It has been a while since I checked in on Earbits, the commercial free online music application that encourages you to become an active fan of the bands and musicians on your stream. Since then, it has greatly improved and I have constructed a hybrid classical radio channel via its excellent Chrome extension feature.

For those who do not know what I mean by a hybrid classical radio station (in other words, all of you) I mean a radio channel that plays classical music, but also the other “learned musics,” as I call them: jazz, art song, and world. By art song I mean various American hemisphere vocal traditions, prominent among them Broadway, tango, samba, and blues. By “world” I mean, you know: Oud, Gamalan, Chinese opera, that sort of cool global stuff.

In pursuit of these sounds I went into the bowels of Earbits and put together a mix-and-match channel via Earbits’ many channel and subchannel options. Basically I created a custom channel called “Hybrid Highbrow.” Once you start up your channel, you get a huge choice of categories and subcategories. So to simplify things, I just chose the “Editor’s picks” option for classical, jazz, blues, and world. As a result, I got a great station that I’ve really enjoyed listening to over the holidays.

Here’s a small sample my playlist.

Great content; in addition, Earbits has a unique system for encouraging users to follow musicians and promote their work. If you subscribe to a music group’s mailing list, you earn “groovies” (as I said three years ago, it’s nice to know somebody still uses that word). This lets you listen to tunes on demand, a single on demand play for ten groovies.

The site also says that you get groovies for sharing tracks on Facebook or Twitter. Here’s the problem: I’ve been sharing a lot of mine on my @hybridhighbrow Twitter account, but I don’t seem to be earning any groovies at the moment. Hopefully they’ll fix this. Still, I’ve been getting new Twitter followers from the activity, so there’s that.

I’ve got a suggestion. I’d really like to be able to share my Earbits channel via some embedded code. I would also like to have a lot more channel visual editing options, at present there appear to be none. But the bottom line is a lot of great music at your curating fingertips. And putting Earbits together as a Chrome app really works for me as an old school desktop computer stalwart. Of course, Earbits also comes in Android and iOS flavors. I’m going to try both of them soon.

The post Running a hybrid classical radio station with Earbits appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The music-techno-chattering classes are pondering recent Pandora news: a huge drop in the online song server’s stock price, largely attributed to the launching of Apple Music. Bottom line: in the third quarter of this year Apple Music, claiming 6.5 million paying customers, pinched Pandora audience expansion to the tune of 1.3 million listeners.

“Let me address these audience growth numbers directly,” Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews coolly noted in an Earnings Conference Call held a couple of days ago. “This was obviously a unique quarter in the streaming music business. The June 30, launch of Apple Music with its 3-month free trial, as well as significant category spending and trial offers across multiple players, brought increased focus to the broader on-demand category during this period.”

I love it when CEOs use 50 words to say “ouch.” Not that I’m such a genius; quite the contrary. Back in July Jennifer and Paul posted reviews about Apple Music and Beats 1 radio in particular, so just for kicks I got myself a free three month Apple Music subscription. Next I went in and mucked around in iTunes, working out how to do the Apple Music thing and listening to all the Beats 1 blather. Then I completely forgot about the service until the Pandora news and I noticed that I was finally getting billed following the three month free trial that I completely blew off. So ouch myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dd7VfsJirc

Here are my lame excuses: I’m really really busy at my teaching job. There are too many other radio thingy-dingies that I’m supposed to know something about. But also when I go into iTunes on one of my desktop computers (I have a Mac and a PC) it’s, like, too much. The next thing you know there’s TV shows, movies, podcasts, “My Music,” “playlists,” “new,” “radio,” “connect,” The Store . . . I feel overwhelmed.

So what the hell, I thought, and I got an Apple Music tech support person to give me a guided tour of the whole shebang. We set up that simul-screen thing and he was very nice, but there’s only so much iTunes Apple Music Beats ooh-look-we-got-everything product I can take. Shortly after my tour I fled to New York City classical station WQXR’s Jonathan Channel and felt better for it.

As for Pandora, the above YouTube commentary notes that 6.5 million Apple Music listeners may not be that many in the larger scheme of things. McAndrews concluded that he was “pleased to say” that, “given the scale of press and consumer attention on this [Apple Music] launch, the impact on our active users and listening hours was muted and was, in fact, consistent with what we experienced during the launch of Apple’s radio service in 2013.” Except for the tanking stock price, of course.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll stick around Apple Music-land long enough for the Android app to surface (I’ve got a Note 4 and perhaps the mobile version is less overwhelming). But chances are I’m going to bail. There’s only so much Big Love from the Corporate Music God that I can stand.

The post Reflections on forgetting that I bought an Apple Music subscription appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Podcasters wanting an inside look into how public radio and podcast experts evaluate new show ideas have an opportunity to peek under the hood of WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Pitch Session. On Friday at 3:30 PM PDT the Online News Association will live stream the five Podcast Accelerator finalists giving their last pitches to the judges: Dean Cappello, Chief Content Officer and Senior Vice President of WNYC; Glynn Washington, host of the popular podcast and public radio show Snap Judgment; and Emily Botein, Vice President of On-Demand Content for WNYC.

While the judges deliberate, Anna Sale, from WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast, will lead panel of well-known podcasters discussing how they discovered their unique podcasting voices. Panelists include: Sean Rameswaram, host of Sideshow from WNYC/PRI’s Studio 360; Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC’s Note to Self; Al Letson, host of Errthang Show and Reveal; and Lauren Lapkus of Earwolf’s With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus. The event is hosted by Anna Sale from WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast.

The five accelerator finalists have been working with WNYC podcast producers who have been mentoring them and helping to hone their pitches. You can learn more about the finalists in this post from ONA.

Tune in Friday 3:30 PM Pacific to watch their pitches and find out who wins at: ona15.journalists.org/sessions/wnycpodcast/

Music Industry Revenues from Streaming up 6%

Many listeners love streaming music services, while many artists and other critics complain that the royalties paid to musicians are paltry, and don’t make up for declining sales in CDs and digital tracks. Yet, there’s no sign streaming is going away, so it helps to understand just how much money is at play.

The Recording Industry Association of America just released its mid-year revenue report [PDF], showing a 6% increase in streaming revenues over the first half of 2014, for a total of just over $1 billion. Making up 32% of all music revenues, streaming still trails digital downloads, which brought in $1.23 billion, although downloads declined 3.6%.

Ad-supported on-demand services, like Spotify’s free tier, brought in the smallest portion of streaming revenues, $163 million, but 27% more than last year. SoundExchange–which covers most online radio–paid out $387 million, which is 20% more than the first half of 2014. Not surprisingly, paid subscription services paid out the most, at $478 million, marking a pretty impressive 25% increase over the same period last year.

The post Digital Watch: Watch the Final Pitches in WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Competition appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Terrestrial and satellite radio still lead music discovery in the U.S. according to Nielsen’s new 2015 Music 360 report, released this week. Although 75% of the population now reports listening to music online, 61% of Americans say they found out about new music from radio. Surprisingly, this represents a 7% increase over 2014.

Despite the growth in online listening, there are still challenges for streaming services. Only 9% of people say they are somewhat or very likely to subscribe to a paid service in the next 6 months, with the top reasons being that they are too expensive, music can be streamed for free, and that people don’t think they’ll use the service enough to justify the cost.

Those reasons reminded me of a recent blog post by music industry analyst Mark Mulligan who argues that the “all-you-can-eat” access to an enormous catalog of music provided by services like Spotify and Apple Music is actually more than what the average person wants. He says these services and the roughly $10/month price combination “constrains appeal to the aficionados and the upper end of the mainstream.”

Instead, Mulligan suggests that “mainstreamers” may be more interested in subscriptions costing $3 or $4 a month for access to apps serving up genre-specific apps that feature “a dozen curated playlists, a handful of featured albums and a couple of radio stations.”

I find myself agreeing with Mulligan, in spirit, if not in absolute specifics. Although I happen to really enjoy the deep catalog of my music subscription, I also recognize that I am–and always have been–an outlier. I’m a music nerd and and audiophile (a deadly combo, I know), who also owns thousands of CDs and hundreds of vinyl LPs. I suspect there are millions like me in the US, but probably not enough to make even just one of the paid music services float.

While ten years ago I might have bought several full-price albums a month–adding up to much more than the cost of a Spotify subscription–most people probably bought only a handful a year. Today that person–who may only buy individual song downloads now–may be willing to spend about $50 a year on music, which is roughly equivalent to what her music budget has always been. By that logic a $4/month service seems about right.

Where I differ with Mulligan is his supposition that people would be happy with genre-specific apps. My experience and intuition is that most music listeners like more than one genre of music. Someone who likes Taylor Swift probably likes country and pop music, for instance.

However, taking a cue from over-the-top video services, this average listener might be interested in something that is more like Netflix or Hulu. That is, a service that offers a much smaller catalog of music than Spotify or Apple Music, but which crosses genres and periods. Neither video service offers up a comprehensive catalog of films or television available in the U.S., but each has a decent mix of new releases, combined with classics and obscurities.

I could imagine a music service that emphasized on demand access to selected tracks and singles from the Billboard 200 for folks who want to keep up on what’s popular across genres, or a separate one that focuses on the Hot 100, for listeners most interested in the hottest tracks. Providing immediate access to these tracks–combined with a curated selection of older tunes–might be just the thing for listeners who would otherwise listen to contemporary hit radio, but would like more control, without commercials.

What I don’t know is if such a service would actually be less expensive to operate than a Spotify. However, it may just be a numbers game–if Spotify could offer more constrained, but cheaper, services to many more subscribers the influx of cash might might be plenty to offset the additional streaming hours. Such service could have listening limits, capping a subscriber at maybe 20 hours a week or 80 hours a month, which would also keep royalty costs in line with the subscription price.

Adding curated playlists and stations to the mix would probably also help attract listeners, though I think on demand access is critical feature. We have to imagine someone spending much of their music budget with streaming, and one of the main reasons to buy a track is to listen to it whenever you want. So even if the new service doesn’t offer every track someone might want, as long as it offers enough songs that someone wants to hear, whenever she wants, a $3 or $4 monthly price still will be attractive. It may also be a better gateway to an unlimited plan down the line.

Funnily enough, as I was writing this it occurred to me that I was sort of describing a service that already exists. Amazon Prime Music offers a much smaller catalog than Spotify or Pandora, but available on-demand and ad-free. It does feature new albums, along with curated genre and thematic playlists drawn from that catalog. I’ve described it as the bubble gum in the pack of baseball cards, since it’s unlike anyone subscribes to Amazon prime to get the music–they’re more typically after the free 2-day shipping.

Amazon Prime costs $99 a year, but also includes commercial free streaming movies and TV and free Kindle books. At just $20 less than a year of Spotify or Apple Music that hardly makes Amazon Prime Music a bargain on its own. However, it might be a hit as a stand-alone service if it were available for half as much.

Of course, it could also be the case that most people are satisfied with streaming songs from YouTube and putting up with ads from Spotify’s and Pandora’s free tiers. But if Spotify actually follows through in imposing rumored limits on its free commercial-supported tier–like reserving new releases only for paid subscribers–then the low-priced, limited access service starts looking pretty good.

Let me know what you think. Do you pay for a streaming music service? Would you pay for a cheaper service, even if it had a slimmer selection? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The post Digital Watch: If Streaming Music Were Cheaper, but Limited, Would Listeners Buy? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Apple held its perennial fall unveiling today, and amongst the updated products on display were a new, bigger iPad Pro and a fresh Apple TV. Of course, you can listen to internet radio on an iPad, though I don’t see how the iPad Pro will be any better for that application than any other model.

I am a little intrigued by the new Apple TV, which is a product that has sorely needed a refresh for a while. Though I’m now a Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV user (and I owe you a review of Fire TV radio apps), before getting those devices I considered Apple TV several times, but was put off by how infrequently Apple updates it, apparently treating it as a “hobby” rather than an important product.

Apple has provided a pretty nice ecosystem for listening to internet radio and podcasts via iTunes on MacBooks and iMacs for quite some time. Apple TV has shipped with the Radio app pretty much since the beginning of the product line, which brings in streaming stations in addition to Apple’s own iTunes Radio. It also features a dedicated podcasts app.

Frustratingly for current Apple TV owners, up to now there has been no direct access to Beats 1 Radio. The new version of this set-top device adds Apple Music, which includes Beats 1. Though I haven’t seen the new device yet, I presume and hope that Apple retains the Radio app, too. At the same time, a new App Store means that third-party radio apps should become available, potentially expanding the range of audio entertainment options.

At a starting price of $149, the new Apple TV is a much pricier option for living room internet radio compared to comparable competitors like Roku. Of course, Apple TV is much more than radio (as all these set-top devices are), so the added gaming and streaming video features are likely the principal selling points, along with the tight integration with other Apple devices and services, like Apple Music.

I don’t think I’ll be buying a new Apple TV, but I’d be glad to take it for a test ride and review if one somehow crosses my path.

John Anderson on DTS/iBiquity Deal

HD Radio historian and expert John Anderson has weighed in on DTS’s acquisition of iBiquity last week. He observes that the sale likely saved iBiquity from “a bailout (presumably from broadcasters) or trusteeship.”

He also notes that most of the research and development on HD Radio has come from broadcasters, which leads him to wonder, “Will these and other development-partners continue to throw resources into a system now held by a non-broadcast company with its own Wall Street presence?”

Anderson doesn’t foresee any major changes in the near term, since iBiquity is retaining its current corporate structure, though he does spell out some best and worst-case scenarios. I recommending checking out his post.

HD Radio Adoption Rate Is Like Color TV?

Speaking of HD Radio, Radio Magazine talked with the recently retired SVP of engineering for CBS Radio, Glynn Walden, who has been a long-time advocate of that technology. He compared the slow adoption of that technology to that of the adoption rates of FM radio in the 1950s and color TV in the 1960s, which each took well more than a decade to catch on. It’s an interesting parallel, though I also think that technologies are adopted a much more rapid rate now, more than fifty years after color TV’s debut.

Comparing HD to FM is like comparing touch-tone dialing to smartphones. Touch tone was introduced in 1963 and it wasn’t widely used until the breakup of Ma Bell in the 1980s. Whereas the first modern smartphone (Palm Treo 650) was arguably introduced in 2004, leading to 50% adoption rate just a decade later.

Consumers generally buy, upgrade and replace their technology more often than they did fifty years ago, in part because it’s all much cheaper in real dollars than it was then. HD Radio hasn’t been adopted as quickly as smartphones because it doesn’t offer significant upgrades over regular broadcast–especially on FM–and those upgrades, like additional channels, are not as easy to access because of the compromises of squeezing HD into the existing analog radio bands.

As smartphones show, a new consumer technology platform really shouldn’t take more than a decade to find wide adoption. That seemed like a reasonable span of time in the 1960s, or even the 1980s. But in the post-DVD era (at that time the most quickly adopted consumer electronics platform in history) HD Radio’s time to adoption is glacial and more indicative of fundamental flaws than anything else.

The post Digital Watch: Is the New Apple TV Your Next Internet Radio? Is HD Radio Adoption Like Color TV’s 50 Years Ago? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

TuneIn Radio has been kind of a deceptively quiet player in the online radio wars that have heated to a boiling since Apple introduced Beats 1 Radio at the end of June. Yet the service claims a user base of 60 million monthly active users who clearly find value in the service’s single-platform access to millions of streaming radio stations and programs.

While TuneIn has been generating income with banner display ads and pre-roll audio ads ahead of streams, yesterday the company added a paid subscription tier, TuneIn Premium. That service adds access to live Major League Baseball games, European soccer in the Barclays Premier League and Bundesliga, 40,000 audiobooks and over 600 commercial-free music stations. TuneIn Premium costs $7.99 in the US, $8.99 in Canada and £5.99 in the UK.

600 Commercial-Free Stations – Where Do They Come From?

The sheer number of music stations certainly got my attention. TuneIn says it struck deals with “the largest radio broadcasters,” to get the stations. Immediately I wondered how the company got big US commercial broadcasters like iHeartMedia and Cumulus to strip commercials out of their live stream. The answer is, they didn’t.

Instead, most of those 600 stations come from established internet-only broadcasters like 977 Radio, JazzRadio.com and RockRadio.com. Even if curated by humans, playback on all those stations is automated, which means the ads are inserted programmatically. That means each broadcaster just had to set up a separate, possibly identical, stream that just leaves out the commercials. TuneIn also offers its own premium genre stations.

So you won’t yet find commercial-free versions of your local terrestrial stations. A TuneIn spokesperson told me that the company plans to add terrestrial stations “in the coming months,” but was not able to speculate about how they would strip out ads. Ads in most commercial radio streams are also automated, but it would seem that live reads would be more difficult to tackle.

Listening to TuneIn Premium

I took TuneIn Premium for a spin using both a desktop browser and the mobile app to see what you get for your eight bucks a month.

First off, TuneIn Premium is not a great deal if all you’re after is baseball, since MLB.com sells its audio-only streaming service for just $20 a year. Clearly, TuneIn is hoping that everything available in Premium as a package might make it an attractive alternative to satellite radio or even an Audible audiobooks-only subscription, both of which cost a little more.

The value proposition for the music stations is a little less clear. While 600 is a lot of stations, there’s a lot of overlap within genres, where the difference between some stations isn’t obvious. For instance, under the Alternative Rock genre there are three “90s Alternative” stations–how does a listener know which to pick? On other hand, some genres, like Classical, have a paucity of options.

Also, these are strict streaming stations without any personalization or interactivity. There are no skips or giving songs the thumbs-down. That doesn’t matter if the stations themselves are well curated, and indeed that’s what TuneIn sees as a selling point.

Premium Sound Quality?

One of the advantages to paid subscriptions to competitors like Spotify and Pandora is that they deliver higher sound quality. I wanted to see if TuneIn Premium means you get premium sound quality. As far as I can tell, the answer is “no.” Now, this doesn’t mean there aren’t some good sounding stations available with Premium–there are. But most of these are delivered at the same quality as the broadcasters’ commercial, non-Premium streams.

JazzRadio.com offers a choice of 128kbps AAC and 320kbps MP3 streams, and both sound quite nice and are amongst the highest quality I’ve encountered on TuneIn Premium. Other broadcasters with premium stations like RockRadio.com and Radio Tunes also offer 128 kbps AAC and 320 kbps MP3 streams which all sounded better than the typical streaming terrestrial commercial station, both when listening over headphones and speakers.

I was a bit surprised to see that TuneIn’s own premium stations stream at much lower quality: 64kbps AAC and 128 kbps MP3. I find those to be the very lowest acceptable bitrates for music, better suited to background than for more focused listening. Over headphones distortion in the high end, especially with cymbals and other percussion, was very obvious and hard to ignore on TuneIn’s Infinite Indie and Classic Hip-Hop stations. Listening over speakers at low volume tamed these artifacts enough, but they became harder to ignore when I turned it up.

That’s a shame, because I enjoyed the mix of music on TuneIn’s own stations. Over the course of several hours I heard no repetition and a pleasingly broad array of tracks. I particularly like the balance of familiar favorites and more eclectic selections on the Punk Rock Radio station. For me a TuneIn Premium subscription would be much more attractive if all the commercial-free streams were streamed at higher bitrates.

The absolutely worst quality I encountered came from Big R Radio streams, which I truly found unlistenable. It sounds like Big R is using processing similar to big market top 40 broadcast stations, only they turn it up to 11. No matter which of Big R’s stations I tuned to, it was significantly louder and piercing than whatever station preceded it. Over headphones I had to take them off immediately because it was painful–and I didn’t even have the volume up loud. Big R offered up the opposite of a premium experience.

I spent less time with the sports channels and audiobooks. They definitely sounded compressed, though no worse than what I hear from the talk channels on satellite radio. I’m not a big audiobook listener, but could see how having access to them is a nice extra. However, it would be even better if you could download them for playback on road trips or airplanes when you have limited or no internet.

Interesting but Not Essential

On the whole TuneIn Premium is an interesting offering. Still, if I were going to subscribe to a commercial-free streaming radio service I would probably consider Pandora One first, at only $4.99 a month. For curated stations I would also take a hard look at Slacker Radio Plus at only $3.99. TuneIn Premium would only jump to the top of the list if the baseball and audiobooks were high priorities–but they’re not for me.

I am looking forward to seeing how TuneIn Premium brings terrestrial commercials stations on board, and how they get made commercial-free.

The post Digital Watch: Reviewing the New TuneIn Premium appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There has been quite a bit of action on the digital and internet radio front this past week, including more terrestrial radio in smartphones, the sign-off of a streaming radio service, and indications that free on-demand streaming music may have reached its peak, ready for an inevitable decline.

T-Mobile to Activate FM in Smartphones

FM radio chips will be lighting up in another carrier’s Android phones. Just a couple of weeks after AT&T’s announcement that it would activate the FM radios on new phones in 2016, the always colorful T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced on Twitter that his company will do likewise:

Hey @NextRadioApp – We heard you! We’re saying yes to FM chip and will push our OEM partners to support! #sayyestoFMchip

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) August 14, 2015

That leaves Verizon–the biggest wireless carrier–as the last holdout amongst the top four.

Though T-Mobile’s timeline isn’t known, Legere’s clearly indicates that the company will support the NextRadio listening app.

Mad Genius Bows Out

Less than a year ago I wrote about Mad Genius radio, an ad-free subscription streaming radio service that touted how it would pay much higher royalties to songwriters and artists than ad-supported services. When Mad Genius debuted founder Eric Neumann told me, “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.”

It turns out the market for the streaming music dollar was still too competitive for Mad Genius to reach that point of profitability. Neumann told RAIN News that the service is shutting down on Thursday. He said that despite the company’s best efforts their efforts, there was “so much noise that we are virtually unknown and untried.” Also, the company was unable to scare up investments because of the perception that the field was already too crowded by big players like Google, Apple, Pandora and Spotify.

Rdio Adds a Vowel with Terrestrial Radio

If you use the global #4 streaming music service Rdio now you have access to an additional 500 terrestrial broadcast stations owned by Cumulus, the second largest radio operator in the US and a Rdio stakeholder. Though I can’t imagine any Rdio user would object to having live radio streams available through the app, it’s also doubtful there was any strong demand for the feature either, since Rdio’s primary allure is on-demand listening, like Spotify.

Cumulus stations like San Francisco’s KFOG and Chicago’s WKQX are still available on competitor iHeartRadio’s app and platform, and the stations can still be streamed from their own websites. So it’s not like Rdio has any exclusivity to Cumulus stations.

Besides not having to switch apps to listen to live radio, the other main convenience is the ability to bookmark songs to add to a playlist. Paid users can download the songs for offline playback. That might have been a killer feature a decade ago, but now that the internet is primary medium used to discover new music, the added value of tagging songs as they’re played live is limited.

The Inevitable Decline of Free Streaming Music?

Rdio started out as a subscription-only service, but then added a free ad-supported tier two years ago, calling upon the ad sales expertise of its partner Cumulus. Obviously this was to keep up with Spotify and Pandora which gained market dominance with their own ad-supported free tiers.

However, the lower royalty rates paid to artists from the ad-supported services had brought them more scrutiny and criticism in the last year. More importantly, the major labels are pushing for more money, which may be leading Spotify to consider putting stricter limits on its free service.

A report by Digital Music News says that Spotify may be gating some music releases so that they are only available to paid subscribers, or only available to free users for short windows. Spotify’s contracts with the US major labels run out October 1, so the pressure is on.

While I certainly have enjoyed access to free, ad-supported streaming, in the back of mind I’ve also thought that the clock is ticking on the model. While the shift to streaming music services was inevitable, and the ad-supported model helped to jump-start its adoption in the US, the revenue limits for artists and labels have made it a bit of a devil’s bargain. Yet, because the streaming platforms, like Spotify, need the labels’ cooperation for continued success, the labels now have some leverage. This is no doubt aided by Apple Music and TIDAL both offering only paid subscription services.

Ad-supported on-demand streaming music isn’t going away, but I won’t be surprised if the free tiers become more limited, not just in terms of catalog but also in terms of listening hours. Personally, I think it’s reasonable to pay for on-demand access to music without ads, as long as both the terms and the sound quality are reasonable. Once I found a service that met those qualifications I subscribed, and I don’t mind paying that bill one bit.

The post Digital Watch: The Inevitable Decline of Free Streaming Music; FM in More Smartphones; Mad Genius Bows Out appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Call me late to the party, but I’ve finally fallen in love with Bluetooth audio streaming. At this point most readers should be familiar with Bluetooth, which facilitates pretty easy wireless connections between devices of all kinds. In this case I’m specifically discussing using Bluetooth to send audio from a computer or mobile device to headphones, speaker or stereo.

Now, Bluetooth has been around a good decade, and those little Bluetooth headsets have been hanging off people’s ears for nearly as long. I even picked one up a few years ago to make it easier to listen to podcasts while walking or riding my bike without getting tangled up in cables.

But aside from that convenience, I otherwise disregarded the development of other Bluetooth audio devices. I had a perfectly nice rechargeable iPhone dock that I used on my patio, and was otherwise happy to plug my smartphones into stereos and speakers via a headphone cable. Sure, it could be a pain when I misplaced the cable or the connection got weak and scratchy, but nothing I couldn’t prepare for or deal with.

In the last year, however, it seems like Bluetooth speakers went from being pricey toys to becoming near commodity items. On top of that, a number of companies started offering higher-quality powered speakers and Bluetooth receivers to plug into your stereo or existing speakers, all promising a step up in fidelity from the previous generation devices.

Sound quality was my biggest point of resistance. Until recently the Bluetooth headphones I’d heard were adequate for podcasts and phone calls, but pretty lackluster with music. Listening in the car was a much better experience. Although Bluetooth uses lossy compression to deliver audio, in the car with road noise and other sonic intrusions I really don’t notice much difference compared to a wired connection, and what difference I do hear is fleeting mostly not bothersome.

What finally convinced me was driving some rental cars and riding in friends’ cars with built-in Bluetooth. Not having to remember a cable, or deal with the beat-up cable already attached to a rental, immediately ramped up the convenience by a factor of ten. So does the fact that most in-dash stereos control over your mobile device so you don’t have to futz with it. Plus, you can leave your phone in your pocket, bag or glovebox, rather than sitting out, and sliding around, so you can keep the cable connected.

That experience drove me to check out small portable Bluetooth speakers, and I picked one up online for a song that’s about the size of a baseball. What sound quality compromises exist are mostly due to the size of the speaker, and not the Bluetooth technology. Being able to take it just about anywhere I want a little music or entertainment without messing with cables or power outlets pretty much makes up for that.

As I recently was planning some upgrades and changes in my home stereo I was also considering adding a high-fidelity Bluetooth receiver. Auditioning equipment at a local stereo store, I settled on a new stereo preamplifier for my system. Looking closes at its specs, I realized that it includes a free Bluetooth adapter that plugs into a USB port on the front panel. Score!

After getting the preamp installed at home I gave the Bluetooth function a whirl, playing both some podcasts and music on my smartphone. Even though iPhones don’t support the higher quality aptX Bluetooth standard, I found the fidelity to be pleasing and quite good enough for talk programs, internet radio or background listening. Since I play digital music using a Sonos Connect I doubt I’ll use Bluetooth for music too often, but it’s nice for podcasts, continuing to listen to something I started on my mobile device, or for when a visiting friend wants to share a song on her phone.

I’m not anywhere near ready to make a Bluetooth driven stereo my main system, especially for critical listening. But the convenience of Bluetooth is undeniable for portable listening, the car, or travel. For me, Bluetooth has helped me listen to more podcasts and internet radio as I do housework, spend time outside, or stay at hotels.

Author Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Therefore I declare that Bluetooth is magic!

The post Digital Watch: Bluetooth Is Magic for Podcasts and Internet Radio 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.

Yesterday was the 20th birthday of the MP3. As historian Brian McCullough tells it on his Internet History Podcast, on July 14, 1995 an email made the rounds at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany declaring, “everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3!” At that moment the files containing compressed audio that would go on to utterly change music gained their name.

In the most recent episode of his fantastic show, McCullough talks with Karlheinz Brandenburg, whose PhD research into perceptual audio encoding birthed the MP3, although Brandenburg is reluctant to accept the title of “father” of the format. MP3 had two contemporaneous competitors in the nascent audio compression world of the mid–90s, and ultimately became predominant because the Fraunhofer Institute where Brandenburg worked and which owned the patent to the underlying technology first allowed the format to propagate in freely distributed shareware software. This catalyzed its adoption by hobbyists and programmers, leading to MP3 being supported by major software companies, like Microsoft, which paid royalties for every copy of Windows that could play back .mp3 files.

While I’ve recently advocated for internet radio to move on from MP3 encoding, I still have enormous respect for the format and the revolution in digital audio unleashed by its invention and adoption. Brandenburg notes that in the mid–90s it was a major feat of programming prowess to create software that could actually play back an MP3 file in real time on the computers of the day. The computing power necessary to handle MP3s was one reason that a competing codec–MPEG 1 Layer 2, often known as .mp2–was adopted for many commercial digital audio applications born in the 1990s, including DVDs and the Public Radio Satellite System, since .mp2 required less horsepower to play back in real time.

I can remember downloading my first .mp2 and .mp3 files in 1996, along with the software to play them, all over a 56kbps modem. I was impressed that a three-minute track stereo track encoded in .mp2 required just less than ten minutes to download, and sounded really good.

Unfortunately for me, my poor one year-old Windows 95 PC was brought to its knees trying to play the .mp3, resulting in choppy audio that eventually just crashed the player app. I had to actually convert the .mp3 to an uncompressed .wav file–a process that also required several minutes–to hear what was encoded in that mysterious file. Then, just a few years and one new PC later, I, and thousands of other internet users, would be actively trading and downloading MP3 files to play back, without our computers even breaking a sweat.

Despite strong competition from the likes of Real Audio and Windows Media Audio, MP3 ended up victorious as the default standard for internet radio, too. Though well into the first decade of the 21st century it was still often necessary to have multiple player apps installed in order to enjoy the full range of stations on the ’net, by the end of that decade that nonsense was mostly eschewed in favor of MP3, and its more sophisticated successor, AAC. Though MP3 didn’t necessarily sound any better than its competitors (and it sure didn’t sound worse), the format was less proprietary and comparatively easier to license, making for a wider variety of servers and players that weren’t tied to a particular operating system or technology.

I also learned in the Internet History Podcast that Brandenburg, the MP3 daddy, also shares responsibility for AAC. That fact makes me feel a little better about dissing the MP3 in favor of the better-sounding AAC. Since they both come from the same family tree, preferring AAC is like choosing an iPhone 6 over an iPhone 3g–the technological superiority is hard to argue against.

Despite the flaws of lossy compression like MP3, this technology made possible internet radio, podcasting, internet calling like Skype, satellite radio, and just about every application that transmits audio over a digital connection. Although today’s broadband connections permit us to receive lossless digital audio, which I prefer, lossy compressed audio still has a place where bandwidth and storage are still at a premium. Don’t get me wrong–I am not against MP3, AAC or other lossy compression formats. I just see no benefit in using them in situations where the constraints that birthed them are no longer relevant.

To learn even more about the MP3 and its place in twentieth century communication history, I highly recommend Jonathan Sterne’s book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Although an academic tome, Sterne’s prose is approachable and clear–it doesn’t require a technical background to understand at all.

Happy Birthday MP3!

The post Digital Watch: Happy Birthday MP3! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

After dedicating two consecutive posts–and part of this week’s podcast–to Apple’s Beats 1 Radio I’m taking a little break before reviewing Apple Music. So this week I have just a few stories of interest to online and digital radio.

Chicago to Tax Subscription Radio Services

First, is a truly puzzling one from Chicago, where the city’s Department of Finance has ruled that sales tax applies to “electronically delivered amusements.” This apparently includes online music and radio services like Spotify and Pandora, along with Netflix, and presumably would also cover SiriusXM, since satellite is still electronic, even if you don’t subscribe to the streaming option. It’s a consumer use tax, but according to The Verge, Netflix is one company figuring out how to include the charge in its customer billing.

Of course, this only applies to services and stations that charge–9% of $0 is still $0. However, it does seem like just another little speed bump in the road for subscription based music and radio in Chicago. As The Verge also reports, there are already lawyers lining up to challenge the legality of the tax, arguing that it violates the Federal Telecommunications Act and the Internet Tax Freedom Act.

Voting Open for Online Radio Awards

On a more positive note, Mixcloud and the International Radio Festival are teaming up to sponsor the 2nd Online Radio Awards. Awards will go to the best talk show in eight categories from business to sports, the best music show across 11 different genres, including ambient/chillout, jazz and world music, and the best overall station in each of five global regions. A best overall station and show will also be named.

Stations and hosts can nominate themselves for inclusion, and awards are decided by listener and industry panel judges. Nominations and voting are now open. Winners will be flown to Zurich for the Festival, August 14 to 30.

At last year’s first Online Radio Awards London’s NTS Radio won best overall station, and also London-based Solid Steel radio show won for best overall show.

The International Radio Festival has been around since 2010, with events tailored for both producers and listeners. Mixcloud is a platform that lets radio stations, podcasters and DJs upload and share music mixes for streaming–but not downloading. It’s popular with many producers because Mixcloud covers music licensing fees.

RAIN Internet Radio Awards Accepting Nominations

The Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) will hold its sixth RAIN Internet Radio Awards in September at its RAIN Summit Atlanta. Nominations are now open in six categories: best streaming broadcast station, best overall digital strategy, best single-stream webcaster, international excellence in audio, best podcast series, and best overall online radio service.

The RAIN Awards are much more industry focused than the Online Radio Awards, which are voted on primarily by listeners. RAIN Awards nominations are open until July 24.

The post Digital Watch: Chicago Taxes Spotify; Internet Radio Awards appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Yesterday I shared my initial impressions of Apple’s Beats 1 Radio, and why I think it’s decidedly global orientation is its most interesting quality. Now I turn a critical ear to the actual programming and sound quality.

Originally I planned to write a review of Apple Music for today’s feature. But after spending additional time with Beats 1, I felt like I needed to write a follow-up examining how even if it is interesting, it’s not otherwise all that great. For all the excitement about Apple Music, at heart it really is just another streaming music service that doesn’t differ very much from all of its competitors. Beats 1 is receiving more attention, in part because this offering actually does differentiate Apple’s music services from most of its competitors. So I think it deserves a deeper dissection.

Here’s the thing: even if Beats 1 were on the broadcast dial near me I would still find it interesting, but not at all outstanding. That’s because for all the hype and somewhat wider playlist, it only seems a bit exceptional when compared against the intensely poor-to-mediocre state of American commercial pop radio.

Beats 1 Radio: Safe as Milk

For all the celebrities, and all the hype, Beats 1 still hews to a very conservative framework that emphasizes the mainstream and heavy rotation. On its launch day the station aired promos making a big deal about debuting a new single from Pharrell Williams, which included sound bytes of the multi-talented artist gushing about how thrilled he was to receive the backing of Beats 1.

Someone with absolutely no knowledge of the last five years of popular music might be forgiven for assuming that Pharrell is some new, up-and-coming artist, giddy from the excitement of having his star chosen to shine. Of course, the reality is that he’s a proven 11-time Grammy-award winning singer, songwriter and producer. Talented as he may be, Beats 1 promoting Pharrell’s new single on launch day is–to steal a phrase from Captain Beefheart–safe as milk.

While I enjoyed the variety of genres and sounds that exceeds that of typical American radio, over the course of about four hours of listening the station’s heavy rotation reared its ugly head, and became annoying. By the time I heard songs like The Weeknd’s new single “Can’t Feel My Face” four times before I got tired of the repetition and turned it off. Sure, that’s no worse than your typical CHR stations–but it sure ain’t better enough, either.

Cynical Censorship

During DJ Zane Lowe’s introductory set he enthused over playing a track from Dr. Dre’s seminal G-Funk album “The Chronic.” He complained about the record being markedly absent from streaming music services up to now as he talked over the unmistakeable opening beats of “Let It Ride.” Dr. Dre, of course, is a co-founder of Beats Music, which Apple acquired to create Apple Music, and is now an Apple employee. Consequently, “The Chronic” is now an Apple Music exclusive, though other online radio stations are free to play any song on the album, provided its not on-demand.

I was a little disappointed, however, when I realized I was hearing the heavily edited radio single. At one level I understand how Apple probably wants to keep Beats 1 as family friendly as possible. However, given the lyrical content of most pop music–including this track–this is an extremely flimsy and translucent fig leaf. Bleeping the f-word in “Let It Ride” is like watching a television edit of Pulp Fiction that dubs in “freaking” and “crud” but leaves all the violence intact (and I’ve seen that version).

There’s nothing particularly “family friendly” about that approach either. It only barely meets the already flimsy version of non-indecent required of FCC licensees. But, Beats 1 isn’t broadcast, and doesn’t have any obligation to meet that standard. If “decency” is a sincere concern, then one might argue that it entails more than just some f-words. Instead, I’ll offer that apparently adhering to the FCC standard of decency is cynical and unnecessary. If there’s a fan of Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” who hasn’t heard the album in all its profanity-laden glory I’d like to meet her and offer her a pair of magical golden Beats by Dre headphones that filter out every naughty utterance known to humanity.

Nothing New

Even if Beats 1 Radio as a whole isn’t cynical, it does fall far short of revolutionary, or even exceptional. SiriusXM subscribers have had access to multiple stations full of Beats 1 style music for over a decade–most without any useless broadcast-style language editing. Satellite radio has been featuring celebrity DJs across all genres the entire time, even offering many–like Bob Dylan–their own channels.

Slacker Radio is another service that is built on curation, again with many popular music artists and celebrities invited to program stations and programs. In fact, looking across the streaming music service landscape you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t offer some of the features of Beats 1, even if not all in one live streaming station.

Any argument for Beats 1 exceptionalism pretty much falls apart when you look at the wider world of online radio. There are dozens upon dozens of stations that offer carefully curated variety, live hosts and even celebrity DJs all day long. Just looking at the US, I can name some outstanding non-commercial stations with strong online presences that qualify: KEXP, KCRW, WFMU, and The Current. Sure maybe their celebrities are a little smaller and genre-specific, but they matter to these stations’ listeners. And then there’s online-only operations like the recently launched Dash Radio, helmed by well-known DJ Skee, with stations curated by artists like Snoop Dogg and Odd Future, along with the resurrected East Village Radio.

Low Fidelity

If I was disappointed by Beats 1 choosing to censor songs, I was even more disappointed by the sound quality. Listening to the station on my iPhone 5 using both earbuds and speakers I found the fidelity to be about a match for most commercial pop stations on iHeartRadio–that’s not a compliment. The dynamic range is highly compressed, and I heard lots of artifacting in the high end giving too many tracks a shimmery sound that generally indicates lower bitrates, or several stages of compressions wherein an MP3 gets played and then recompressed to another MP3 or AAC stream. It made me wonder if the DJs are using a full uncompressed CD-quality source (or even actual CDs) or compressed tracks from the iTunes store.

Now, I’ve certainly heard worse sounding internet radio, but there’s no way I would call Beats 1 high fidelity. That’s somewhat ironic, given that Apple has always touted sound quality as a virtue of its music offerings, and Beats by Dre headphones are supposed to offer enhanced fidelity. Using a pair of Beats, or any decent headphone, to listen to Beats 1 would be a disappointing experience.

As a control I listened on Apple Music to some tracks I heard on Beats 1, including “Let It Ride” and “Can’t Feel My Face.” Hands down, the Apple Music tracks sounded tremendously better, with no glaring compression artifacts or high end distortion. Even though these were all pop songs with already compressed dynamics, it was a much more pleasant listening experience on Apple Music.

My conclusion is that Beats 1 suffers from two constraints. First, it’s clear that the station uses the kind of heavy-handed processing used by most big pop stations, which makes the station jump out when scanning the dial, but is fatiguing to listen to for hours at a time. Second, I’m pretty sure Beats 1 streams at a pretty low bitrate, adding to the distortion and degrading sound quality. This is probably to save bandwidth and costs, since Apple is streaming the station out worldwide. Nevertheless, it’s still a disappointment.

Not Much of a Threat

Even with the backing of Apple, it’s hard to see Beats 1 Radio as much more than a curiosity. I doubt it will become a serious to rival Pandora. Instead, after the newness wears off, I suspect interest in Beats 1 will subside. As I said yesterday, the service isn’t much of a threat to any truly independent internet radio, though it does pose a reasonable alternative to listening to any US CHR station online through a platform like iHeartRadio or CBS’s Radio.com. However, for the moment those platforms are girded by offering a wider variety of formats.

On the one hand I kind of wish Beats 1 were more audacious and boundary-pushing. On the other, I’m kind of glad it isn’t, since the service already benefits from Apple’s market power to put it on millions of mobile devices by fiat. While I do use Apple products in my work, I’m not a fanboy, cheering on the company’s dominance over every arena it enters. I prefer diversity and a media landscape that isn’t consolidated into an oligopoly.

On the bright side, perhaps Beats 1 will function as a kick in the pants to the otherwise moribund state of American commercial radio online.

And maybe Snoop Dogg will give up the chronic.

The post Digital Watch: Apple’s Beats 1 Radio Is Safe as Milk appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Apple Music raised the hackles of musicians–especially independent artists and those signed to independent labels–this week. That conflict highlights the brewing storm over the future of free music–that is, music that listeners don’t have to pay for directly to hear. As nearly all players struggle to make money from music, I argue that independent non-commercial radio–terrestrial and online–represent two bright spots for musicians and listeners alike.

Apple stepped in it when the company decided that it would not pay royalties for any music streamed during a user’s three-month free trial of the new Apple Music service. In essence, it seemed like Apple was saying, “if we don’t get paid, neither do you.”

That policy went down like a lead zeppelin, causing many independent labels to hold off on signing contracts to offer their music through Apple Music. Apple didn’t seem much moved until the Taylor Swift spoke up last weekend. She published an open letter explaining that she’ll keep her newest album off Apple Music and that she finds Apple’s decision not to pay up during the trials to be “shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.”

She went on to say that she wasn’t withholding for her own sake, but for the new and young artists who “will not be paid for (their) success” or “thought that royalties from that would get them out of debt… Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.”

When the Billboard chart-topping winner of seven Grammys speaks, apparently Apple listens. Apple very quickly pulled an about-face late Sunday night, with Apple VP Eddy Cue tweeting that “Apple Music will pay for artist streaming, even during customer’s free trial period.” Following this several independent label groups announced they would be signing on to Apple Music, including Worldwide Independent Network and Beggars Group.

In a blog post Future of Music Coalition CEO Casey Rae praised Swift, giving her a “high-five.” He also observed that Apple doesn’t “even need music at this point, apart from the brand benefit. So it’s pretty significant that they decided to change their policy. This will likely have a ripple effect and may end up impacting how ‘free’ is perceived on other platforms.”

It’s been sixteen years since Napster debuted, introducing a generation of internet users to abundant free music, and nineteen years since the Telecommunication Act of 1996 lifted national radio ownership limits creating a rushing wave of consolidation followed by a crushing of weight of debt on top of the country’s largest station owners. These two factors radically changed the relationship between artists, radio and listeners, taking us to where we are today.

The only thing that seems clear is that the present proliferation of free music is unsustainable. In the end I’d guess that listeners are going to have to start paying more in subscription fees to hear the music they choose, or tolerate even more ads and interruptions on nearly every non-subscription tier or platform, from Spotify and YouTube to Pandora and commercial radio.

Non-commercial broadcast radio and independent internet stations may be two shelters in this storm. One reason is that these services tend to play a much wider variety of music than their commercial brethren, offering tremendously more exposure and promotion to artists in exchange for their broadcasts.

Another reason is that non-commercial and independent stations also tend to have closer relationships with listeners. These relationships are financial, relying upon listener donations for funding, but without profiting at the expense of artists. The relationship building also carries over to the artists played on stations, who have a chance to build stronger rapport with audiences and new fans.

The Free Music Archive–which we featured on the podcast–is one example of such collaboration, with indie stations and artists coming together to curate great music. Another is KEXP’s recently announced “Under the Needle” series of in-studio performances to be syndicated to non-commercial stations. There are also creative opportunities for artists and stations to cooperate and share revenue with the sale of music, merchandise and concert tickets via their websites, or through offering premium gifts to donors.

This was basic thrust of the “immodest proposal” I published eighteen months ago, suggesting indie artists and stations band together more formally. Though such efforts are still small in scope, the examples I give show that the potential is real.

Listeners benefit because they get to hear often-expertly curated music created by passionate artists. And, perhaps they have access to extra content like live performances, interviews and artist DJ sets, frequently alongside tickets to concerts, festivals and other events. Ideally, listeners forge a relationship with their favorite stations, the DJs and the musicians that encourages them to support the people who provide them with so much great culture and entertainment.

Will every listener buy concert tickets, tell friends about new bands or donate to station pledge drives? No. But the rise in crowdfunding and other fan-supported ventures indicate there’s a good shot that enough listeners will put their money where their ears are.

I’m not arguing that the indie artist – indie station nexus will create stars with popularity and sales equivalent to Taylor Swift. Rather, this is a promising path for a wide middle class of artists and stations that can together achieve sustainability rather than have to gamble with debt and insolvency for the chance to become superstars.

Now is the time for stations to be sure artists know what they can offer, and then also be sure listeners are able to tune in, whenever and wherever they are. That second aspect, of course, is a whole other argument for another day.

The post Digital Watch: Apple Music Conflict Highlights the Problem of Free Music appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Network neutrality is in effect, as of last Friday, June 12. That’s despite a request by major ISPs for the DC Circuit Court to put the FCC’s Open Internet Order on hold until their challenges get their day in court. Not unexpectedly, the DC Circuit denied that motion.

Effectively, the Court wasn’t impressed with the ISPs’ exhortation that they would suffer irreparable harm if the rules took effect, and that there was nothing prima facie defective with the FCC’s rules. That isn’t necessarily a strong indicator that the Open Internet rules will have an easy victory, though it does offer a glimmer of hope for the future of net neutrality.

Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld observes that the decision has some political value with regard to a Congressional Republican-led effort to write alternative open internet legislation that would end the Title II regulation of internet service as a utility, while attempting to still preserve some semblance of network neutrality. If the ISPs had won a stay against the FCC’s rules, that would have given Republicans more leverage to bring Democrats to their side to craft a bill that might get the president’s signature, under the reasoning that weaker a net neutrality law is better than no rules at all. However, now the Republicans will have to either make their bill even more attractive to Democrats, or just throw caution to the wind, make it a political play, and draft something far more partisan that is also more likely to get a veto, if it even passes.

Unless Congressional Republicans are able to pass their own net neutrality bill or successfully squeeze a rider killing Title II protections into a bill the president can’t afford to veto (like this one), challenges to the FCC’s Open Internet Order probably will start being heard in court sometime early next year. In the meantime the ISPs claims that real net neutrality protections will seriously undermine their businesses will be put to the test.

For internet radio listeners it means that wired and mobile broadband internet providers are prohibited from throttling or otherwise inhibiting your ability to access any particular station or service. If it happens, you have the ability to file a complaint with the FCC. At the moment this hasn’t been much of an issue for internet radio services, though it has been an issue with Netflix and video services in the recent past. But as more radio and music platforms start to offer high fidelity and higher-bandwidth services, it’s good to know that the risk of throttling or blocking is now lower.

One question that remains for me is the status of T-Mobile’s “Music Freedom.” This service allows T-Mobile customers to stream selected internet radio and music services without it counting against their data plans. While that sounds like a gift to users, the problem is that not every station or service gets this gift. In fact, as I argued last year, it looks a heck of a lot like discrimination, or an “internet fast lane,” something that should be prohibited under the Open Internet Order.

I’m not even sure the service would be legit if all music services and internet radio stations were given a free pass. That’s because music and radio would still be prioritized over all other traffic, whether its videos or app downloads.

These are the early days of net neutrality, yet. I’ll be watching to see how things pan out.

Apple Music To Serve Fewer Bits than Competitors

As a slight follow-up to my look at Apple Music last week, there has been some investigation into the bitrate and quality that the service will be serving up. Apparently it will stream music at 256 kbps, which is a lower bitrate than the paid subscription levels of its competitors, and also lower than the Beats Music service that Apple Music subsumes, all of which deliver 320 kbps, though in different codecs, like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

Apple has not confirmed what codec it will use, though I would be very surprised if it doesn’t use AAC, since it’s the standard of the iTunes store. However, a tangle of licensing contracts with labels and mismatches between the catalogs of tracks already in iTunes and Beats might make it difficult for Apple to unify a single codec standard.

As I’ve noted, because AAC is a more more modern efficient codec than MP3, I think 256 kbps in AAC is at least equivalent to 320 kbps MP3, if not actually better sounding. Still, 320 kbps AAC should still be just a little better, and provide some additional headroom to eek out more quality.

That said, most iTunes store customers seem perfectly happy with 256kbps files. I’ll admit that I’m hard pressed to hear any difference between iTunes 256kbps AAC files and those coming from any other paid streaming or download service, whether it’s Amazon or Google Play, Spotify or Rdio. Uncompressed Deezer Elite and TIDAL, however, are superior to my ears.

Of course, the proof will be in the listening. We have to wait until June 30 for that to begin.

Radio Survivor, Now in Podcast Form

Though we’re trying to make it hard for you to miss, I would be remiss not to note that we at Radio Survivor have finally launched our own podcast. We’ll certainly be covering issues important to digital and internet radio, including podcasting.

Our first episode has a feature on the Free Music Archive, which provides a valuable service to both musicians who want their music to be heard and shared, and to podcasters and internet stations looking for music unencumbered by high licensing or royalty rates.

We released episode #2 yesterday, where I discuss the DC Circuit’s net neutrality decision and we talk with Sabrina Roach of Brown Paper Tickets about her work supporting low-power FM in the Seattle area:

Please take a listen, then subscribe and rate the show at iTunes. Or subscribe with your favorite podcast listening app using our RSS feed.

The post Digital Watch: Net Neutrality In Effect; Apple Music Delivers Fewer Bits appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Monday Apple announced its much anticipated music service, called, appropriately enough, Apple Music. It essentially integrates Beats Music, which the company acquired last year, more closely with iTunes and iTunes Radio, and adds more celebrity-curated stations and playlists.

Apple Music doesn’t become available until June 30, so nobody has taken it for a spin yet. But looking at the feature list, frankly, the only thing that appears to make it special is that it comes from Apple. That means it will be instantly available on millions of iPhones, iPads and Macs, giving the service an immediate head start over every other streaming music platform. But I fail to see much else that rises above the heap.

It’s main service is on-demand access to some 30 million tracks, just like Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and Rhapsody. Features like artist-curated playlists also are found on other services. Certainly Apple’s deep pocketbooks mean well-known artists like Trent Reznor and Drake are participating, but Jay-Z’s TIDAL has also signed up big-name talent while Slacker has “artist takeover” stations curated by the likes of AWOLNATION, The Black Keys and Reba McEntire.

It’s also difficult to see anything innovative at all in Apple’s “Music Radio” stations, even the flagship “global station,” retaining the Beats name as “Beats 1.” Again, the only unique element is that Beats 1 is curated by three apparently well-known DJs based in LA, New York and London. There are thousands upon thousands of great internet stations out there, with dozens or hundreds curated by popular and famous DJs.

So, really, all Apple is bringing to the party is a service that is available by default on the most popular smartphones and tablets. That also means there’s a little less friction for the iPhone owner to sign up for Apple Music, since she has likely already set up an account with her credit card to buy apps or iTunes tracks.

If Apple Music’s major threat is to big, well-funded platforms like Spotify, Rdio and TIDAL, this begs the question of why Radio Survivor readers should care. The reason is Apple’s market power when it comes to online audio, and what affect it could have on internet radio as a whole, especially independent stations and networks.

For comparison, Apple’s embrace of podcasting, especially bundling its Podcasts app with iOS, helped spur the medium’s growth. It’s not a trivial thing that iTunes provides a pretty level platform for just about any podcast to be found. iTunes may highlight some podcasts and rank the most popular ones, but a surprising number of quirky and independent shows make their way onto the front page.

With Apple Music, the company is exercising this power, only to offer a closed platform. It’s too soon to tell how good, and therefore, how much of a threat the Apple Music stations will actually be. If iTunes Radio is any indicator, the threat level could be very low.

However, it’s easy money to bet that Apple Music Radio will exceed iTunes Radio’s low bar. So the real question is how much variety it offers, and how enjoyable it is to use. Because the on-demand service does not have an ad-supported free tier, this will push more listeners to try and use Music Radio. But, because it will be available free to any iOS user with an Apple ID, it’s likely that it will have commercials. The question is how frequent they are, and how annoying they’ll be. Keep in mind that online radio listeners appear to be less tolerant of ads than terrestrial radio listeners.

The commercial aspect alone reduces the threat, I think, since there are so many great non-commercial and commercial-free stations out there. I reckon a listener who has a favorite station has little incentive to ditch it in favor of Apple’s stations.

The big unknown lies with the thousands, or maybe millions of iPhone owners who don’t already use an internet radio app or platform. Will Apple Music Radio be good enough not only to lure them to listen, but to stay tuned?

In the same way that iTunes is in some ways synonymous with Podcasts, there’s the risk that Apple Music Radio could become synonymous with internet radio for too many people. Though I think that’s still a longshot, such an outcome would be detrimental to the medium as a whole. If Apple’s platform ends up being kind of crappy or too annoying with ads, then that might tarnish internet radio for a lot of new listeners. The more realistic threat is that Apple Music Radio is just good enough to capture millions of casual listeners who won’t be bothered to look for or try other stations.

That said, I’m more inclined to see a rising tide that raises all boats. While I’m certain some percentage of listeners will be happy to stick with whatever Apple Music provides, I think there will always be segment of people who, once they discover the medium, will seek out fresh and novel stations.

Despite being nearly 20 years old, internet radio still only makes up about 11% of all audio listening in US. There’s room for a lot more growth, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Apple can soak it all up.

However, that doesn’t mean we should take our eye off Apple, either. Market power does funny things to companies.

The post Digital Watch: Is Apple Music a Threat to Indie Internet Radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A reporter emailed me the other day and asked me for a comment on Spotify’s announcement that it is going to add podcasts to its lineup of audio offerings. What does this mean, she queried? What is the significance? Suddenly I began to wonder whether anyone will want to listen to podcasts on Spotify. So here’s what I wrote back to her:

“Much of Spotify activity is about playlist construction and/or serendipitous background listening. Will your typical Spotify listener want to interrupt her playlist or stream to suddenly audit some discussion about culture or politics? I’m guessing that the most successful initial podcasts on Spotify will be about music and/or contain many music elements. So perhaps initially effective podcasts will have some curative relationship to the content of individual listeners.

Or course, Spotify could also create a whole subplatform within its mobile, tablet, and web interfaces for podcasts, allowing consumers to leap over to that area for podcasting. But Spotify seems very intent on seeing all its content in integrative terms and deploying it with that philosophy in mind, so this acquisition poses a lot of very tricky questions for the company, I think.”

I suspect that Spotify gets the trickiness of this episode in its development. The whole idea is to figure out what you like/are doing/think/feel at any given moment and suggest content. From Spotify’s announcement earlier this month:

“For the first time, Spotify is adding video clips and audio shows to the music mix. We know there are times in the day you want to switch between music to catch up on the latest news, listen to your favourite podcast or simply watch something fun. And with a stellar range of entertainment to choose from there’s something for everyone. Spotify will suggest video and audio shows for you to watch and learn what you love.”

The experts (self-appointed and official) call this “context.” So the answer to the headline question above is—of course people will listen to podcasts on Spotify. But how many? And an even larger query looms: how many different formats (audio/video/podcasts/playlists/radio streams) can you jam into a smartphone application before it starts to lose its identity and begins to resemble a great big stuffed mobile media potato? I don’t know the answer to that one either, but it does feel like a problem.

The post Will anyone want to listen to podcasts on Spotify? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There is already a pile of lawsuits challenging the FCC’s Open Internet Order waiting for attention from appeals courts. On Wednesday all of the major telecom and cable industry groups made a volley to jumpstart this process.

The U.S. Telecom Association, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the CTIA, AT&T, the American Cable Association, CenturyLink and the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association joined together to file an emergency motion asking the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to block the Commission’s rules before they take effect on June 12. Another option they request is for the court to fast-track their suits.

The joint plaintiffs claim that member companies will experience irreversible “burdens and costs” if the court does not act on its request. They are specifically targeting the reclassification of internet service as a utility under Title II, the provision the industry has been most vocally opposed to.

This emergency request comes on the heels of the FCC denying a petition last Friday, from several of these groups–including AT&T, CenturyLink and the CTIA–to delay implementation of the Open Internet Order.

The FCC has, however, found some allies in the tech community willing to help defend the Open Internet rules. A coalition of companies called the Internet Freedom Business Alliance filed a motion with the DC Circuit Court on Tuesday, asking to intervene in the suits filed against the Commission. The Alliance includes companies like Tumblr, Etsy, Kickstarter and Vimeo.

At the same time, as Kif Leswing writes in the International Business Times, the Commission may soon lose a strong ally in net neutrality if the just-announced Verizon-AOL merger goes through. That’s because AOL has been a mostly strong supporter of net neutrality, going back at least a decade–with some lukewarm lapses during its Time Warner days–while Verizon led the fight against the FCC’s first round of Open Internet rules that led to the drafting of the most recent Order released this spring.

On Capitol Hill there’s a Republican-sponsored bill that would remove Title II classification, while still attempting to implement some semblance of network neutrality. Right now the bill hasn’t gained momentum, still needing more support from Democrats to be viable.

It seems unlikely that the bill will garner that support as long as the FCC’s Order is effect and in court. There is a chance that if the DC Circuit decides to stay Open Internet rules that some Democrats may be enticed to sign on in order to guarantee at least some net neutrality protections go into effect sooner, rather than later. Still, most Democrats may be willing to let the legal process play out, especially since the Title II provisions were drafted in direct response to the DC Circuit’s earlier decision, which said that Title II is, in fact, the most Constitutionally defensible approach to achieving net neutrality.

In case you’re wondering why I’m following the Open Internet Order when our focus is radio, it’s because online broadcasting is part of radio’s future. In particular, independent broadcasters are likely to be protected with network neutrality, ensuring that they’re streams and podcasts remain as accessible as those coming from much larger companies and broadcasters that might otherwise be able to pay for priority access to internet users. Internet radio and podcasting have sparked innovation in radio and audio programming, and I have an interest is seeing that kid of creativity and originality continue to be possible.

The post Digital Watch: ISPs & Telcos Ask Court to Block FCC’s Open Internet Order Immediately 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.

The biggest news in digital and online radio in the last week was the US Patent and Trademark Office invaliding one of the key “podcast patents” which the company Personal Audio had used to sue podcaster Adam Carolla along with larger broadcast companies that also release podcasts. You can read my full report for more details.

The FCC’s Open Internet Order was published in the Federal Register on Monday, which means it’s now open season for lawsuits until June 12. On Tuesday the mobile industry trade group CTIA, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association [NCTA] and the American Cable Association, representing small cable operators, filed suit, as did telecom giant AT&T. All are protesting the reclassification of internet service as a utility under Title II, while the CTIA is also challenging the reclassification of mobile broadband.

The next step is for these cases to be consolidated and assigned to an appeals court, via lottery. The two challenges filed before the Order appeared in the Register were assigned to the DC Circuit, though no further action has been taken. Because they were filed early–the FCC argues prematurely–the Court may dismiss them, or could choose to consolidate them with the four new suits.

There continues to be Congressional mobilization against the Open Internet Order, though it’s not certain that any bill will make it all the way to the president for a signature (that it’s not likely to receive anyway). On Monday Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia introduced a Resolution of Disapproval which would cancel the Order if signed into law. House Judiciary Chariman Bob Goodlatte has signed on, giving it a touch more weight. Though, with 13 sponsors so far, its rather shy of making it to the floor for a full vote. At the same time Michigan Rep. Fred Upton and Oregon Rep. Greg Walden are still working on their own net neutrality legislation to replace the FCC’s Order.

For his part, at his annual address to the National Association of Broadcasters on Wednesday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told the crowd that the Open Internet Order is good for them, too. He said,

“Your goals as an important and innovative public service provider and our Open Internet goals are the same: when you want to offer something over the Internet, no one should stand in your way. Least of all, no one should stand between you and the consumers who will benefit from your service. I believe, by the way, this is equally applicable for both radio and television.”

The post Digital Watch: Four New Lawsuits Challenge Open Internet Order appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Just under eleven months ago pioneering internet radio station East Village Radio shut down after eleven years of operation. Station CEO Frank Prisinzano cited the costs of royalty payments and internet service as making it difficult for East Village Radio to even break even.

Now, the station is poised for a comeback, promising a return to the internet airwaves this month. This time around East Village Radio has the backing of an internet radio startup called Dash Radio. According to a recent Wired feature, Dash is the brainchild of former Los Angeles radio DJ Scott Keeney a/k/a DJ Skee who has the backing of funders like Epic Records CEO L.A. Reid, and even East Village Radio co-founder Peter Ferraro.

Dash has been broadcasting since last August and now serves up 56 stations that don’t look different from the kind of music offerings on SiriusXM, with ones dedicated to genres like funk, classic rock, electronica or hair metal, along with more eclectically curated stations like Odd Future Radio. Dash also will carry a Record Store Day station timed for that annual vinyl celebration on April 18.

Dash is available free on the web and through smartphone apps. The service is also commercial-free. That begs the question of exactly how Dash intends to generate revenue for its investors. I understand that there is or will be paid access to program archives, but I saw no sign of it on the web version. As a listener I won’t complain, though it begs yet another question of how long Dash and its stations–like East Village Radio–can serve listeners for free without some kind of commercial support.

Open Internet Lawsuits Go to the D.C. Circuit

The first lawsuits challenging the FCC’s new Open Internet Order were filed two weeks ago. Because they were filed in two different Appeals Court districts, there was a lottery held to decide which court will hear the cases. The winner turned out to be the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, right in the Commission’s back yard.

On its face this seems like a technicality, but the venue can have real consequences for any appeals case. Some circuits are regarded to lean more liberal or conservative, for instance. Not unsurprisingly, the D.C. Circuit tends to be a little deferential to government agencies, yet leans conservative.

In fact, the D.C. Circuit struck down the FCC’s previous Open Internet rules. That might look like a strike against the Commission in defending the new Order. However, with these new rules the FCC was pretty much following the instructions of the Court, which rebuked the Commission for having taken such pains to avoid Title II last time around.

Still, there’s a good chance that the D.C. Circuit won’t hear these challenges. That’s because, as I noted earlier, the suits were probably filed prematurely. In general regulatory orders are not open for legal challenges until they are published in the Federal Register–something that has yet to happen. Of course, it will be up to the First Circuit to determine if the suits will proceed or be dismissed. If they are dismissed, then the venue selection process will start over again when the next round of suits are inevitably filed.

The post Digital Watch: East Village Radio Stages a Comeback appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Since the FCC passed its new Open Internet rules, reclassifying internet service as a telecommunications utility, I’ve fielded some questions–occasionally hushed, others less so–about if there might be another edge to this sword. Concerns seem to be sparked by the Commission’s recent decision to throw the book at a Roanoke, VA television station for the inadvertent and fleeting airing of a clip from a pornographic video during an evening newscast. It’s been a while since the FCC has levied any indecency fines, and this one’s a doozy.

With the trend of online radio growing in popularity and the FCC taking a stronger role in regulating internet service, some radio folks have started to wonder if the Commission might start enforcing indecency rules in online radio, too. I’m happy to report that I think it’s extremely unlikely, to nearly impossible, and have good reason to say so.

First off, my best guess is the FCC has little interest in regulating online content. Despite a common perception on both the left and right of the Commission as a Big Brother style organization salivating at the chance to accumulate and express more power, in reality it’s just another overwhelmed regulatory agency, with no police powers, that is making moves to actually reduce its enforcement capacity, not increase it.

Even firmer evidence comes in the form of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Or, rather, the fact that the anti-indecency sections of the Act were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997’s Reno v. ACLU. The intention of the CDA was to impose broadcast-style indecency rules on the internet, to protect minors from content that “in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.” The landmark FCC v. Pacifica decision which upheld the Commission’s ability to regulate broadcast decency was one precedent used by the government to defend the CDA.

However, that defense failed. In his majority opinion, Justice Stevens acknowledged earlier cases in which the Court had recognized a legitimate government interest in protecting children from “harmful materials,” but concluded that the decency provisions of the CDA were “unnecessarily broad.” This means is that there is currently no statutory authority for any arm of the federal government to regulate decency on the internet, whether in the form of podcasts, streaming radio or outright porn.

For even further evidence we only have to look at other non-broadcast media that also falls under the FCC’s watch. Satellite radio, which uses radio frequency signals beamed from space, is regulated by the Commission, and yet broadcast decency standards do not apply. Howard Stern is free to engage in all manner of sex talk using all the f-bombs he wants on his SiriusXM show. Given his history of attracting indecency fines, that freedom was one of the main reasons he abandoned broadcast for satellite.

Cable television is yet another telecom service regulated by the FCC but is free to air much more content that would be too indecent for terrestrial broadcast. From premium channel shows like Game of Thrones to tamer, but often profanity-laced shows on basic cable channels like IFC, cable broadcasters don’t have to worry about ever getting an FCC fine for content. While many cable networks do edit, bleep and blur, they do so to keep sponsors, parents and local cable operators happy, not to avoid fines.

If the FCC wanted to start regulating indecency in other media and start racking up hefty fines it would be far easier for the agency to start making moves on cable and satellite broadcasters first. There’s fewer of them, they’re easier to find, and they have deep pockets. And, yet, the FCC hasn’t, and there’s no sign it ever will.

Finally, there is nothing in Title II or the Open Internet order that gives the FCC any authority over content on the internet in the first place. Quite the contrary, the point of the Open Internet is to ensure that our ability to receive information on the internet is content-neutral and non-discriminatory.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have blind faith in the FCC. While it sometimes regulates in what I think is truly the public interest, the agency’s actions on broadcast indecency, in particular, I often find over-reaching, unnecessary and anachronistic. But looking at all the available evidence shows that the risk of the Commission regulating indecency in internet radio is slim to none.

The post Digital Watch: Will Open Internet Order Let FCC Regulate Internet Radio Decency? Not Likely appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The FCC is taking flak from Congress about its Open Internet rules passed last month, and this week the first wave of lawsuits has been filed. The United States Telecom Association is the biggest plaintiff, representing the nation’s largest broadband providers. The other suit was filed by Alamo Broadband, a small Texas-based ISP.

In its suit, US Telecom charges that the Open Internet Order “is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” and violates federal law, including both the Constitution and the Communications Act. On its blog the group says it ”supports open Internet rules, but disagrees with the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to reclassify broadband Internet providers as common carriers."

There is some debate about whether or not these suits are actually premature, since the Order itself does not go into effect until sixty days after being published in the Federal Register–something that has not happened yet. For its part, the FCC contends the lawsuits indeed are premature.

As communications attorney Harold Feld explains, US Telecom is covering its bases with the early petition. There’s the off chance that a court could find that because the Order is a complex beast, with aspects that qualify as “adjudication,” as well as rulemaking, that the window for filing a challenge was ten business days after release. Feld thinks this is unlikely, resulting in either these suits being dismissed, or the Appeals Court sitting on them until sixty days after the Order is published in the Federal Register.

FCC Chairman Wheeler has come in for heavy doses of criticism in his appearances in front of several Congressional committees since the Open Internet Order passed. Mostly these are cases of all smoke, no fire. While Republicans control Congress and the committees and generally oppose the Commission applying Title II utility regulation to internet service, it’s not clear there are enough votes in either the House or the Senate to pass legislation to change or nullifying the Order.

Republican Senator John Thune and Representatives Greg Walden and Fred Walton have been working together on proposals for legislation that would kill Title II, while also implementing many aspects of Open Internet protections, like a ban on creating a paid “fast lane.” This proposal is more net neutrality-like than any coming from Republican legislators before, and could appeal to some Democrats, though it’s not clear how wide support is even amongst Republicans.

It’s a serious question how many Dems want to oppose the FCC and the President on the issue. Furthermore, President Obama is not particularly likely to sign such legislation, if passed.

An alternative approach for circumventing the Open Internet Order was suggested by suggested by Wheeler’s own colleague, Commissioner Ajit Pai, at a Monday hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. Pai told the assembled representatives that “Congress should forbid the commission from using any appropriated funds to implement or enforce the plan the FCC just adopted to regulate the Internet.” Again, such a move would require the President’s signature, though bundling it in with other appropriations makes it a more effective bargaining chip.

Expect more smoke and dust as the ISPs and their pals in Congress run around looking for ways to puncture the Open Internet Order. This will be a long fight, and most probably resolved by the Appeals Court, and not any time too soon.

The post Digital Watch: Congressional & Legal Challenges to Open Internet Order Begin appeared first on Radio Survivor.

While internet radio is sometimes thought of as the wild and untamed cousin of terrestrial broadcast, it’s not entirely unshackled. While web broadcasters don’t require an FCC license, and are unrestricted with regard to using four letter words, stations still have to have to pay up for the right to play recorded music. Even if you find a way to host your station’s stream for free, eventually you’ll have to pay royalties if you play any tunes.

SoundExchange is the non-profit organization responsible for collecting one set of royalties–so-called “mechanical” royalties for recorded music–with that money going to the labels and artists that own the copyrights in the actual recordings. The group just reached a settlement with National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on the rates that affiliated public and community stations will owe from 2016 to 2020.

SoundExchange reached a similar settlement with College Broadcasters Inc. last October, covering member college stations. It’s important to note that these royalty payments are only required for stations’ internet streams. In the US terrestrial broadcasts are exempted.

Non-commercial radio has had tense relationship with SoundExchange over the course of its twelve-year existence. That tension stems from the fact that unlike Pandora, Spotify, SiriusXM or commercial internet radio, non-commercial stations aren’t generating profit from their broadcasts, and revenue is often variable. This means SoundExchange payments often seem like just one more drain on resource, which is why college and public stations have pushed back to negotiate rates that are consistent with their non-profit model.

The details of the NPR/CPB deal haven’t been released, and the settlement must still be approved by the Copyright Royalty Board.

It also should be noted that non-commercial stations have been obligated to pay songwriter royalties to groups like ASCAP and BMI for decades; royalty obligations are not necessarily anything new. It’s just that paying performance royalties was ushered in with the internet era, in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1995, to be exact.

Back to my opening musing, about how these royalty obligations make internet radio a little less free than might otherwise be assumed. This was on my mind because this week I talked to a reporter about a pirate station she’s covering. The reporter said that the station had actually received notice from ASCAP and BMI demanding that the station pay up. That’s the first time I’d ever heard of an unlicensed station being hounded by these groups, and I guessed that it was probably the station’s popular internet stream that caught their attention, not the relatively obscure FM signal.

Because of freedom from the FCC, internet radio has often been suggested as a strong alternative to unlicensed broadcasting. But hearing about ASCAP and BMI chasing down a pirate’s ostensibly more legit internet broadcast reminded me that the internet alternative may be free as in speech, but is not free as in beer.

The popular and influential internet station East Village Radio actually started out as an unlicensed FM in 2003 before moving to the supposedly safer environs of internet broadcasting. Yet, EVR closed down last May after an eleven-year run, saying “licensing fees and internet costs” were too large for the station to cover. And, because it wasn’t a non-commercial broadcast station, EVR couldn’t take advantage of the lower rates negotiated by the likes of NPR and CBI.

Although in the past I’ve resisted the equation between pirate radio and internet radio, perhaps the internet station that resists paying royalties is just a little more pirate than one that does. That broadcaster isn’t likely to have the FCC or federal marshals knocking at their door. However, still possible is a visit from a process server with a subpoena for an appearance in civil court when you get sued for back royalties.

Now, I’m not advocating that US internet stations try to dodge paying songwriter and performer royalties, though there is a case to be made that independent stations that generate little in the way of revenue or profit are at the greatest disadvantage. Rather, I think it’s useful to recognize the constraints of both internet and terrestrial radio. Would-be broadcasters are well advised to take these royalty obligations into account ahead of time.

The post Digital Watch: Even Online There’s No Such Thing as ‘Free Radio’ 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.

As if it wasn’t already obvious, online audio of all types is growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, 44% of all Americans over age 12 listen every week.

It’s most popular with young people, though also quickly gaining traction with everyone under age 55. This is according to the the 2015 edition of their Infinite Dial survey of American listening habits, released last week by Edison Research and Triton Digital.

The key number for all broadcasters to pay attention to is that 77% of listeners aged 12 to 24 listen to internet radio in a month, and 73% of them use a smartphone, compared to 61% who use a desktop or laptop computer. While broadcast radio holds onto its dominance in the car, 59% of 12 to 24 year-olds have listened to internet radio in the car.

When it comes to choosing a service the runaway winner is Pandora, which 54% of that age group listened to in the last month, with Spotify and iTunes Radio coming in a distant second and third, with 23% and 20%, respectively. iHeartRadio comes in an even more distant fourth, with only 14% of listeners 12 to 24 saying they listened in the last month.

On the one hand iTunes Radio’s popularity is impressive given that the service is barely 18 months old. On the other hand, the fact that it’s included on every iPhone makes it an easily accessed default for a lot of users.

As a whole these numbers are a bracing wake-up call for all terrestrial broadcasters. Public radio has bolstered itself a little better with its investments in podcasting, which also saw gains in listenership this year. Yet not all public or non-commercial broadcasters have leveraged podcasting equally, and commercial radio has barely made a dent.

What we’re watching is a whole generation of listeners skipping broadcast radio altogether, not just over the air, but on their smartphones and computers as well. Not to put too fine of a point on it, Pandora is eating broadcasters’ lunch… and dinner, and dessert. Teens’ and young adults’ preference for Pandora, Spotify and iTunes Radio is an unavoidable indicator that they are not interested in the poor to mediocre music programming served up by the vast majority of radio stations, and they’re sure as hell not going to listen to it online when there are simply better choices.

It’s a tough situation for the biggest commercial radio owners, since they’ve spent so much effort gutting their local talent, without cultivating much national talent, choosing instead to grind away with the same basic programming formulas from the turn of the century. Loading up hundreds of barely differentiated stations into a smartphone app and promoting it relentlessly on your broadcast properties doesn’t do much good when the youngest generation of listeners isn’t tuning them in to begin with.

There’s more hope for other broadcasters that are not so laden with debt or handcuffed by outmoded assumptions. Community, college, public and independent commercial stations aren’t going to compete head on with Pandora, but do have an opportunity to capture millennials’ ears online. To do this, they first have to recognize that it’s necessary. Now is that time.

HD Radio Is Not the Global Choice

This week John Anderson published a examination of global digital radio. The most popular format across Europe, now making incursions into Asia, is the DAB standard, not the HD Radio standard used here in the US. John notes that Norway is even planning to end analog broadcasting altogether in 2017 since digital signals now reach 99.5% of the country’s population.

The question is: in five or ten years will the rest of the world be enjoying more advanced (and maybe higher quality) digital radio than we do in the States, where most people don’t enjoy it much at all?

Update on BBC Radio Streams

Finally, I have a follow-up to my mention of listeners upset by changes to the BBC’s online streaming two weeks ago. Writing in the Guardian, Jack Schofield has published a very clear explanation of the situation, along with suggestions of how to best play the Beeb’s new streams, though with an understandable emphasis on listeners in the UK.

The short answer is that most PCs, tablets and smartphones should be able to play them. It’s internet radios, which have their capabilities mostly baked in, that are still in limbo, though Schofield lists a couple of models that might do the trick.

The post Digital Watch: Broadcasters Are Losing Young Listeners Online appeared first on Radio Survivor.

After writing last week about how some listeners were upset about changes to the BBC 3 high quality/bitrate stream my curiosity was piqued about higher fidelity internet radio stations. So I set about finding stations that highlight sound quality by offering higher bitrate streams.

First, it’s important to define terms. For the purpose of this post I’ll be using the terms “high fidelity” and “high bitrate” which correlate, but not perfectly. Fidelity, of course, refers to how good the stream sounds, while bitrate refers to how much bandwidth the stream uses. All things being equal, higher bitrate streams deliver better sound quality. That said, if the source material isn’t well recorded or the signal path is not well designed, it’s also quite possible to deliver sub-par sound quality over a high bitrate stream. I listened to a few too many stations like that.

These days most internet radio streams use either MP3 or AAC compression. MP3 should be to familiar to just about anyone who listens to digital audio. AAC is a newer standard that is used by Apple for iTunes music downloads, and is a little more efficient than MP3. That means it delivers better sound quality at the same bitrate.

So, for “high bitrate” MP3 streams I’m using the same standard as BBC 3, 320 Kbps. Because AAC is a little more efficient, I’m using 256 Kbps as the minimum. Now, certainly one can argue that these standards seem arbitrary, and that very good sound can be had at levels below these. However, my experience is that these are the bitrates where the compression is least likely to impact the sound–if the quality is less than optimal it’s probably due to some other link in the chain. With AAC, in particular, I’ve heard some very nice sounding stations using the more advanced AAC+ codec streaming at bitrates as low as 96 Kbps. Nonetheless, the point of this examination is to find stations that push high fidelity, not just good fidelity.

“High fidelity” is a more subjective standard. For me, I consider a station “high fidelity” if it sounds as if I’m listening to purchased digital file from a music store like Amazon or iTunes, or even as good as a CD. For all intents and purposes nothing negative about the sound should call attention to itself. Examples of things I shouldn’t hear include the “underwater” quality associated with poorly encoded and low bitrate MP3s or a shimmery high-end heard on instruments like cymbals. I also shouldn’t get the sense that I’m missing some aspect of the sound, whether it’s high end or very low end content. In practical terms, at the very least I should very easily think I’m listening to a good analog FM broadcast.

As it turns out, there are plenty of stations that stream at 320 Kbps MP3, but not all of them qualify as high fidelity to my ears. In fact, many sounded poorer than stations streaming at 256 or 192 Kbps. My guess is that’s because they were often playing back MP3 files that don’t meet that standard as the source, which were simply being recompressed to 320 at playback. Such recompression–called “stacking codecs”–only further degrades sound quality, and never improves it. I also heard some college and community stations streaming at 320, but where it definitely sounded like there were wiring problems in the connection to the streaming computer, resulting in buzzes, hum or distorted audio.

There are fewer stations streaming in the AAC format to begin with, and even fewer meeting the high bitrate standard. In general these stations were more likely to sound good than the MP3 stations. I figure that’s because choosing AAC likely means that sound quality is more of a specific emphasis.

Finally there are a handful of stations that stream in full CD-quality, without any MP3 or AAC compression. Most use a standard called FLAC which reduces the amount of data needed by half, but without throwing away any data like both MP3 and AAC do. These stations stream at bitrates from about 768 Kbps to 1.44 Mbps (megabits). A decade ago those would have been considered outrageous bandwidth hogs. But given that HD streaming video requires 3+ Mbps, today that doesn’t seem so bad.

Now I will share some of my finds. These stations were selected because they both stream at a high bitrate and sound very good. For each station I’ve given direct links to the stream that will play in most audio apps like iTunes, Quicktime, WinAmp, Windows Media Player or VLC. I provide these links because often these stations’ web players only provide lower bitrate streams.

By no means is this a comprehensive list of high bitrate streaming audio sources. I welcome suggestions of other good stations in the comments.

High Fidelity Internet Radio Streaming in AAC (256+ Kbps)

Audiophile Stream Network – Greece
Multiple genres, all in 320 Kbps AAC
Baroque classical: http://50.7.173.162:2199/tunein/baroque.pls
Classical: http://50.7.173.162:2199/tunein/classical.pls
Jazz: http://50.7.173.162:2199/tunein/jazz.pls
Live: http://50.7.173.162:2199/tunein/live.pls
Rock and blues: http://50.7.173.162:2199/tunein/enieopyy.pls

Radio Jackie – UK – “The Sound of South West London"
Local pop radio: http://www.radiojackie.com:5873

High Fidelity Internet Radio Streaming in MP3 (320Kbps)

Amys FM – Belgium
Soul, R&B: http://ns336770.ip–5–39–71.eu:2199/tunein/amysfm.pls

Hi OnLine Radio – Netherlands
Multiple genres, only some at 320kbps.
Classical: http://mediaserv30.live-streams.nl:2199/tunein/hionlineclassic.pls
Latin: http://mediaserv33.live-streams.nl:2199/tunein/hionlinelatin.pls
Lounge: http://mediaserv33.live-streams.nl:2199/tunein/hionlinelounge.pls
Pop: http://mediaserv30.live-streams.nl:2199/tunein/hionline.pls

KRUI – University of Iowa
College radio: http://krui.student-services.uiowa.edu:8000/listen.m3u

Linn Radio – UK
Plays music from the record label of this high-end audio manufacturer.
Eclectic: http://radio.linnrecords.com/cast/tunein.php/linnradio/playlist.pls
Classical: http://radio.linnrecords.com/cast/tunein.php/linnclassical/playlist.pls
Jazz: http://radio.linnrecords.com/cast/tunein.php/linnjazz/playlist.pls

Monster FM – Germany
Five different genre streams.
Top hits: http://stream.radiomonster.fm/tophits/listen.pls
“Evergreens”: http://stream.radiomonster.fm/evergreens/listen.m3u
Dance: http://stream.radiomonster.fm/dance/listen.m3u
German hits: http://stream.radiomonster.fm/schlager/listen.pls
Techno/House: http://stream.radiomonster.fm/techhouse/listen.pls

The Organ Experience
Classical organ music: http://www.organlive.com/organlive_320.m3u

Radio Satellite 2 – France
Oldies: http://radiart.eu:2199/tunein/satellite.pls

SceneStat Radio – Sweden
Electronic, video game music: http://scenesat.com/listen/normal/max.m3u

Somehow Jazz
Funk and jazz fusion: http://www.somehowjazz.com/live/mp3–320.pls

WIUX – Indiana University
College radio: http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8080/wiuxultra.m3u

Uncompressed Internet Radio

All of these stations require the VLC player or another app that can play back FLAC streams. iTunes will not work.

Europaradio Jazz: Live SmoothJazz HD – Italy
FLAC Lossless 1 Mbps: http://www.europaradiojazz.org/stream.flac.m3u

Czech Radio D-dur
FLAC uncompressed classical music: http://radio.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac

Absolute Radio streams five different rock and pop stations in uncompressed FLAC, but is only available in the UK.

The post Digital Watch: In Search of High Fidelity Internet Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The most significant digital radio news this week is the FCC’s vote on Open Internet rules happening at Thursday’s open meeting. The proceedings begin at 10:30 AM EST, and will be streamed live.

I posted an overview on Tuesday, and things haven’t changed much since then. The House Communications and Technology Subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday where Republican lawmakers warned that the new rules will be tested in court and fail. But that was mostly smoke, with no fire.

Subcommittee Chair Greg Walden and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton have introduced a bill that would prohibit many of the things targeted by the Open Internet proposal, like paid prioritization of content (a/k/a internet fast lanes), but at the expense of giving the FCC less authority over internet service providers. House Democrats are unlikely to sign on, and according to the New York Times senior congressional Republicans concede that without Democratic support no alternative net neutrality legislation is going to pass.

All five commissioners have a few hours left to work behind the scenes on edits they would like to see introduced into the final proposal, so the rules aren’t written in stone yet. We’ll be watching the FCC tomorrow to learn what the future of internet will be.

Slate Debuts Panoply Podcast Network

On the podcasting front, The Slate Group announced a new podcast network called Panoply with media partners like The New York Times Magazine, HBO Documentary Films and The Huffington Post. Right now the company says it has “12 commitments from a total of 18 shows,” and is adding a new Slate podcast, Whistlestop with John Dickerson. These join Slate’s fifteen existing podcasts, like Political Gabfest.

Slate has been producing podcasts for a decade, upping its investment last year with new shows like The Gist with Pike Pesca, Slate Money and Lexicon Valley, primarily featuring personalities already on or recruited to the company’s roster. The new network is a big move, and represents a branching out to assist other companies in creating podcasts featuring their own talent, and then co-branding them under the Panoply name.

The podcasting train blasts forward, full-speed ahead.

BBC Internet Changes Upset Listeners

Apparently, many listeners are upset because their internet radios will no longer play some BBC stations. According to a blog post from the BBC’s Head of Media Services Henry Webster, this situation is due to a couple changes, mostly having to do with updating infrastructure to use more modern formats and protocols. Formats are the kind of file, like MP3 or AAC, which the audio is encoded in. Protocols are the way these streams are delivered to players.

First, the broadcaster has ended support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) streaming, a standard that dates back to the 90s which Webster says accounted for 2–5% of the Beeb’s online listening. Complicating the situation was the fact that there was no way to know what devices were accessing the WMA streams, making it difficult to know which manufacturers to contact ahead of the change, resulting in some radios losing these broadcasts.

Second, the BBC changed the way it served SHOUTcast MP3 streams, also relied upon by many devices, causing inconsistent playback for some. These are now defaulted to deliver 128kbps MP3 streams, whereas before many stations were available in a higher quality and higher bitrate 320kbps stream. The high quality versions are now only offered in a 320kbps AAC stream in a protocol that isn’t supported universally. In particular users of the Logitech Squeezebox or Sonos system are only receiving the lower bitrate MP3 stream.

The downgrade to the the Radio 3 classical music service, particularly rankled many listeners. Due to the outcry the MP3 version of Radio 3 has now been restored.

The BBC says it is working with device manufacturers, like Logitech, to resolve the problems so that more devices can access the high quality AAC streams. Listeners who use the BBC’s website or apps are not affected.

Problems like these affect plenty of other internet broadcasters. It’s just that most don’t offer 57 different streams to such an enormous global audience, so we rarely hear about them. However, the situation does highlight an enormous difference between terrestrial and internet radio. Broadcast standards change only about every 25 years or so, and so far these updates–like adding stereo or HD Radio–have been backwards compatible. Your 1960s transistor radio receives local FM stations just as well as a new one fresh out of the box.

By contrast, there is no single standard for internet radio, and no single standards body to define one. Now, the situation is better than in the early 2000s when there were competing and incompatible formats like RealAudio and Windows Media Audio alongside MP3, often forcing broadcasters to offer up three or more separate feeds. Nevertheless, the SHOUTcast MP3 standard that the BBC is moving away from is some fifteen years old, which seems ancient in internet terms.

The flip side is that internet radio can innovate, adding features and improving sound quality, more quickly than terrestrial broadcast. The only caveat is that migrating to new formats or protocols threatens to leave some percentage of listeners behind.

Because it is perhaps the world’s predominant radio broadcaster, the BBC’s experience likely will serve as a case study for other broadcasters. Thinking optimistically, it might even provoke a little more collaboration between internet broadcasters and device manufacturers. That would be nice.

The post Digital Watch: Net Neutrality Ready for Vote, Slate Debuts Podcast Network, BBC Upsets Internet Listeners appeared first on Radio Survivor.

HD Radio is back on my mind after reading a recent article in Current about how public stations are using the technology. iBiquity, the company behind HD Radio, has hired the former director of NPR Labs to survey stations on the technology, obviously with the hope of encouraging more use.

Writer Scott Fybush talks to a handful of stations about their HD Radio operations. Only some of them use their HD2 and HD3 channels to broadcast additional program streams. It appears that one popular use is not necessarily to reach listeners directly with digital subchannels, but to use them to serve programming to translator stations. One station in Rhode Island re-started its previously dormant HD transmitter for the express purpose of leasing its HD2 channel to a former commercial station so that it could feed an previously online-only broadcast to a translator.

I’ve not been shy expressing my opinions about HD Radio. Squeezing a digital signal in with analog is too much of a compromise to deliver consistent digital reception, while at the same time it exacerbates congestion on the dial, in the worst cases causing interference with fringe stations. The good-on-paper idea of doubling or tripling the number of channels available on the dial is faced with the hard reality that those channels are mostly only receivable on car stereos–HD receivers exist in very few homes–and only for a portion of a station’s analog service area. On top of that, in my listening tests the sound quality of HD2 and HD3 channels ranges from acceptable to pretty awful.

What this adds up to is that HD Radio isn’t really a radio service–at least not one aimed at listeners. While iBiquity claims that 50% of new car models include HD Radio, and nearly 10 percent of those on the road can receive it, I seriously doubt many actual listeners are taking advantage of it. Sure, they may have a slightly less staticky signal when in the digital service area. But as my experience driving across half-way across the country demonstrated, it’s takes incredible luck to scan the dial and turn up an HD2 or HD3 channel. A listener has to know the HD2/3 channel is there, actively seek it out, and then be in range to receive it reliably. Not a formula for attracting big audiences.

The rule change that created the ability to feed an HD2 channel to a translator has been a boon for these repeater stations, which are specifically prohibited from originating programming. In effect, that means most listeners to an HD2 station are actually hearing it on an analog translator. That’s made translators more valuable, and increased their market value. It also turns HD2 channels into something more like a satellite distribution system or an ersatz studio-to-transmitter link, not a radio service like originally intended.

Some data, like album art or traffic information, can be served over HD, with a slightly larger geographic reach than an audio program, since the data stream doesn’t have to be continuous and is more tolerant of interruptions. Again, that’s not radio, but traffic data in particular is a potential revenue stream for broadcasters when licensed for use in hand-held and in-car navigation systems.

Even so, you might ask why anyone should care about HD Radio, since it seems like just a fringe service. A reason for concern is that HD Radio represents a shift from AM and FM radio being primarily for listeners to becoming utilities for broadcasters and data services. This is a subtle shift, and not one that has gone very far yet. But do not doubt that many broadcasters, as well as iBiquity, would not mind at all shifting much of their business to wireless data transmission.

It’s not that such wireless data transmission can’t be a good supplement to radio broadcasts; I’m not arguing real-time traffic info in the car is a bad thing. What concerns me is that any push to expand HD Radio isn’t really about providing better broadcast service to listeners. Rather, it’s a trojan horse to move the broadcast bands away from actual broadcasting.

Consider the very serious proposals to have the AM dial go all HD, a concept that was tested last year in Seattle. Even if stations are permitted to go all-digital on a voluntary basis, as proposed by iHeartMedia (née Clear Channel), just who is going to be tuning in those HD-only stations on the AM dial? How many listeners will go out of their way to get HD receivers to tune them in?

Will these really be broadcast stations, or effectively just a repurposing of AM bandwidth for traffic or other information services?

Since 2009 we’ve had digital television in the US, with most viewers switched over to the service. And it’s still primarily a TV service, with even some new burgeoning networks finding a home on the digital subchannels.

Arguably, the success of digital TV stems from the fact that all full-power stations had to make the transition, requiring viewers to buy digital TVs or digital tuners. It wasn’t a painless transition, but it worked. Perhaps a hybrid analog/digital system also would have worked. Though, I suspect the transition would have taken even longer, despite the fact that television receivers tend to stay in one place, unlike radios.

HD Radio is a compromise that doesn’t force a digital transition, but also ends up not offering much incentive for listeners to make that transition, either. I don’t expect HD Radio to go away, and as long it remains mostly harmless I’m fine with leaving it be. But I am suspicious of efforts to grow its use, especially in the form of all-digital stations.

Indeed, the digital radio ship may have sailed in the US. It was already well out of port by the time HD Radio finally came on the scene a dozen years ago, and has passed over the horizon as the growth of mobile broadband makes digital radio even more accessible.

This all begs the question of whether digital broadcast radio is even necessary. That’s a topic for another day.

The post Digital Watch: Why HD Radio Isn’t Actually Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A number of prominent musicians have complained loudly about the royalties they receive from streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora, from indie rock veteran David Lowery to pop star Taylor Swift, who pulled all of her music from Spotify. Mike Masnick at TechDirt decided to look closer at the numbers and determined that “Yes, major record labels are keeping nearly all the money they get from spotify, rather than giving it to artists.”

This pie chart of after-tax payouts shows the situation pretty graphically:

Masnick aims his criticisms at the labels, which he notes don’t encur the costs of manufacturing vinyl and plastic discs that then need to be shipped around the world. With Spotify or Pandora, “distribution is an ‘upload’ button.” I find it kind of hard to argue with that logic, not that I was ever a fan of the major labels to begin with.

Speaking of streaming music services,Pandora reported its 2014 fourth quarter and year-end earnings. The company says it paid out $439 million in royalties last year, on $920.8 million of revenue, $732.3 of which came from advertising. That made for a profit of $58.2 million. Alas, those numbers were below expectations and the stock dipped on the news.

The company also says it now surpasses 1 billion streams a day on occasion, and has a whopping 79.2% of the internet radio market.

That share of the market pretty well dwarfs every major broadcaster, not that the commercial radio industry in the US has worked all that hard to establish a strong online service. iHeartRadio is the most prominent, though it’s kind of a hodge-podge that is primarily known for offering up streams of its terrestrial stations, which aren’t exactly rocketing the company to profit in the first place.

Radio industry analyst and consultant Mark Ramsey published an incisive guide on “how to monetize your online radio streams.” Pretty much all of his points are spot-on and apply equally well to non-commercial community, college or public stations as well, whether or not the goal is to generate revenue.

For commercial stations advice like “cut the (commercial) spot loads to a maximum of half of what you do via broadcast,” is utterly obvious when you compare the Pandora listening experience to any given commercial station. Yet, this is one of the only times I’ve read this tip.

Commercial and non-commercial stations alike should heed strategies like “create channels that stream on-demand content in a loop all day long,” and “use a robust podcast engine to cut up, catalog and distribute short-form audio.” The idea is that a station’s web site should do everything possible to help listeners find and access programming without being tied to the broadcast schedule. Stations that only serve up a live stream of the terrestrial signal are squandering 90% of the advantages the internet offers over and above the AM or FM broadcast.

Read the whole piece to get all seven of Ramsey’s excellent tips.

Finally, for stations that do generate revenue from their online streams, one persistent challenge is getting reliable ratings that advertisers trust as well as traditional broadcast audience numbers from Nielsen (formerly Arbitron). Today WideOrbit announces that Nielsen has certified its Clarity online radio streaming platform, making it the first one to receive such a certification.

Along with live and on-demand audio streams, Clarity does what is called ad insertion, allowing internet broadcasters to place ads in their internet streams that may be different from the broadcast, or even differentiated by other factors, like a listener’s location or the time of day.

With the Nielsen certification stations that use Clarity will be able to offer ratings for online programs that look more like ratings for terrestrial broadcast. While I have long-standing criticisms of radio ratings, I also understand how it’s important to have an ostensibly neutral third-party say audience numbers are reliable. It’s just that, especially in broadcast radio, I wish there were competition. At least with online radio and audio there is another company, Triton Digital, providing audience measurement, too.

The post Digital Watch: Where’s All That Streaming Music Money Going? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Welcome to our new Wednesday feature, Digital Watch. Each week I’ll be tackling news and analysis about radio’s intersection with the digital world, online and off. This takes the place of Podcast Survivor, but it doesn’t mean podcasting coverage is going away. I’ll explain further at the end of this post.

The week’s biggest news dropped on Wednesday, when FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler publicly revealed details for his Open Internet proposal to be voted on by all five commissioners on February 26. Most proponents of strong network neutrality–including public interest groups and internet companies like Twitter and Netflix–are cheering what is known so far. The most significant part is the proposal that the FCC will regulate internet service as a utility, under so-called Title II provisions. The surprise is that Wheeler plans to cover mobile broadband, not just wired internet service.

The Verge has a rundown of many of the pro and anti Title II reactions that have been published.

Matthew examines the possibility that the new rules, if passed, would kill “sponsored data” plans where services pay for users’ wireless data or plans like T-Mobile’s Music Freedom in which the carrier doesn’t charge for the data consumed using selected streaming music platforms. I’ve already argued that Music Freedom is really an “internet fast-lane” dressed up as a gift for music lovers, since T-Mobile picks and chooses which services benefit. Such “fast-lanes” are what the Open Internet proposal aims to prohibit.

As for wired home and business internet, so far there has been less of a thread to internet radio and streaming music services, principally because they use less bandwidth than high definition video as provided by services like Netflix. However, the burgeoning trend towards streaming uncompressed CD quality audio from platforms like Deezer Elite and Tidal does push audio closer to video-scale bandwidth territory. Furthermore, if high resolution audio of the sort that Neil Young’s Pono player delivers takes off, it’s not hard to see even more data-intensive streaming music services on the horizon.

For internet audio and radio the latent threat has been more about paid prioritization rather than limiting bandwidth. For radio this would look something like T-Mobile’s Music Freedom but with your cable modem, where one or more partner services would be given priority, especially for customers on inexpensive low-bandwidth tiers. In reality most “unlimited” home internet plans have a data cap of some kind, which could be activated or lowered at any time, potentially impacting a heavy consumer of internet radio or streaming music. The FCC’s Open Internet proposal would likely place the indie community or college station on the same ground as iHeartRadio when it comes to equal access to the home internet user.

Of course, even if the proposal passes wholesale at February’s open meeting, the chapter will not be closed. Court challenges and Congressional intervention are still possible. At the same time, passage would still set a tone and effectively set a new baseline for future debates or negotiations on the matter.

In other news…

Teens Prefer Streaming Services

Edison research just released more results from its fall 2014 Share of Ear survey on American listening habits. While not surprising, they don’t look so good for terrestrial radio.

Edison found that teenagers 13 to 17 now spend more time with streaming audio services like Spotify or Pandora than terrestrial radio, by a margin of 64 minutes to 53 minutes a day, respectively. AM/FM radio still leads for all other age groups. But, of course, today’s 13 – 17 year-olds are tomorrow’s 25 – 34 year -olds.

It doesn’t take much insight to see that today’s teenagers are raised in an on-demand environment, and broadcast radio is the polar opposite. But it would be a mistake to leave it at that, since a service like Pandora is not on-demand, even if it is customized. I would argue that mainstream commercial music radio, with its surplus of heavy rotations and voice-tracked non-local talent, is a poor alternative to Pandora, commercials and all.

Choosing amongst 50 cookie cutter CHR stations on iHeartRadio is nothing like choosing a Pandora station, even if you’re craving the current top hits. But this is old news, right?

Internet Radio Pays Record Royalties

SoundExchange is the independent organization that collects performance royalties from digital radio services on behalf of music artists. The organization reports that $773 million was paid out to registered recording artists in 2014, a new record high.

Admittedly, most stations with internet streams have a mixed relationship with SoundExchange because it’s another bill to pay for something that they don’t have to pay for their terrestrial broadcast signal. Yet, this record pay out indicates that there is increased interest in internet radio. Also, this includes performance royalties paid by profit-making digital services like Pandora and SiriusXM, as well as commercial and noncommercial radio stations.

From Podcast Survivor to Digital Watch

As I mentioned above, this week marks a shift from the Podcast Survivor weekly feature to this new one, Digital Watch. I wrote Podcast Survivor every week from November 2013 to January 2015. While I’m retiring the weekly feature, Radio Survivor is not retiring podcast coverage. Podcasting will definitely be part of Digital Watch, but the segment has grown so much in just fifteen months that we’re going to make it more of our everyday coverage.

I also made to decision to end the weekly podcasting feature because it started to seem as though I was saving up lots of podcasting stories, and then couldn’t quite get to everything in just one post. Much of those stories tended to be meta-reporting–making note of coverage in other press outlets. While I see the use in that kind of aggregation, it’s also not really the kind of writing I most enjoy doing. For me, continuing in this vein was a recipe for burnout, which isn’t good for anybody.

Clearly, I could do more primary source reporting and analysis of podcasting instead. However, with a day job also working in and writing about podcasting, this has become a difficult needle to thread. It seemed to me the best solution is to broaden the scope each week so that I can better look at bigger trends in digital audio, which includes podcasting.

Importantly, Radio Survivor will continue to provide regular coverage of podcasting, just not only on Wednesdays, but more as relevant news happens. I also will continue to write the monthly Podcast Extra feature which appears exclusively in our free weekly email newsletter (you can sneak a peek at January’s edition).

The post Digital Watch: Net Neutrality Is Here; Teens Prefer Streaming appeared first on Radio Survivor.