Byrne; Dave Allen

I am reading Paul Riismandel’s summary of Day One of the Future of Music Summit. It appears that all digital music policy discussion roads lead to Spotify. “It seemed like every [FOMS] conversation that dealt even a little bit with royalty payments and artist income always veered back to Spotify,” Paul notes. “On this there was nothing close to any sort of unanimous opinion, though the discussion and debate was respectful.”

Somewhat less so was the recent dialogue between David Byrne and Dave Allen over the famous (or infamous) Swedish service.

“The internet will suck all creative content out of the world,” Byrne dramatically declares (hint: he doesn’t like Spotify).

“Appearing to be elitist and Luddite is not a good way to win over today’s music fans to one’s cause;” Allen responds, “let’s leave that to be the historical legacy of the RIAA.”

But the Byrne/Allen debate does spark an interesting historical question, at least for me. Can a new communications technology create a new market without wrecking an extant one? David Byrne would appear to say no, essentially calling Spotify and similar services (Pandora?) legalized versions of Napster and Pirate Bay. He continues:

“In future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year. Some of us have other sources of income, such as live concerts, and some of us have reached the point where we can play to decent numbers of people because a record label believed in us at some point in the past. I can’t deny that label-support gave me a leg up – though not every successful artist needs it. So, yes, I could conceivably survive, as I don’t rely on the pittance that comes my way from music streaming, as could Yorke and some of the others. But up-and-coming artists don’t have that advantage – some haven’t got to the point where they can make a living on live performances and licensing, so what do they think of these services?”

Allen doesn’t really argue with Byrne. He just says Spotify is here and that’s that:

“It is not hyperbole to suggest that this generation’s music fans want to rent their music, not own it. Spotify may not have created that shift but they certainly provided a solution to easy access, mobile music streaming. They simply saw consumer demand, just as any company in any marketplace could determine. I am certain that Spotify would want every single music fan on their service to pay the monthly subscription, but is it their fault if we choose not to do that and listen to the ad-supported version instead?”

Actually, it appears that Spotify et. al. did create that shift. They did not just “see” consumer demand, they enabled it. They used technology to replace an ownership market with what Allen correctly calls a rental market. And although we can always appropriately point to the labels as a culprit when it comes to shortchanging musicians, royalty-wise, it is possible that Spotify and Pandora have made an already bad situation for many artists even worse by developing a “rental” market in which consumers pay minimal “rent” in the form of watching and listening to ads.

I can see ways out of this dilemma for musicians, but they’re going to take a while to implement (Paul’s got some great ideas, BTW). In the meantime there’s a reason why I never admiringly use the adjective “disruptive” in my posts. I tend to sympathize with the disrupted, not the disruptors.

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In my third installment of my Internet radio in my car diary, I admit that I have tuned in to Pandora in my Honda Civic while driving on the freeway. You probably think this isn’t much of a confession. But I found the experience distracting enough to wonder whether I should make it a habit.

To backtrack, over the summer I got a Bluetooth powered stereo installed in my Honda, specifically a Panasonic DEH-X6500BT. The receiver very nicely connects to my Android device—a Droid Razr. That means I can pretty much audit any radio application I’ve installed while driving my vehicle. Not surprisingly I went for Pandora first. How wonderful to listen to my Mozart channel while commuting from San Francisco to my teaching gig in Santa Cruz!

Unfortunately, there are limitations to this pleasurable activity. First of all, the DEH is really designed to work with the iPod/iPhone rather than a Droid. But even if I’d had the good sense to mention that I owned an Android to my stereo installation guy, the receiver instructions make it clear that Pandora only goes so far with the system under any circumstances.

To wit: “Certain functions of the Pandora service are not available when accessing the service through the Pioneer car audio/video products, including but not limited to creating new stations, buying tracks from iTunes, viewing additional information, logging into Pandora, and adjusting Cell Network Audio Quality.”

Despite these and my device/receiver incompatibilities, I can access a variety of functions via my receiver panel. I can skip songs; I can pause songs; and I can toggle through various display options. On the other hand, I don’t seem to be able to change stations or deploy the “quick mix” function.

But frankly, I am not sure that I want to. Through my commute, my driving felt distracted enough just futzing around the Pandora options that I could access. And we haven’t even discussed firing Pandora up while you are driving. I started the app before I drove onto the street.

Some DEH models give you the option of connecting to Pandora via your iPod with relative ease (you can toggle between Tuner, CD Player, Aux, Bluetooth, and “iPod/Pandora”). But if you don’t have that interface or something similar, I’d think twice about fidgeting with some random smart phone app while navigating any thoroughfare similar to Highway 17.

Bottom line: interactive smart phone music applications are probably best accessed via an automotive audio system that is maximally compatible with the app. This is a convenience and functionality issue, but it is  also a safety issue as well.

On the other hand, here’s an Edison media survey YouTube of a consumer trying a fancy new Pandora touch screen car interface, and she’s still skittish about the system. “Like I have to like really hit it,” she nervously notes, referring to the screen. ” . . . like it’s not overly sensitive which I guess is a good thing. But at the same time you really have to make sure you are typing, pressing the right letter.”

“So that’s why I try and do it before I’m driving,” she adds [just like me], “because it would just be too dangerous to do while I’m driving.”

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Yesterday streaming music service Rdio announced that radio station streaming would be free on Android and iOS mobile devices, effective immediately. Up to now the service has been subscription only, with a free trial period available for new users.

Like Spotify, Rdio’s emphasis has been on demand listening. The service’s stations were only just launched in August.

Rdio’s new free service will be underwritten by ads provided by its new partner, Cumulus broadcasting, though stations are ad-free right now. While the deal lets Rdio get into the ad-supported model without rolling out its own sales department, it also lets Cumulus move more aggressively into the online and mobile radio space without having to build its own platform.

As the second largest owner of radio stations in the US Cumulus also seems to be perpetually trying to catch up to #1, Clear Channel. That company has made a big play to capture the online and streaming audience with its iHeartRadio platform, which merges broadcast streams from a range of commercial and non-commercial broadcasters–including Cumulus–with online-only stations. I suspect the Rdio deal may be a way for Cumulus to test the waters in mobile streaming without the huge commitment of developing its own platform.

As of late Cumulus has been slowly renegotiating or cutting some ties from Clear Channel, while cutting costs. At the end of August the company struck a new deal to carry Rush Limbaugh’s program–syndicated by Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Network–for three more years on its stations. But just a week ago Cumulus announced that it would drop Premiere’s Sean Hannity show in favor of Michael Savage’s Savage Nation, which had been absent from terrestrial airwaves since September 2012 when he won a legal battle with syndicator Talk Radio Network.

Will the Savage Nation get its own channel on Rdio sometime in the future? (shudder)

The Rdio-Cumulus deal, then, might be seen as a cross-sector consolidation that increasingly shouldn’t be seen as cross-sector. It’s come time that terrestrial broadcasters cannot afford not to have their own online and mobile platform, delivering more services than just live streams of their broadcast stations. The reality they’re waking up to is: it’s all radio.

What remains to be seen is if Rdio will attempt to create advantages beyond ad sales from its Cumulus deal. Think of how Pandora is trying to break into broadcast as a ploy to reduce its royalty rates.

I’m checking out Rdio’s free mobile streaming right now, and will give it a fuller review soon.

The post Rdio launches free service with ads from broadcast partner Cumulus appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Typically I’m a little more cautious when upgrading my mobile device OS. I usually wait a couple of weeks for the early adopters to upgrade and find the bugs and hassles, and maybe even wait for the first patches to fix those bugs before taking the plunge. But today I had two reasons to upgrade to iOS7 on the day of release, to try out Slacker’s new app and iTunes Radio.

First up is my initial impressions review of Slacker for iOS7, which I’ve been using for a half the day. For more details on what the upgrade offers, see my post from earlier today.

Releasing a major redesign on the same day that Apple debuts its iTunes Radio service certainly seems like an audacious move. Slacker CEO Jim Cady doesn’t seem concerned. He said,

“The digital music market has shifted dramatically since the days of simply putting 1,000 songs in your pocket. We think Apple finally jumping into streaming with iRadio will help expose millions of new consumers to streaming music, which is great for everyone in the space. However, access to music is just the beginning, listeners need tools to navigate this massive sea of content, which is where Slacker leads the with the best human curated stations, playlists and recommendations.”

So let’s dig into Slacker’s new app and see how it measures up to that goal of helping the listener “naviate this massive sea of content.”

Upon starting up the app the first time I can say that it delivered on the clean interface promised in the pre-release screen shots and walk-through. Indeed it is easy to just start playing music, with the last song I played in my most recent Slacker listening session queued up at the bottom of the home screen. Buttons for stations and My Vibe are prominently displayed in the center.

My Vibe

I most wanted to try out the My Vibe feature, so that’s where I jumped in. For my Wednesday morning moods I was offered options like “Wake Up,” “Driving” and “Concentrating.” Although it was 11 AM by the time I had iOS7 and Slacker installed, I went for “Wake Up” and chose the Indie Coffee House station.

That playlist delivered a nice selection of mellow, but not too downbeat, indie rock like “Chained” from xx, Feist’s “Secret Heart” and Radiohead’s “Let Down.” All the typical Slacker navigation options are there to favorite the song, ban it, or skip forward. Like Pandora, the free version of slacker only allows 6 skips, which is plenty for me.

When morning turned to afternoon I checked out some other vibes. Slacker offered up moods like “Supermom” and “Hump Day,” the latter with a camel icon, neither of which quite met my needs. As I started to write this post I chose the “Concetrating” vibe which offered the intriguingly titled “Mensa Mix” amongst others. Needing to be smart, I went with “Mensa” which streamed some low-key but complex electronic tracks from many artists I wasn’t familiar with, along with more known acts like Björk and Boards of Canada. I really got into this station–it worked as advertised for concentrating.

Featured Stations and Playlists

Heading back to the home screen I checked out some featured stations and playlists, which are at the top of the app’s home screen on a carousel. I chose one intriguinginly titled “55 Songs You Think Suck, but Don’t.” Hosts Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks wrote the recent book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” and give cheeky, but informative, introductions to each song. I can’t say I agree that Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic” doesn’t actually suck. Luckily these featured stations offer the same interactivity as all others, so I chose to skip poor Alanis. That brought me to LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.”, and while I’m not sure it doesn’t suck either, I appreciated how one of the hosts offered that his 9 year-old son has better taste in music because he likes that track.

In the browser version of Slacker you can turn DJs off if you don’t want to hear their banter. But I could not figure out a way to do it on the new mobile app. If I’m choosing to listen to a featured countdown I probably want the DJs, but would prefer not have them when I’m choosing a My Vibe station. Now, none of the My Vibe stations I listened to had a DJ–just occasional ads, because I’m using the free version–but with so many to choose from, my sample is far from exhaustive.

Navigating Stations

My past experience with Slacker has been mostly browsing their large selection of human curated stations. Navigating stations on the iOS7 app is markedly improved. Selecting stations from the home screen takes you to an alphabetical genre and theme list. Many stations are listed in multiple categories, which I think aids in finding them. For instance the 66 Greatest Metal Songs is under both Countdowns and Rock, which makes sense.

Once you pick a genre or theme you’re presented with a tiled layout with icons for each station in a 2 x 3 layout that I think is easier to browse on a smartphone than a text list. If browsing isn’t working out you can always search by text to find songs, artists, albums or stations.

Sound Quality

I listened to Slacker with my iPhone 5 via AirPlay to my Airport Express, connected to my Yamaha Aventage 1000 receiver with Polk Audio tower speakers so that I could put the sound quality to the test. On most tracks I found the quality to be surprisingly good, given that I understand the mobile app plays 40kbps AAC+ files.

On some tracks, like “Let Down” I heard some shimmery highs that were only distracting if I turned up the volume to higher than background level. However, My Vibe is intended more for background music than focused listening. For this the quality was more than adequate, and consistently better than SiriusXM internet streams. I need to revisit the Pandora and Spotify mobile apps to judge how they compare.

Slacker isn’t slacking

Slacker’s strength has always been human curated stations, and the iOS7 update definitely puts that aspect up front. Several hours of heavy use turned up no bugs or glitches in the app, which I found impressive, especially given how Slacker must have had to push it to deliver on Apple’s iOS7 timeline.

When I first heard about My Vibe I was intrigued. Using it today more than met my expectations, offering enough variety and depth of stations, genres and artists to both satisfy the need to hear the familiar and the surprising. I think that makes Slacker a very solid choice when you want some music but don’t want to customize your own station or playlist, or even choose a genre at the outset.

But…. I haven’t yet taken iTunes Radio for a spin. I’m guessing that hardcore Slacker users won’t easily be swayed to use Apple’s new service. The real question is if Slacker offers an experience that will lure away casual listeners for whom the service built right into their phone’s OS will be the easiest option.

Stay tuned for my assessment.

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I’m eyeballing Pandora’s latest Security and Exchange Commission risk filing, which notes that the Internet streamer has yet to significantly penetrate local markets like conventional radio stations do. Seems like the  company is thinking about the challenge,  though.

“Radio advertising has traditionally attracted primarily local advertisers, and we are still at an early stage of building our sales capability to penetrate local advertising markets,” the Pandora document observes:

” . . . which we view as a key challenge in monetizing our listener hours, including listener hours on mobile and other connected devices. In addition, while a substantial amount of our revenue has traditionally been derived from display ads, some display ads may not be currently optimized for use on certain mobile or other connected devices. For example, standard display ads may not be well-suited for use on smartphones due to the size of the device screen and may not be appropriate for smartphones connected to or integrated in automobiles due to safety considerations. Further, some display ads may not be optimized to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of connected devices. By contrast, audio ads are better-suited for delivery on smartphones connected to or installed in automobiles and across mobile and connected device platforms and video ads can be optimized for a variety of platforms. However, our audio and video advertising products are relatively new and have not been as widely accepted by advertisers as our traditional display ads.”

“In addition,” Pandora adds, “the introduction of audio advertising places us in more direct competition with terrestrial radio, as many advertisers that purchase audio ads focus their spending on terrestrial radio stations who traditionally have strong connections with local advertisers.”

All this is complicated by the challenge of getting advertisers to buy mobile ads at all. Pandora is clobbering the mobile radio listening market. Pandora listener hours on mobile devices has gone from five percent in 2009 to 77 percent (!!!) this year. But:

“Digital advertising on mobile devices is an emerging phenomenon, and the percentage of advertising spending allocated to digital advertising on mobile devices is lower than that allocated to traditional online advertising. According to IDC, the percentage of U.S. advertising spending allocated to advertising on mobile devices was less than 1% in 2010, compared to 13% for all online advertising. We must therefore convince advertisers of the capabilities of mobile digital advertising opportunities so that they migrate their advertising spend toward demographics and ad solutions that more effectively utilize mobile inventory. Our cost of content acquisition, or royalty fees for public performances, is currently calculated on the same basis whether a listening hour is consumed on a traditional computer or a mobile device.”

At this point, that section of the SEC filing concludes, “we have not been able to generate revenue from our advertising products delivered to mobile and other connected devices, such as automobiles and consumer electronics, as effectively as we have for our advertising products served on traditional computers.”

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Every time RAIN (the Radio and Internet Newsletter) announces semi-finalists in its upcoming Internet radio awards, I learn about some interesting new online radio service. The latest is Zeno Radio, one of four semi-finalists in RAIN’s “Best Overall Digital Strategy” category. ZenoRadio lets North Americans hook up to radio and audio from anywhere via their mobile phone line.

How does Zeno Radio work? A radio station in, say, Ethiopia sends ZenoRadio its stream via a URL and Zeno assigns a dedicated phone line to the operation. Ethiopian expats in the United States can then listen as long as they have an unlimited mobile voice plan. According to Salon Ethiopia, ZenoRadio has worked with radio stations in 30 countries to build a user network of 500,000 listeners.

In January, ZenoRadio signed up Pio Deportes, the Dominican Republic’s biggest sports station, as a client. The service also has its own immigrant oriented radio network, immigrationnation.us. All this reconfirms my impression that immigrants are Internet radio’s vanguard market.

Other semi-finalists in this category: ESPN Radio, iHeartRadio, and Tunein. The finalists will be announced next week, and the winners disclosed at the RAIN Summit in Orlando, scheduled for September 17.

Further reading: Stand up paddling Internet radio station makes semi-finals in webcaster awards

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People are listening to internet radio (which is delivered by a series of tubes).

As RAIN notes, Pandora also released its June numbers, with Wall Street reacting poorly to news that listener hours and market share were down from May, even though both were up significantly from June 2012. Thinking about this makes me wonder: how often does a major terrestrial television or radio broadcaster see its stock price slide based on a single month’s ratings?

Looking to the sky, satellite broadcaster SiriusXM reported 715,000 new subscribers in the 2nd quarter of 2013, nudging its total subscriber base past 25 million. That caused the company to predict it will add a total of 1.5 million new subscriptions in 2013, 100k more than it predicted last quarter. The company did not break down how many new subscribers are internet-only.

Even if summer means a slowdown in internet listening, what I see in these numbers is strong demand for radio, whether its online or satellite. Although Pandora is a music-only service, most of the other top online broadcasters–as well as SiriusXM–offer a significant quantity of news and talk programming.

Internet radio listening will only grow more if it becomes easier to listen using mobile networks, away from home or office wifi connections. This, of course, makes broadcasters dependent on mobile carriers, and threatens to favor big players, like Clear Channel, at the expense of smaller or non-commercial ones. Being able to listen to internet radio more easily in the back yard, at the park or at the beach may help to counteract the summer slump where terrestrial broadcast radio still rules.

In any event, people still want radio, no matter how it’s delivered.

The post Internet and satellite audience numbers indicate that people still love radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some unexpected excitement for iTunes Radio, digital radio future for Sweden and an online shortwave archive are in today’s round-up of radio news not to miss.

• Music blogger Tyler Hayes published an excited mash note to Apple’s new iTunes Radio for FastCo.Labs, based upon sampling the beta version. Our own Matthew Lasar expressed his own doubts about yet another automated “radio” platform, Apple-magic or not.
• Sweden plans to turn off analog FM broadcasts in favor of the DAB+ digital radio standard, reports blogger Gunnar Garfors (via @DIYmediadotnet). In a letter to a Swedish paper, that country’s Minister of Culture says that the transition should be accomplished in nine years, and will permit private broadcasters to more easily reach the entire country.
• Thomas Witherspoon, the man behind the Shortwave Listening Post, has created the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive in order to preserve and document broadcasts from this long-lived global information service. Audio is uploaded to Archive.org, and then indexed at the Shortwave Archive.

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A new radio tuner hit the web on Thursday, coming from the folks who bring you the online radio recorder app, DAR.fm. According to CEO Michael Robertson UberStations differs from existing radio platforms in that it provides a “unique recommendation engine” that helps the user find other stations with programming similar to what you’re listening to now.

The site’s spartan interface, modeled after a spartan radio, worked equally well for me in Chrome and Firefox on my MacBook Pro, and in Safari on my iPad. It was a little squeezed and tiny on my ancient iPhone 3G. It would be nice to see a mobile optimized interface for smartphones and smaller tablets.

You can search by city, zip code or call letters, which results in a list of all that market’s stations, displaying what each is playing, provided that metadata is available. When you select a station it goes into one of five spots that, to me, mimic a car radio preset. Then you click the play button to listen.

The presets seem to reset when you start a new search, which limits their utility. Also, the preset only displays the station’s frequency. Seeing stations call letters and/or logos would be much more useful.

The recommendations come into play when you click “More Choices on Now” underneath the UberStations logo. With remarkable speed, you’ll get a list of stations currently playing music or programs similar to your current selection. The results include stations from anywhere in the US playing something related. Though you can’t search Canadian or Mexican cities, stations from these countries will appear in border markets like Detroit and San Diego.

The recommendations appear to be driven by station format, which is a rougher guide than, say, Pandora’s musicological recommendation engine. When I asked for more music like the 80s first-wave alternative track “How Soon Is Now” from the Smiths, I got reasonable recommendations like a station playing R.E.M., along with somewhat less appropriate suggestions, such as classic rock stalwarts Credence Clearwater Revival and Billy Squier.

Robertson says that UberStation also plays potentially higher quality AAC streams in the browser, in addition to the ubiquitous MP3 streams. Other services, like TuneIn, spawn an app like iTunes to handle AAC streams. However, which stream you get (MP3 or AAC) is opaque to the user.

Finally, Robertson tells me that the service will soon integrate podcast feeds, so that you may get recommendations for shows that aren’t on live, but are available on demand.

UberStations’ responsive and clean interface make it fun to scan the virtual dial and come up with stations in cities you’ve probably never heard of. In particular, I like how well it works on a tablet right in the web browser without having to install a memory-hogging app.

Overall it’s a nice first shot, and a welcome addition to the online radio player space. With some additional polish and podcast integration I think it will become even more useful.

The post UberStations recommends stations based on what you’re listening to now appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Thursday Slacker Radio announced that it added 6 million listeners since the service relaunched with a new design in February. That’s when Slacker upped the ante with unlimited free listening to its streaming, curated stations on PCs and mobile devices, in addition to an interface overhaul. These stations include news and sports from ABC and ESPN, respectively, along with a music library that the company says has more than 13 millions songs. The free mobile listening seems to have paid off with a three-fold increase in iOS listeners since the February relaunch.

Slacker’s CEO Jim Cady tells VentureBeat that his company’s listenership gain is correlated with Pandora’s decision in February to limit free listening to 40 hours a month. He says that Slacker is able to maintain the unlimited free accounts due to growth in paid subscriptions and agreements with automakers like Chrysler and GM to let drivers access the service in their dashboard via their smartphones.

Slacker is a distant number three streaming music service, with 35 million registered users, behind Pandora’s 200 million and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio at 170 million users. Slacker’s ad free streaming is available for $3.99 a month, the same rate as Pandora’s. For $9.99 a month Slacker also offers an on-demand music service like Spotify.

To me, Slacker sort of sits in the middle between Pandora and iHeartRadio as a service, providing a better music service with fewer ads than most of iHeartRadio, while also providing some news and sports, which are not found on Pandora. It’s nice that a free account user won’t run out of streaming hours, though I’ve only run into that barrier on Pandora once or twice, ever. I need to spend more time with Slacker, especially on my mobile devices.

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The biggest radio news to come out of CES this week was Sprint’s announcement that it struck a deal to integrate FM radio tuners in some of its smartphones. Radio listening will be available through the forthcoming NextRadio tuner app on Android and Windows devices, which Sprint says will offer, “a wide range of interactive listener features not available today.”

For users there are several advantages to a real FM tuner compared to using a streaming radio app. Importantly, broadcast radio does not use any data bandwidth and won’t incur any additional charges no matter how much you listen. Also not all broadcast stations are available as live streams, and, especially when it comes to major league sports, not all programs are available as live streams. Finally, FM tuners are misers when it comes to battery consumption, especially compared to keeping a data connection active for an hour or more.

I used an HTC EVO that had an FM tuner for a few years. And while I only used the radio occasionally, every time I greatly appreciated its utility. I used it mostly while traveling so that I could tune in local stations without having to carry another radio.

I actually got a lot of use out of the EVO’s radio when I was in Argentina in 2011. My hosts–Americans spending a year abroad–did not have a radio at that time but wanted to listen to some local broadcasts. I had the cell radio turned off, since it wasn’t compatible with Argentine networks, but could connect it to speakers so we could enjoy Buenos Aires stations.

Despite my enthusiasm for FM tuners in smartphones, I don’t think this deal is such an enormous boon for the radio industry. Rather, I think it’s a matter of too little too late.

The radio lobby has been pushing for a few years to have radio tuners in all smartphones, but in this case they’ve succeeded only with the #3 wireless carriers, and not with all that carrier’s smartphones. A very notable exception to the deal is the iPhone, which has never had an FM tuner, despite past rumors. This is not a minor exception, given that the iPhone is still the most popular smartphone in the US.

There is no mention of HD Radio either. One might recall that at last year’s NAB the radio industry was all excited about a prototype smartphone with integrated HD radio. Nearly one year later that device is vaporware, and there’s no mention of HD radio as part of the Sprint deal. I would have been more impressed if the radio industry had been able to pull that off. But, that would also be much more expensive for Sprint.

In fact, this is a pretty cheap deal for Sprint, which can use all the publicity it can get, as the #3 carrier. FM radios are already integrated in a lot of smartphone models available outside the US. For instance, I recently got a Samsung Galaxy S3. The US version has no FM radio, but the EU version does. So it doesn’t seem like such a big deal for Sprint to ask Samsung to assemble a US version that has the radio included.

I have a hard time seeing an FM radio being the feature that drives the average consumer’s choice of carrier or smartphone. One might think that I am that sort of consumer for whom it would be important. Yet, none of my smartphone choices over the last five years have been driven by FM radio inclusion. Sure, I enjoyed the tuner in my HTV EVO. But day to day, other features, like 4G data and operating system features, have been much more pivotal. The FM radio is frosting, not the cake.

Because of this, I will be very surprised if this deal has any effect on the other carriers. I simply don’t see an incentive for AT&T and Verizon to jump on the FM tuner bandwagon; they won’t be fighting some tremendous erosion to Sprint over this feature. Even if they do find it advantageous to agree to take the smartphone versions with FM radios, I still don’t see that expanding the radio audience by any significant amount.

It’s a good thing that there will be FM radios in some Sprint smartphones. It’s just too little, about four years too late.

The post Sprint to add FM radio to smartphones – too little, too late? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Three years ago at CES car stereos started talking to smartphones to control apps like Pandora. This year radio apps are moving en masse from the smartphone into the dashboard. Smartphones still provide the critical mobile data link, although one auto manufacturer announced a deal to integrate that access directly in the dash.

Two major US auto manufacturers announced platforms that will let drivers run third-party apps on their on-board dash computers. Radio apps are some of the first to get in line for this opportunity.

Ford introduced its Sync AppLink platform at the 2011 CES, and this week announced that it is opening up the platform to more developers, offering a software development kit to download. The focus is on music, information and entertainment apps, while the company will deny apps that feature too much text, video or games that would distract drivers. AppLink is available on several cars and trucks, including the 2013 Fiesta and 2012 F–150 truck.

General Motors announced that it will also offer a software development kit to developers. Qualified apps will be downloadable through an app catalog accessible via the dashboard, but the platform is not yet available in any vehicles.

At CES this week GM demonstrated radio apps from iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Slacker and the Weather Channel. Ford’s Sync supports control of apps for iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Slacker, adding Stitcher to the mix, as well as the subscription music services MOG and Rhapsody. There are also apps dedicated to 17 terrestrial radio stations, including New Jersey’s independent rock station WDHA-FM.

Chrysler announced its own mobile entertainment platform called Uconnect, which will have the ability to access mobile data via Sprint’s network, in addition to connecting via a smartphone. The platform features iHeart Radio, Slacker and Pandora apps.

Harman International manufactures home, pro and mobile entertainment systems, and has been offering its Aha radio platform in Kenwood, Pioneer, Subaru, Honda and Acura car stereos, in addition to iOS and Android apps. Aha offers customizable audio channels consisting of content from broadcasters and podcasters, in a manner similar to Slacker Radio and Stitcher, but with an emphasis on localized content. At CES Harman announced that Aha would be added to Ford’s Sync, Chrysler’s Uconnect and Porsche’s Communication Management system.

As smartphone integration gets tighter more drivers will experience mobile streaming radio as seamlessly they do satellite radio. While some radio lovers with smartphones have taken the initiative to connect the audio output of their mobile devices to their car stereos for quite some time, having to control the stream on the phone itself is annoying at the least, and dangerously distracting at the most. App integration with the vehicle’s in-dash controls definitely will grow the audience for online radio, though probably at the expense of some terrestrial broadcasters.

I still wonder what effect this will have on wireless data plans, which have become more restricted and more expensive on the major carriers. The next frontier is cutting the smartphone tie, with mobile data built into the vehicle itself. I would think carriers and automakers could team up to make this option reasonably priced by limiting access to bandwidth hogging apps, like video.

At the same time, these platforms are shipping on a limited number of models, with Ford offering its Sync on the widest range of vehicles. When this kind of integration makes it onto standard equipment–or at least the most popular option packages–is when we’ll see mobile internet radio really take off.

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The 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show kicks off on Tuesday and runs until Friday. As usual, I will be monitoring the announcements and news from the show for anything of import to radio, broadcast and online, podcasting and streaming.

Announcements for the show are just getting started. Monday is “press day” at CES, when there’s a heady stream of press conferences and press releases, which should reveal a large percentage of the show’s announcements.

Pandora’s CEO Joe Kennedy is scheduled to present at the Citi 2013 Global Internet, Media and Technology Conference happening with CES. His presentation is scheduled for 2:15 PST on Monday, the 7th. It will be streamed live at the Pandora investor relations site. There hasn’t been any word about what he’ll be talking about, though I suspect he’ll be discussing Pandora’s fight to have its listenership ranked along side terrestrial radio, as well as a Nielsen exec’s recent statements saying that after its Arbitron acquisition the company will start monitoring internet radio services.

While Pandora still rules the roost in online radio, a prominent Apple analyst says he believes that the company will debut its competitor service, which he dubs “iRadio,” this year. Apple doesn’t participate in CES, so it’s unlikely we’ll have an announcement this week.

In terms of hardware, I don’t expect to hear about any monumental new radio gear this CES. Internet radios continue to be a niche item, and HD Radio seems to hold little appeal outside of car radios. There will probably be some product updates announced, but I don’t imagine anything truly new or groundbreaking.

However, I predict we’ll hear about more Bluetooth-enabled devices that make listening to mobile devices even easier by cutting the cord between your smartphone and car or home stereo. That’s the kind of step forward that will greatly assist the growth of listening to internet radio on the go.

The post What might be in store for radio at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It has been a year since I posted my review of the Kindle Fire as an Internet radio device. A lot of digital water has gone under the bridge since then, and I’ve replaced the Fire with a Google Nexus 7. Sorry Kindle, but the Nexus 7 is the tablet for me. Nothing personal. I even prefer it to my iPad. The Nexus is light, versatile, and makes for a wonderful Internet radio.

My Nexus 7 tuned to Pandora with an iLive Bluetooth speaker

Probably the best thing about the Nexus 7 are its navigation features. Simply by dragging desktop application icons on top of each other, a Nexus 7 user can create folders full of apps, then drag the folder to the six slot “dock” at the bottom of the screen (tutorial here). My “radio” folder includes Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, Turntable.fm, Scanner Radio, iHeartRadio, BBC Radio, NPR News, Slacker Radio, and BeyondPod.

Here below is a screen shot of what my Nexus 7 folder for radio apps looks like:

The Nexus 7 has a better speaker system than the Kindle Fire, but not that much better. I tried the free versions of SpeakerBoost and Volume+ to enhance the volume, but neither worked on my device. What does work quite wonderfully is the iLive Bluetooth powered external speaker that I bought at a neighborhood discount store for twenty dollars.

Once you have your Nexus 7 set up with your favorite radio/audio applications, you’ve got to make decisions about the audibility of other apps. Do you want want audio alerts from Google Talk, Facebook, and other instant/social message apps while the music is playing or the talk is talking?

I don’t want my Pandora classical channels interrupted, on the other hand, I do want to notice the alerts. Decisions, decisions . . .

The post My Nexus 7 is an Internet radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

John Anderson came through with a remarkable catalog of tunes about pirate radio. I couldn’t find all of them on Spotify, but I found a lot. Also thanks to Betty for Dar Williams’ “Are You Out There”; Gonzo, who mentioned Bruce Springsteen’s “Radio Nowhere” and Queen’s “Radio Gaga”; Lucas McCallister, who suggested “Radio Free Europe” and “Radio Song” by REM; Brett Johnson, who reminded us of Journey’s “Raised on Radio”; and Greg Blouch, who added radio related pieces by Negativland, Joe Walsh, and Wonder Stuff.

On our Facebook page, my brother Raphael  pointed out that The Who “Sell Out” album is pretty much all about radio, so I added “Odorono” and “Heinz Baked Beans” to the list. Todd Nemet mentioned “The Nightfly” by Donald Fagen. And the great D.J. McShmormac poured forth a slew of YouTubed radio related performances, among them “98.6,” “Turn Your Radio On,” and Lee Perry’s “Station Underground.”

McShmormac also suggested this masterpiece, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on Spotify, so I’m just posting it here:

Also not available on Spotify: “Mr. Radio Man” (1924), which, happily, is archived on the Library of Congress National Jukebox site:

Keep those suggestions coming. I’ll continue to add them to this list until it bursts.

The post An even bigger Songs About Radio Spotify playlist appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My trusty old Windows XP PC on Spotify.

I’ve been writing a lot about Internet radio and mobile devices these days. But sometimes I think there are advantages to tuning in on my PC laptop instead.

Advantage number one: avoiding monthly charges.

Most radio social networking applications on your PC are free with advertisements, including Last.fm. But want to get Last on your mobile? After a free introductory period, you have to pay a monthly fee.

“I want to explain why we’re making some of these changes,” Last.fm’s Matthew Hawn announced in February of 2011.

On the Last.fm website an ad-supported, free-to-listeners model is what supports our online radio services in the US, UK and Germany. In other markets and on emerging mobile and home entertainment devices, it is not practical for us to deliver an ad supported radio experience, but instead, we will migrate to what we believe is the highest quality, lowest cost ad-free music service in the world.

“You’ll see that this change brings us in line with other music services that already charge you to listen to music on mobile devices,” the statement added.

Is this the way of the future? Not sure. Other services, like Spotify, are maintaining free mobile ad supported apps for some mobile gadgets. As for Rdio: “New users in the US will automatically get Rdio free on their computers,” the service notes on its FAQ pages, “but you’ll need to subscribe to use Rdio on your smartphones, tablets and home media devices.”

The challenge of delivering advertising on mobile apps continues to make the future of mobile social networking radio uncertain. Bottom line: your PC is the surest bet for free Internet radio content.

Advantage number two: easier interfaces.

I don’t know about you, but I find it so much simpler to use apps like Turntable.fm, Spotify, and Mxyer on my PC than on my mobile, not to mention option packed software suites like WinAmp. There’s just more space. And you can integrate all kinds of cool extensions for these services via PC web browsers like Chrome.

I’ve got an iPad. But for some reason I can’t get Turntable to tilt horizontally on the device so I can use it with my keyboard case. Frustrating. But tt.fm looks great on my PC. And yes, PCs are less mobile. But a small Netbook isn’t that much less portable than a tablet.

Advantage number three: less worries about ISP interference.

You can’t use Skype over WiFi on Verizon mobile devices. Now AT&T is blocking Facetime on the iPhone and iPad unless you subscribe to one of its cellular plans. If the latter carrier gets away with this, I worry that it is only a matter of time before other mobile gadgets become pockmarked by conditions on audio/video apps, especially the innovative ones that encourage two-way creativity.

I wonder if part of the reason why PCs are less susceptible to this kind of interference is because of the Federal Communication Commission’s 1969 Carterfone decision, which made it illegal for telecommunications carriers to block lawful and unharmful devices from being attached by consumers to their wired networks.

I asked John Bergmayer over at Public Knowledge about this. PK is challenging AT&T’s latest move. Here’s his reply:

“I’d say that Carterfone set the expectation as to how people would connect to wired broadband networks. It doesn’t apply on its face to broadband, just to Title II phone companies,” Bergmayer noted. “Without Carterfone, amateur BBSs, Compuserve-type commercial services, and dial-up ISPs would never have happened.”

“The openness that characterized the early days of the commercial Internet carried over to some extent into the broadband era—not in terms of ISP competition, which is unfortunate, but at least in terms of a competitive equipment market, where people can use the computers and other devices of their choice within their homes.”

The problem is that the FCC has never really extended Carterfone to mobile technology. Thus the PC seems to occupy an interesting middle ground when it comes to broadband radio. Its comparative bigness makes it less attractive to mobile lovers, but its scale makes it easier for developers to create workable free, ad supported services. And it dwells in a regulatory quasi-safe harbor that probably protects it from some ISP meddling.

PS: I’m listening to Spotify right now on my PC. Sounds great! (except for the ads)

The post Is your PC laptop the best deal for Internet radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is “in talks” to obtain licenses for what amounts to a Pandora-like streaming music service. All Things Digital says it’s true, or as ATD’s Peter Kafka puts it, “Industry sources I’ve talked to say that’s correct.”

I’m sympathetic to this reader comment on the WSJ piece:

“Oh great. Watch Apple’s inflated ego turn a great service into a proprietary application open only to appleheads who renounce God and proclaim their faith in rounded corners.”

All snark aside, the question is whether Apple could obtain better license deals than the ones that Pandora gets, which gobble a considable portion of the latter company’s revenue. Doubtless the answer is yes. The next question is why yes would be worth the effort for Tim Cook. Is this about money or empire building?

The post Would you listen to an Apple version of Pandora? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Marc Maron podcast on my Droid Razr BeyondPod application.

As the great patent war between Samsung and Apple continues, I’ve started wondering which mobile operating system is better for radio listening: Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone and iPad, or the various Android flavors featured on Samsung devices and many other mobile phones.

My tentative answer is that it is a bit of a toss up, but an interesting one, given the likelihood that Android is going to stay in the mobile game, despite all legal setbacks.

Here’s how I see the comparisons shaping out in three major categories: streaming, podcasting, and direct FM transmission.

1. Streaming

You can get streaming applications like TuneIn radio on both iOS and the Android. That means you have access to a wide variety of frequencies not only across the United States but around the world. My experience is that TuneIn works equally well on both my iPad and my Droid Razr.

But sometimes significant radio apps get developed first for the iOS, then come around for the Android later. This was the case with turntable.fm. I’ve also noticed that individualized Android radio apps can be unreliable (for example: a local unlicensed radio station around my San Francisco neighborhood has an Android app, but I’ve never been able to make it work).

So if you are buying a mobile device based on its streaming radio-centric capacities, perhaps take a look at your favorite desktop radio programs to get a sense of their operating system orientation.

2. Podcasting

I had the misfortune of beginning my Android mobile podcasting experience with Google Listen, which I eventually realized was a terrible application (and now discontinued). Happily there are a variety of better products, among them BeyondPod and DoggCatcher for the Android, and Downcast and Podcruncher for Apple devices.

Or, most obviously for the iOS, just go to the iTunes store and select Podcasts (at the bottom of the screen for the iPad), and pick from a wide variety of casts. You can also download Apple’s free “Podcasts” app, but be forewarned, it has a terrible user rating record. Stitcher also offers lots of casts on both Android and iOS.

3. Direct FM streaming

Some Android phones come with FM receivers. This gives them an advantage over other devices (including iOS mobiles) in several ways. First, you can listen to local radio stations without using up data. Second, if a big emergency in your area takes down your broadband network, you’ve still got a shot at reaching local electronic media to find out what’s going on.

It’s not all that big an advantage, though. FM chips and their related gadgets are so small and economical that you can buy an almost infinite variety of attachable FM transmitter/battery charger/car stereo syncing gizmos for your iOS gadget for as little as four or five bucks. The same goes for Androids.

And so, in conclusion, the iOS-versus-Android radio question is inconclusive, just like the Apple/Samsung patent fight. What sayest thou, Radio Survivor readers?

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