Are you working abroad? Do you now live in some wonderful city that is fascinating and different, but also pretty difficult to navigate through, socially speaking? Well, one solution is to do what Michael Egerton, now an expat resident of Hong Kong did: start an Internet radio station.

Egerton hails from the Netherlands. He lives on Hong Kong’s biggest island: Lantau. Hence no surprise that he dubbed his station Radio Lantau. The South China Morning Post has a great profile of the operation. It caters to around 12,000 listeners, many of whom miss the kind of tunes they heard back home. Comments from Egerton’s fans attest to this:

“His show is pretty much the only Hong Kong programme I listen to. Old school hip hop on Hong Kong radio is really not happening.”

“A lot of music he plays, I would say he plays for western listeners … stuff that reminds me of back home, back in the day.”

Having spent some weeks in Hong Kong not that long ago, I can corroborate these quotes. Hong Kong AM/FM listeners are really into talk radio. No surprise there. The place is so intensely political because of its fraught relationship with the People’s Republic of China, hence the yearning for 24/7 commentary. The other radio genre they love is (obviously) “Cantopop” (or HK pop as it’s also called), which is lots of fun but very idiosyncratic.

So if you are looking for the latest western stuff, music-wise, you are going to have to resort to your own devices, figuratively and literally in Radio Lantau’s case.

The post Lonely in Hong Kong (or elsewhere)? Start an Internet radio station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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.

Twitch is the online streaming video site that lets you watch the pros play big online games like League of Legends, World of Warcraft, or Counter Strike. Now the service is setting up a music database system so that gamers can add their own soundtracks as they impress viewers with their fighting prowess or webcam commentaries.

The “Twitch Music Library” will feature tunes from “established and burgeoning labels,” the company’s blog post explains, including Monstercat, Mad Decent, Dim Mak, Spinnin’ Records, OWSLA, and Fool’s Gold.

It appears that Twitch is a little twitchy about this step forward, identity-wise. To wit:

“We understand that this is new and may be a bit confusing given Twitch’s long-standing ‘gaming-only’ stance. We view music as an expansion, but gaming will always be our core focus. You’ll see the same front page and directories, and you can still interact in all the same ways with your favorite broadcasters and your fellow viewers. We hope you discover some really great music creators and have the chance to check out some of your favorite musicians, while also having access to a free-to-use library of music for your broadcasts.”

In addition, some of these labels will run their own Twitch radio style music channels. The first one out the door is Monstercat’s, aka Monstercat FM, which comes complete with a bot that gamers can add to their chat bar so chatters know which Monstercat artist is playing.

No surprise that Monstercat is in the vanguard here; the company is way ahead of the game (so to speak) when it comes to innovative music delivery services. Last time I checked with turntable application plug.dj, the Monstercat/Tastycat channel was the number one room. Monstercat also has a licensing service for YouTube video streamers.

Twitch expects “a few bumps along the way,” the blog post continues, since “this is a fairly large and new undertaking.” My guess: read “copyright issues” where you see the word “bumps”. The FAQ for the project encourages individual gamers to upload their own original music or songs, but of course participants can’t include their own covers of popular tunes unless they can show that they’ve bought a compulsory license for the original song.

So it’s complicated, as usual. But I still think the whole project is immensely cool and worth the risks. After all, what are online games anymore without music and sound tracks?

The post Twitch rolls out music streaming for gamecasters appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

I received an email from 8tracks.com on Saturday with the subject header “You made an impact in someone’s life with your playlist!” It announced that yet another 8tracks subscriber has “liked” one of my lists, and continued:

Hello Matthew,

A powerful bonding moment just happened: 1 person liked your mix! The world can be a lonely place sometimes, but not today.

I have mixed feelings about these sort of messages. The hard nosed anti-sentimentalist side of my brain immediately bristles at the missive. “C’mon Matthew,” it curmudgeons me. “You don’t seriously think you actually powerfully bonded with 8tracks user ‘notesarefalling’ because s/he ‘liked’ your mix, right? As for the world not being a lonely place today because of the microtransaction, I think we’ve strayed into the Get A Life Department here.”

Growl . . . On the other hand, it is possible to receive the message as a cute, campy slice of overstatement, not to be taken very seriously, but not to be dismissed entirely, either. A tiny sliver of encouragement packaged in amusing prose.

In any event, before I forget . . . hey notesarefalling: thanks!

In a related piece of online alienation, I now have no less than 554 followers on Tunein, but still haven’t the vaguest idea how to communicate with them within the Internet service itself. I can follow them back, or I can “share” their links on Facebook or Google Plus or Twitter. But that’s as far as it goes. So why are they following me? Because of the three radio stations I’ve bookmarked within Tunein’s infrastructure? I don’t get it.

You can’t really be a social networking application if users can’t talk to each other within the app. In SoundCloud you can post comments on tracks. On YouTube you can make comments on video/songs and playlists. On Spotify you can export your playlists to blogs where people can comment. It’s got to be that way for it to be really social. Or at least I think so.

The post 8tracks.com and the art of overstatement appeared first on Radio Survivor.

WQXR-FM’s Meet the Composer podcast is now around half a year old, and it has already become a wonderful resource. I just finished listening to the latest episode, focusing on the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter. “As a composer, [Balter] writes an almost unthinkable amount of music, and not all of it works,” observes MTC host and violist Nadia Sirota. “He gives himself the right to fail.”

“I’m always writing something,” Balter notes in an interview. “There’s not a moment when I don’t have a double bar in my life. . . . I allow myself a lot of room for failure, and I think that failure is a great thing. Failure sometimes teaches much much more than something that just works from the beginning.”

This humble truism should not obscure the fact that MTC succeeds—specifically in alerting me to the existence of exciting new classical music and the musicians who produce it. For example, I did not know that Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy was writing an opera on the Irish famine titled The Great Famine. The podcast has excerpts from the work-in-progress, and it is quite beautiful. Other composer profiles: Caroline Shaw, Andrew Norman, and John Luther Adams. I particularly recommend the “Frank Zappa as Gateway Drug,” episode.

Here is to MTC’s next six months—and well beyond. It is worth noting that SoundCloud has a lot of new music too, if you know where to look or who to look for. For example, Dennehy has a nice excerpt from another of his pieces over there, As An Nós. And Shaw has her own SoundCloud page too. The streaming service recently cut a deal with Warner to license music, which will presumably keep the lawyers from the door, at least for a little while longer.

On Friday, SoundCloud posted a blog entry pretty much comparing its existence to the removal of the Berlin Wall—the event’s 25th anniversary celebrated on Sunday. “SoundCloud celebrates the tearing down of walls anywhere, and audio everywhere,” the company titled its post. So are the big labels, like, the Stasi? Just asking.

Meanwhile the rest of the civilized world is debating Taylor Swift’s decision to withdraw her catalogue from Spotify, she complaining of declining album sales. Last week Adele’s manager Jonathan Dickens told her and everyone else to get real, streaming is the future, “whether people like it or not.” Swift’s stuff is still all over YouTube, Dickens noted, where artists often make even less.

Speaking of YouTube, some of its more eccentric Griots are posting commentaries on the Swift v. Spotify case. I particularly recommend Adam Rants’ rant on the subject, followed by this Zennie62 meditation, and Joe Garland, who produced his vlog on the subject while driving. For a more informed discussion, I suggest sticking around for this TheLipTV conversation.

It is unclear what impact Swift’s cry of pain from on high will actually have. Most musicians don’t enjoy the luxury of packing up their marbles and leaving. Down go old walls; up go new ones.

Our Monday InternetDJ post covers all subjects related to online radio, however you want to understand them (or however we understand them, for that matter).

The post WQXR’s Meet the Composer podcast: the first six months appeared first on Radio Survivor.

An 8tracks.com Halloween friendly ambient playlist: Artistic Thoughts.

This Halloween all the big streaming music services will, as usual, cook up perfectly decent curated  channels. But here are various indie online sources that will offer something better than the norm.

Classical station WQXR in New York’s Q2 “living composers” channel will be running their second Halloween scarathon with 20th century content that will definitely give you the hairy eyeball. Remember all that extra-creepy music from György Ligeti, Béla Bartók and Krzysztof Penderecki in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining? That’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about for this year’s festivities. ‘QXR staff are even soliciting suggestions and I know that regular Q2 denizens will have good ones. I suggest you tune in. I definitely will.

If you need something a little stronger for Halloween, Soma.fm’s Doomed channel is without any question the most all out terrifying music stream I know. It bills itself as “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls” and I gotta tell you, that’s pretty much what it is. Selections include tunes from Ah Cama Sotz’s Dead Cities album, Throbbing Gristle’s song “Beachy Head,” and Agonoise’s “Under the Cross.” This is “abandon-all-hope-all-ye-who-enter here” music at its best. Cultivate your existential crisis this Halloween at Soma.fm.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a more soothing/inspiring dungeons-and-dragons, Harry Potter, sword-and-sorcery soundtrack kind of Halloween, 8tracks.com has lots of really nice playlists waiting for you. I recommend three particularly elegant ones: Words Are Wind, a playlist dedicated to epic adventure soundtracks, Audio Aderall, the closest thing I can imagine to a Halloween study music playlist, and Artistic Thoughts, a weird-but-in-a-nice way ambient music stream.

Finally, you never know what those scamps over at ARTxFM in Louisville, Kentucky are going to do, music-wise. But last Halloween they ran an intergalatic rave during the town’s Halloween Parade, and their Twitter feed indicates that various deejays have already done Halloween shows. So I’ll be checking them out as well.

One more thing: watch out for pirates!

The post Where to find classy Halloween indie Internet radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

OMG I am totally, happily lost, wandering about NASA’s new SoundCloud channel, which is full of amazing audio. Check out this set of tracks, which begins with “Chorus Radio Waves Within Earth’s Atmosphere”:

Next comes a Sputnik beep, a sample of lightening on Jupiter, and some Saturn based radio emissions from Casini. You can also listening to famous NASA words, such as “Houston we have a problem here.” Interestingly, comments are disabled for that selection.

Just think of all the fun things you sample-loving community radio deejays can do with these music-of-the-spheres sounds.

NASA has always been into radio and audio. One gets the impression there are at least a few wannebe rock radio hosts at the agency. Two years ago Paul Riismandel profiled the agency’s Third Rock radio channel, which is still going strong. Third Rock says it updates listeners on NASA events, but every time I’ve dropped by it mostly seems to play alternative and modern rock.

“It’s an interesting concept,” Paul noted back in February 2012. “But a new listener like me isn’t going to be enticed to tune in again if we don’t get the space stuff during our first time tuning in.”

Happily, NASA’s SoundCloud channel definitely delivers on the space stuff. Check out these “Voyager Interstellar Plasma Sounds”:

And here’s a “Kepler: Star KIC12268220C Light Curve Waves to Sound”:

If you are going to access this fun content, NASA has some conditions. Fair use-ish purposes are fine, but “If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, especially including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA’s endorsement of commercial goods or services.” More details about NASA policies here.

The post NASA conquers space music with SoundCloud channel appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Speaking of digital strategies, BBC Radio 1 has a funny little primer on how to deploy YouTube videos to build and diversfiy your radio audience. Hosted by BBC visual expert Joe Harland and Radio 1 Presenter Greg James, it’s definitely worth a look.

BBC Radio 1 does mostly live music. The accompanying YouTubes, the tutorial explains, either offer some kind of (often comical) response to a performance, or the producers cook something up that the hosts can talk about on the radio later. The former would include Greg James doing a parody of a Miley Cyrus video; the latter would include Hugh Jackman belting out a rather labored version of “Who Am I” from Les Miserables.

Radio 1 does about one of these a week, the video says. The staff keep an eye out for viralness. There is no hard and fast YouTube formula, however. “Look at what is successful,” Joe Harland says. “Be inspired by it. But don’t try solely to replicate it.”

The post The BBC Radio 1 School of YouTube appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Several weeks ago I gave a rather bad grade to SoundCloud’s “explore” classical channel, but I’ve been checking out other channels, and the service’s “world” stream is much better. A lot of really marvelous Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian content there.

Among the best tracks I’ve heard: Time and Fallen Leaves. A fine piece from the South Korean K-pop duo group Akdong Musician. These kids are originally from Mongolia, but made their way back to South Korea to get into the music biz. Seems like it’s working so far. Light guitar playing accompanying a beautiful soprano vocal track.

Meanwhile SoundCloud user H. Salah has an outstanding stream of classic Egyptian vocals; I would definitely check out the Bollywood tracks being offered by Old Punjabi Gold; and Africa Groove has a lovely Tiwa Savage hit, My Darlin.

Why does SoundCloud’s “world” channel work so much better than its classical channel? I think that the amorphousness of the concept of World Music lends to its success in this instance. World Music was always a sort of neo-Colonial idea, after all. Think about it: when was the last time you saw Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus on a World Music playlist? Never, yet they’re part of “the world,” right? In the end, “World Music” is generally the First World looking at and listening to the Third. But the sheer messy globalness of the genre makes it much easier to curate via categories and tags.

SoundCloud is just vacuuming up users and listeners, it should be noted. Tech Crunch says that its heading for no less than 200 million listeners a month. And its revenues are also jumping, Euro-wise: from 8 million in 2013 to 14 million in 2014. But the service’s operating losses have more than doubled, from around 12 to 23 million over the same period.

We cover Internet DJ content every Monday at Radio Survivor.

The post Internet DJ: why SoundCloud’s world music channel works appeared first on Radio Survivor.

YourEDM has an interesting piece on the thinking of DJ Producer Ryan Raddon, aka Kaskade, regarding radio and YouTube. Raddon sat on a recent Advertising Week panel in New York City. Raddon’s words:

“On my [YouTube] channel I’m just sharing insight, I mean anything from ‘hey this is music that I’m listening to,’ to ‘this is what I’m doing in the studio,’ ‘this is my life on the road,’ I feel like I can speak to the fans really directly. I didn’t have to wait for radio to break my song. I put it up on YouTube, a self produced video, get it out there and see what the reaction is and start some momentum that way.”

Discussants on the panel were all about which platform comes first, radio or YouTube, TV or YouTube. In my mind the generic social algorithm goes something like this: “You post something on Twitter, or YouTube, or Spotify, or someplace similar, and then hopefully it gets picked up by radio or television as you get more popular.” But increasingly it feels like the online platforms are an end unto themselves, and AM/FM radio is either there or it’s not there, but it isn’t the end goal any more.

These cautionaries to radio aside, there is an interesting Radio Story School online that you might want to check out. It comes with a free e-book, advice about gear, and a whole lot of other stuff. It is produced by Zena Kells, an Australian radio producer who lives in Cambodia.

Meanwhile The Turtles, victorious (at the moment) over Sirius XM regarding pre-1972 recording royalties, are now suing Pandora for $25 million. As with Sirius XM, the issue is that while federal law doesn’t cover recording royalties prior to 1972, California law does.

Speaking of YouTube, who is next?

The post Internet DJ: waiting for radio; waiting for The Turtles to sue appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The RAIN newsletter has an interesting opinion post up by Mike Spinelli, formerly at SoundExchange, now in law school studying music licensing. Spinelli’s post is titled “The ‘me’ generation: why music curation isn’t the answer.” We are all individualists now, Spinelli says. Looking at various aspects of Beats Music, he contends that “human-curated playlist are not where streaming services are headed.”

In conclusion:

“The future is in being able to determine what I want to hear without me knowing it yet. A curated playlist may have a few songs I like, but a service built around this concept to enhance music discovery is inefficient. The future is in the data listeners provide, and refining that data to reach the right listener. That is where we’re headed.”

To get specific, our aspiring royalties lawyer is scoffing at Apple CEO Tim Cook’s comment (as Apple prepared to buy Beats Music) that “human curation was important in the [Beats] subscription service – that the sequencing of songs that you listen to affect how you feel.” Indeed, Beats takes playlist power very seriously, making it easy for subscribers to create them on the service’s web or mobile interfaces. But, the author asks us: do we really want to go back to cassettes? “A playlist created by a superstar (or anyone for that matter) is not what a listener wants to put on when they log into a streaming service,” he claims.

As evidence of this Spinelli submits a leaked Beats royalty statement posted by The Trichordist. Not surprisingly, the Trichordist makes quite a meal of what it regards as inadequate songwriter compensation (RAIN has posted a more dispassionate analysis of the figures).

It’s always interesting to me when people talk about “the answer” and “the future.” I immediately ask myself the same question: ‘the answer to and the future of what?’ In Spinellis’ case I feel pretty confident that he is talking about the future of money. But there are other futures to discuss as well. These include the future of friendship, of sharing, and of communities. And for those futures, music curation in the form of playlists looms large.

If nobody wants curation when they log into a streaming service, how do we explain the popularity of 8tracks.com? The playlist app is now so huge its recently installed forums pages overflow with discussions and comments, and it is fresh with new funding from Venture Equity. If nobody wants curation, why are there gazillions of exportable Spotify playlists up on web and blog sites (here is one of ours)? Ditto for SoundCloud.

Ok; to be fair, maybe these sort of application features don’t generate as much income as put-us-in-the-driver’s-seat music streaming channels. But I do very much hope that the constantly evolving world of Internet radio isn’t pressured by the labels and their advocates to put all their features into one future, to the exclusion of all others. That kind of future would an awfully lonely and boring one, at least for me.

We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature (except when we cover them on other days).

The post If music curation isn’t the answer, what’s the question? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

SoundCloud has a variety of “Explore” channels. These are basically very long playlists of whatever has been recently posted. They include Folk, Rock, Deep House, Trip Hop, and a bunch of other genres about which I know nothing. The service also has a “classical” channel. The problem is that most of the content on the classical channel isn’t really classical.

Take the first piece I hear when I access the channel: “Precious Little” by Hiatus. It has classical elements: a piano, some digital orchestral background sounds. But it’s really an ambient piece. In fact it isn’t even tagged “classical.” It’s tagged “#Ambient.” Next comes “RIP Christie,” a digital elegy with those nice backwards jump cut sounding sounds you hear in Hip Hop. It’s pretty. It’s tagged “#sad.” It does sound sad. But it doesn’t sound classical.

I keep going and going down the playlist and finally I get to something classical, a lovely rendition of Iranian-American composer Shardad Rohani’s beautiful Persian Garden for violin and orchestra. This is followed by Danny L. Harle’s engaging piece Soar Away for piano, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion.

But before that I had to encounter a mashup of ZZ Top’s hit song “Sharp Dressed Man” which is tagged “#classic rock” and “hip hop” and “mashup.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I love ZZ Top. I just don’t want to hear the band when I access a channel titled “classical.”

So how can I get an actual classical stream on SoundCloud? If I do a search modified for playlists with the tag “#classical,” that gets me a lot more of what I want. This works less well with a search modified for tracks. If you think movie soundtracks count as classical music, you’ll love the search modified for “groups” (I don’t want to get into an argument about this).

But thus far I’m finding it very difficult to easily pick up a SoundCloud stream that focuses on what musicologists call the Common Practice period of classical music and the centuries before and after. Any suggestions welcome.

The post How to get a SoundCloud classical channel that doesn’t suck appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am an 8tracks.com discussion forums lurker. Here are the hottest conversations, and the offbeat ones.

The One Song That You Could Listen to Forever. This forum has generated no less than 2.3 thousand views. Among the faves: “Feel Good” by The Gorillaz; Handsome Family’s “Far from Any Road,” “One Night With You,” by Thieves Like Us, and The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun.” Plus “Love Etc.” by the Pet Shop Boys.

It’s interesting how the mood of the songs change as the forum discussion progresses. First everything is noir/anti-hero/sad and then things cheer up with recommendations like Daft Punk’s “Digital Love” and Alicia Keys singing “Empire State of Mind.”

How did you discover 8tracks? 2.4 thousand views. Lots of respondents say through Tumblr and Stumbleupon. I liked this response the best: “I was doing reggae and hip-hop shows for college radio. They suggested that we post our mixes on 8tracks after each show. Been enjoying the site ever since.”

Best Movie Soundtrack? Another noirish discussion. Faves include tracks from Clockwork Orange, The Assassination of Jesse James, Suspira, Pi, and Cloud Atlas. 1.4 thousand views.

Also interesting: I need stuff to read, I need some good songs for high school, and Favorite indie/alternative song quotes.

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

The post 8tracks: the hot forum discussions appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Denver, Colorado now has a streaming channel specializing in local bands, delivered by the city’s public library. The service in question is called “Volume”. You plug in your Denver Public Library user name or library card number and password, and you receive access to a variety of area music groups for streaming, playlisting, and/or downloading. And all DRM free.

Currently the Volume project has the space to offer 100 albums every year, and pledges to add around 25 every three months. The library has obtained a license to host music for two years. “So by the end of 2015, and moving forward, we should have 200 albums on the site at any given time,” Volume’s About page notes.

The plan is to put out appeals for submissions to musicians from the state three or four times a year, so calling all Colorado artists. In fact, a new window for content has opened, and here is the submissions page.

Current categories include Americana, Country, Metal, Modern Folk, Rock, Soul, Hip-hop, Electronic, and World. Quite a few creative user playlists too. Reverb magazine has a nice piece on the service, which includes an interview with Volume project manager Zeth Lietzau. He notes that Volume targets two groups: people in their 20s and 30s who don’t interface with Denver’s library system much, and regular library patrons who do not patronize the local music scene.

“What we’re trying to find is a place that creates a really Denver-centric community,” Lietzau says. “That’s a niche that people are interested in.”

The post Denver public library brings local band radio to the city appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

Comscore

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

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

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

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

The post Internet DJ week: YouTube becomes YouPay appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last-but-not-leasts:

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

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

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

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

The post Internet DJ week: are you being your true self or Michael Cera? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

Out came this playlist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Internet DJ week: acrostic Spotify messages, Pokemon radio attacks, youth wasted on young appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you are a classical music lover, 8tracks.com offers many great playlists. They are perfect for inspiration and/or background for study. Here are some recommendations:

evening: an excellent piano oriented mix. Lots of Chopin and French impressionist music. It is 47 minutes long and has eleven tracks, including a nice improvisation on Satie’s Gynopedie.

The Violin: this 8track list centers itself around the violin tunes Sherlock Holmes presumably played as he pondered his cases. Bach, Paganini, Vivaldi, wonderful stuff. Nine tracks; fifty minutes.

Music for Plants: lots of beautiful string ensemble content here, including a nice oboe concerto, a piano version of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (tracklist here).

Almost a lullaby: A top flight classical playlist mix that includes Edward McDowell’s rarely played piano piece To a Wild Rose and Chopin’s wonderful B flat minor Nocturne. Eight tracks; 26 minutes.

Mot just walzes. Lovely waltzes: Blue Danube; Under Paris Skies; Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz. Great pieces. They’ll make you happy. 17 tracks; almost one hour and twenty minutes.

Forgotten Kingdom is a soundtrack oriented classical playlist (tracklist here). I’m still looking for a word to characterize this kind of music: rich orchestral, but not traditionally classical. Anyway, the tunes are excellent and that’s what counts. 50 tracks; around two and a half hours.

Off to war. A war movie soundtrack oriented list. Great soundtracks such as John Williams’ The Journey to Himmel Street and a semi-orchestral rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

At the ballet. Yup, ballet music: Brahms; Saint Saens; Tchaikovsky. One hour and ten minutes; 16 tracks.

There are also my lists: a classical piano mix, which includes performances by me, and The Beautiful Time, which foregrounds late 19th and early 20th-century masterpieces. Enjoy . . .

Meanwhile I was skulking around plug.dj rooms again, trying to figure out from which countries the most popular rooms originate. Then I started having trouble getting into the site, although I did get into one:

Herdyn: The administrators of this room hail from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It describes itself as “only for Fans of eSuba Herdyn,” but I managed to slip in and enjoy the music. “Herdyn” I presume is Pavel “Herdyn” Mikeš, celebrity streamer and double champion on the League of Legends gaming site. He is an “elo top laner” (whatever that means; help me out here). eSuba means “play with soul.”

More room national origins when I can lurk some more.

In Spotify news, here’s a Spotify application called Outside Hacks that makes Outside Lands festival recommendations for you based on whatever you are listening to on Spotify. Headliners for the August 8-10 event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will include Kanye West, Tom Petty, the Arctic Monkeys, and about one hundred other groups, as far as I can count.

Finally, stock market watchers continue to pair Amazon and Pandora Media together, and the stocks of both companies continue to decline. “Shares of Pandora Media fell more than 10% on Friday on news of another profitless quarter,”reports Time. Ten percent for Amazon too, after it disclosed bigger than anticipated losses. “Potential profits just won’t cut it anymore in this market. Take note, Twitter,” the article notes. Does this mean more and more social music apps being absorbed by the big computer, ISPs, and search engine companies? I hope not, but . . .

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

The post 8tracks: ten fine classical music mixes appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— brenbren27 (@The_brenbren27) July 10, 2014

and: 

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

— Maximus Fantastimus (@CtrlAltDelIt) July 10, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

I had fun over the Fourth of July rummaging around the Internet Wayback and looking at old images of audioscrobber.net, Richard Jones’ early version of Scrobbling as he was joining forces with Last.fm. Here is screenshot circa November 2004.

Audioscrobbling, circa 2004

Jones was a third year student at the University of Southampton at the time he cooked this up. Apparently he was living in a tent on a friend’s balcony in London, getting up at 5:30 am (what else could he do?) most mornings and coding the system. I always thought that the term “scrobbling” was a bit of a brilliant misnomer. Basically it meant adding plugins to your media player software that allowed a central database to keep track of your music preferences and recommend like minded users and songs for you. A duo of German and Austrian music geeks read about Jones’ innovation and got him connected to their ersatz indie label/Internet radio website, Last.fm. Suddenly Jones’ database system was joined with actual listenable content, and a star was born.

Early Autoscrobbler.net had real integrity and transparency. The site advised users that their data would be used by others, but only for non-commercial purposes.

“Any time you feel like it, you can come to the website and check out your profile, perhaps try some of the suggested songs,” the Help page explained, “see the suggestions from other similar people and generally marvel at what appalling music taste many people have compared to you.”

It is interesting to review what the big scrobble hits were back then. The top five: Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Volcano,’ by Damien Rice, Muses’ ‘Sunburn,’ Queen’s ‘Killer Queen,’ and Blink 182’s ‘Always’. Ah, those were the days (actually, they’re still sort of here, so let’s not get too nostalgic. . . . ).

In other news, Soundrop has an interesting new service which the company unveiled just before our patriotic holidays. It is called show.co and appears to be a tightly constructed suite of applications for running music campaigns. Show.co manages all the social networking, YouTube and Soundcloud stuff, links to pay download sites, and web/mobile visuals for your group’s latest output. It also appears to be affordable. You can run a single campaign for $19 to $25 a month.

I have not tried this application out, but I appreciate Soundrop’s chat room software for Spotify and Deezer, which make both applications much more social. Based on the quality of that work, I’ll bet that Show.co is worth a try. There’s a free two week trial.

Not a lot else happened this week, InternetDJ-wise. But I now have, without any effort on my part, acquired 113 followers on TuneIn. The problem is that I still don’t know how to communicate with them within TuneIn’s application universe. Any suggestions?

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

The post Revisiting the birth of Scrobbling appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post 8tracks blossoms with user forums appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myspace seems to be making a comeback of sorts. Well, let’s modify that—various news sites are peering into the service and noting with bemusement that it still exists. So Forbes posted this unflattering headline on Friday: “How To ‘Frankenstein’ Your Brand Like MySpace: The Social Network That Refuses To Die.”

C’mon folks, a little kindness please. Since when was declining to keel over such a disgrace? Anyway, the post notes that Myspace has been emailing old users reminding them that it is still around and that in some instances they still have lots of (possibly embarrassing) photos on the site. This got a small portion of the tech blogosphere’s attention. The word “blackmail” began floating around. But the company told the Delhi Daily News that it is just trying to win back past users and “re-engage them through a personalized experience.”

I never had a Myspace account in the first place, so I set one up. And lo and behold, it turns out that Myspace has a rather nice array of radio channels. Basic genres: pop, rap & hip-hop, rock, country, latin, R&B, electronic, alternative/indie-rock, metal, reggae, blues, jazz, classical, and folk. Each genre leads you to an array of sub-genres, for blues: blues radio, traditional blues radio, early American blues radio, and modern electric blues radio.

I’ve been listening. The curation is good. In any event, judge not lest ye be judged. For example, it turns around that some Apple engineers involved in the development of iTunes Radio and Ping preferred listening to Spotify and Pandora. An Apple source told Buzzfeed music that “Everyone’s excuse was it’s because we work on iTunes, running and closing the app after every code change.” But “it’s really because Spotify has all the free music with a real social platform.”

As for Ping, another source says it died for real in 2012 because “Apple was not interested in making a network — they were interested in making a purchase pusher.” So there.

Meanwhile PerezHilton.com is sad that Twitter did not buy SoundCloud.

“This would have been so amazing!” a Saturday post opines. “Listening to music on Twitter, uploading sounds with your tweets, streaming easily from anywhere, sharing songs with your followers!”

Um, here’s the good news Perez, you can already do all those things without the merger. In fact, SoundCloud leads the music social networking world in tweets. And Forbes take notice: Myspace ranks number six on the top ten tweet list.

Here’s another institution that isn’t dead (and I’m glad).

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

The post (Re)discovering Myspace radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

In other news . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just dribbles and drabs of news in the world of social media radio this week. Here are a few items:

Michigan’s The Morning Sun reports that a recent high school graduate of that state has developed an application called “Selocial.” The app allows you to take a picture and then attach 15 minutes of music to it.

“It’s what we call Instagram meets Spotify with on the fly news,” David Baird told the Sun. “Customers can have a learning experience about the music they’re listening to.”

Baird says he has access to a very large music database. I went over to his application’s beta web site and signed up. A message arrived in my email browser moments later: “This is a confirmation that your request for an account at Selocial was received.” Nothing beyond that has happened yet, but I look forward to further developments and will report on them.

Meanwhile, the celebrity gossip website Oh No The Didn’t notes that synthpop producer and techno radio DJ William Orbit has uploaded a new mix titled Alien Insurrection to SoundCloud. God help anybody whose music is mentioned at ONTD; the comments couldn’t be cattier. Some representative snarls: “this is honestly awful. this sounds like the intro music to a 90s teen show,” “but…why does it sound country?,” “orbit is the definition of a one trick pony,” and “it’s kind of like a Ray of Light outtake with really bad vocals. :\ .”

At the risk of being shot at sunrise, I confess that rather like the piece. Here it is.

Speaking of SoundCloud, the service appears to be clobbering the music app scene in Indonesia. In a new survey, 31 percent of Indonesians say they use it, followed by 21 percent using MelOn and 12 percent using Shazam. SoundCloud is also popular in Vietnam and Philippines, albeit not as widely used as domestic applications, such as Vietnam Radio.

SoundCloud doesn’t get near the top three in India, however. That country’s winners: Songs PK, Saavn, and Hungama.

Finally, station XRAY-FM in Portland, Oregon has put out a notice announcing that its website now features lots of on demand content. You can listen to local progressive talker Carl Wolfson’s programs, plus Death Metal aficionados DJ Skull and DJ Bones’ Strike of Death show and a bunch of other neat stuff.

The station is looking for supporters, of course, the first 1,000 of which “will be immortalized as our Founding Members,” the announcement says. “You will be the ones who made XRAY.fm a sustainable part of the Portland radio landscape.” So Portlanders and others seeking immortality should check out XRAY’s contribution page.

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

The post Indonesia loves SoundCloud; in defense of William Orbit appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Pandora is now experimenting with channels sponsored by Kleenex, Taco Bell, and Sketchers. These are called Promoted Stations. Here’s the dope straight from the source:

“Listeners that are part of the beta launch will have these stations auto-populate, one station at a time, in the ‘Stations You Might Like’ sections of their playlists. This allows listeners browsing for their next listening experience to consider a brand’s content alongside existing and other recommended stations.”

A Pandora Kleenex station? . . . yes, the imagination goes wild. Possible song playlist: Cry Me a River, by Arthur Hamilton, Wipe Out by The Sufaris, Red Peters’ Blow Me, You Hardly Know Me, Hilltop Hood’s The Nosebleed Section, Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and, of course, Judy’s Turn to Cry.

Apparently ten percent of Pandora listeners are already subjected to these Promoted Stations. Here’s an ain’t-this-grand quote from Lizzie Widhelm, Vice President for Digital Advertising at Pandora:

“We are relentlessly focused on advertising solutions that enhance both the listener and advertiser experiences. Promoted Stations make it easier for listeners to explore the unique content we create with brands and give advertisers the opportunity to extend the reach of their content, as well as the time spent with their brand.”

Your welcome, Pandora listeners. If Radio Survivor readers have any additions for my playlist, please post them in the comment section below. As for a Taco Bell playlist, sorry, but I’m not going there.

This glorious news makes me further desirous of Pandora alternatives. Sometime around the middle of last week I read that Tunein aspires to become the Twitter of web radio. I love Tunein and this idea and immediately revisited the web/desktop interface to see what’s cooking. Upon signing up I discovered that I can now “follow” stations. But there are problems:

First, Tunein doesn’t make following stations very intuitive. I see that I can click a “+” symbol next to a station, but when I hover over the symbol in my Chrome browser, it doesn’t say follow. So I just guessed that that’s the follow sign. Happily, I was right.

Second, once I follow a station, where is it now on my Tunein account? After some futzing around, I realized that I have to go to my profile page (http://tunein.com/me/). Sure enough, there in the “my library” section I found the stations that I’m following.

Third, I saw that I can create subfolders in my library. So I created folder titled “classical.” But how do I move my classical stations to that folder? I sat around for a spell and then tried the “edit” option. This allowed me to drag my stations in the “general” folder to the “classical” folder.

Yes, there’s a help section that explains most of these things. But at present the software presents casually interested users with two choices: a learning curve that many busy consumers might not have the time or patience to drive around, or a preliminary review of the help pages (same problem).

On top of all this, you can’t really do many Twitteresque things with Tunein at this point. Or at least I couldn’t make them work. I can’t figure out how to share my library with the public. Tunein lets you make comments about the stations, but I can’t cipher how to share them either. I could Tweet comments, of course, and Tunein has Twitter sharing mechanisms. But that’s Twitter, not Tunein.

Bottom line: great concept that needs more upfront help tips and stronger sharing mechanisms. Can’t happen too soon as far as I’m concerned.

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

The post Blowing in the wind? Pandora to launch Kleenex music channel appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am wandering about Grooveshark this week, and there is much to enjoy. Here are some broadcast channels well worth exploring:

Film Scores Too. A very nice continuous stream of movie and personal soundtrack tunes. Very good choices. As I write the room keepers are playing Italian soundtrack composer Ludovico Einaudi’s Una Mattina, a gorgeous piano solo. Next they’re playing Steve Jablonsky’s piece First Transmission . . . great stuff.

Most Beautiful Songs. Not exactly the most original title, but in fact the songs are quite beautiful. Choice selections from Tanita Tikaram, Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, and Dire Straits.

Mandarin Pop. The title says it all. Lots of nice Chinese popular music. I’m hearing lots of talented small ensembles with acoustic guitars. Very listenable; very touching. I wish I could tell you more about this room, but alas, I don’t read Mandarin Chinese.

JP ACG Music. A really good Japanese Pop channel. Its proprietor, @gigyaya, has been running the stream for about a year, which is about when these broadcast channels started. They include chat boards and places where you can suggest songs. They’re quite good, music-wise, although I don’t see a whole lot of chatting.

Meanwhile Digital Music News has an update outlining their version of the company’s strange three year legal battle with Grooveshark over “discovery” server access to the identity of an anonymous commenter on DMN who alleged Grooveshark copyright infringing. Apparently the case is now being heard by a California appeals court.

The scuffle is a chapter in a larger battle between Grooveshark and Universal over whether Grooveshark’s use of unlicensed pre-1972 recordings is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” protections. These provisions shield music sharing companies against lawsuits as long as they take down infringing content that comes to their attention via complaints or their own monitoring.

Universal seems to have won the latest round of this fight. The DMCA was written as an amendment to the Copyright Act, updated in 1971 to extend copyright protection to sound recordings. But a court noted that that the added legal language stipulated that the licensing status of pre-1972 recordings weren’t covered by federal statutes, just state or common law. Thus Grooveshark’s troubles; what fun.

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

The post Mandarin Pop! four great Grooveshark broadcast channels appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The fascinating world of online stuff and online music sharing continues to navigate its strange post-modern course as worried projections about Amazon.com and Pandora Media waft across the news/blogosphere. What do Pandora and Amazon have in common? They function in an environment in which revenue and profits appear to depend on technology, but in fact depend on (or flounder on) government and law.

In the case of Amazon, investors are realizing that the Internet retail giant’s razor thin profit/revenue margins have to a significant degree rested on the entity not paying state sales taxes. “Within a few years, I would expect that substantially every state in the union — or at least all of those with populations large enough to matter to a nationwide retailer — will be collecting sales taxes from Amazon and other online retailers,” writes Charles Sizemore over at Forbes. “The effect on Amazon and holders of Amazon stock is crystal clear: It’s bad.”

Thus The New York Times wonders if the “20-year honeymoon” between Amazon and its investors is coming to an end, as a small army of Wall Street analysts lowered their ratings on the company on Friday.

Similarly, the market is squinting at Pandora and listening to the blunt words of Brandy Betz over at Motley Fool.

“Pandora actually loses money with an increase of listeners, thanks to content-acquisition costs,” Betz writes. This is true. Bette Midler can grump all she wants about how much Pandora pays her in copyright royalties, but the truth is that the streamer’s royalty burden is a lead ceiling over not only its future, but the future of online music. Meanwhile terrestrial radio pays zero zilch nothing in performance royalties to musicians. This has nothing to do with technology and what folklorists like to call “free market capitalism.” It has everything to do with politics.

Where is all this going, online music sharing wise? I don’t know. But there are alternative models to consider.

The YouTube/Soundcloud commons model. In this system the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects these huge music repositories from crippling copyright violation lawsuits, and they lease their libraries to smaller entities, which then share them in interesting and creative ways. This is how plug.dj and 8tracks.com function.

The Bandcamp model. In this system artists post a portion of their music for free and offer the rest of their content for sale. That’s how it works at Bandcamp. Fans can deploy the free content in various interesting online ways, drawing further public interest in the music. Example: go over to the Progressive Rock Music Forum and there you will find various Bandcamp recommendations.

The listener supported model. Basically streamers create interesting musical genres and fans contribute to keep service going. This is the Soma.fm model.

The erzatz all-of-the-above model. The classical music website Sinifini roughly adheres to this approach. It’s basically a smorgasbord of Spotify playlists, YouTubes, interviews, articles, and forums. But, obviously, it’s very dependent on other extant services.

Here’s a model I am less enthusiastic about: the oligopoly throwaway model. Under this system Apple and Microsoft and similar hegemons maintain dreary unimaginative “radio” services that sustainably function because they represent only a tiny percentage of the entity’s costs. See iTunes Radio and Xbox Music as examples. They’re basically second thought online music services that the one ton gorillas have rolled out because, well, wuddever.

All of these models have their exciting and innovative qualities. I’m not sure any of them will work much better than Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify. Was it any better a century ago when the “Big Three” (Edison, Columbia, and Victor) ruled the roost? Good question.

I keep thinking that there’s some public media model that might solve lots of problems, but I haven’t come up with how it might work yet. ‘Oh no,’ you say, ‘that would get the government involved.’ Guess what: it already is.

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

The post If Pandora goes the way of Amazon, what’s next? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’m rummaging around the indie artist site Bandcamp to see if there are any good classical tracks, and there most certainly are:

You have absolutely got to listen to Sly 5th Avenue do a saxophone/violin meditation on a Bach theme. It’s gorgeous. And while we are on that composer, Pianobeat has a really nice album which features an elegant keyboard performance of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire. Dominick Francken has a very soulful rendition of the Prelude from the First Violin Suite. And Dadalus Uggla has an interesting improvisation on the keys B-A-C-H.

And that’s just stuff about Bach I found via Bandcamp’s search engine—there are tons of other composers on the site. Another way to explore Bandcamp is via its “discover” page, which has a classical category. This delivers more complicated results, because you get a lot of content that tags itself “classical,” as in “classic” this or that genre. Still, quite beautiful things come your way, among them a lovely waltz by Christopher Ferreria and an amazing cello ensemble piece by Zoe Keating. If you keep following the thread, you will eventually run into common practice period classical content, such as this elegant performance of Rachmaninoff’s F-Minor Etude by Beste Aydin.

You can also just browse by the tag “classical.” The problem with Bandcamp, from my perspective, is that it is a bit complicated to get started with as a playlist aspiring fan. When I go to the fan signup page, it explains how to get a fan account: “Easy: buy something, support an artist, and we’ll invite you.” So I bought something (the Aydin album) and had to go through a whole I-do-not-want-to-use-Pay-Pal-so-what-do-I-do-now thing. The email receipt indeed included an invite to join and I did. But the way to develop a feed is to follow other fans, and I can’t figure out how to search for fans with tastes similar to mine.

The great virtue of Bandcamp system is that it nudges you to buy content, which is good for artists. But its initial complexity is perhaps one reason why more people listen to SoundCloud (although to be fair, lots more people listen to SoundCloud than many other music sharing applications).

Speaking of which, SoundCloud classical has some awesome stuff coming down the queue (as usual). Here are some classical SoundCloud feed makers to keep an ear out for:

• Ahmed Gado of Mansoura, Egypt. Honestly, I don’t know who is this guy is, but his playlist is just a heavenly cascade of Egyptian classical content: orchestral, Oud, keyboard, old stuff, new stuff. You’ve got to get this Gado dude on your mobile list; he’s awesome.
• Deryn Cullen’s The Cello Companion. A wonderful mix of original compositions for cello, lovely soundtracky stuff, and beautiful renditions of the classics via cellist Deryn and her husband Dan, operating out of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
• City Slang. Really hauntingly sweet music from this hallowed indie record label in Berlin. A brainchild of Christof Ellinghaus, CS became a conduit for US bands looking for audiences in Europe (see The Lemonheads, Ya Lo Tengo, The Flaming Lips).”Hell, we don’t know what makes us jump either,” says the label’s About page. But: “It’s got to be good.”

While I’m on a roll, some nice 8tracks.com classical playlists:

• 8tracks user Sumsa’s The Regret of the Fantasie Impromptu. Chopin, Satie, and very listeneable ambient content via Phillip Glass and Ludovico Einaudi.
• MarieDuplessis’ On the Eve of Revolution. Pre-Bolshevik crackdown classical goodies. The list starts with Tchaikovsky’s neglected masterpiece Valse Sentimentale and just gets better.
• allirpe’s Classical Music for Evil Minds. You knew this list was going to start with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, right?

We started with Bach and we are ending with Bach. Keep sending me news about your classical music radio stations and online classical music sharing/streaming pr1ojects. Follow @radiosurvivor and my classical music twitter feed, @hybridhighbrow.

No classical music next week. I’m going to do an update on various online services and their progress. We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post How to find J.S. Bach on Bandcamp appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Say you’ve got a classical music radio show on some college or public radio station. Like a lot of classical radio deejays, you may be the sole representative of this genre on your signal. Everybody else does a pop genre, or jazz or folk or something along those lines. Under these circumstances, it makes sense for you to set up a website for yourself where you can share news, playlists, and other goodies with your listeners.

Marvin Rosen

Classical pianist Marvin Rosen over at WPRB-FM, housed at Princeton University in New Jersey, is lucky. He’s part of a consistent lineup of classical deejays who regale the Princeton area most mornings. But he’s still got a nice website that’s worth noticing. It’s called Classical Music Discoveries, and it furthers Rosen’s mission, which is to focus on the two areas of the repertory most neglected—the pre-Baroque era, and the modern period.

At Rosen’s Discoveries page, you can listen to his WPRB programs, access archives of various compositions, read his blog, and mosey over to his Facebook page. I think that if you are doing classical radio, it makes a lot of sense to invest in some kind of online venue where your listeners can get more from your program, especially given the relative scarcity of classical radio fare.

Sarah Cahill

Rosen is not the only pianist/radio deejay with a cool website. In the San Francisco Bay Area there’s the very accomplished Sarah Cahill, who broadcasts over KALW-FM. Cahill’s Revolutions Per Minute show is heard on Sunday evenings from eight until ten PM. KALW also airs Music from Other Minds and Jim Sveda’s The Record Shelf. Of course just about every classical music deejay has an official page on their respective radio station, but a tip of the hat here to the ones who go the extra mile and set up their own online presence.

In the coming months I plan to set up a directory at Radio Survivor of classical music shows and radio stations, with an eye towards creating some kind of database driven aggregation of this content for classical music lovers. This will include developers who run classical Spotify playlist sites and such. That’s a big project. In the meantime, help me out by telling me what you are doing to promote your classical music show.

Congratulations, by the way, to The Radio Arts Foundation, which celebrates the one year anniversary of bringing classical music back to St. Louis following the demise of KFUO-FM in July of 2010. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes that RAF’s fare is far more varied and interesting than the old KFUO (I’m listening to the HD stream I write this entry and I agree). On the other hand, the site doesn’t seem to have a program directory and the FM signal is much weaker. But Rome wasn’t built in a day—or a year. What matters is that the music is there, served up with love by real people.

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

The post The art of the classical radio deejay website appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Most Radio Survivor readers have doubtless forgotten my effort to create a hybrid classical music room at plug.dj. Alas, I tried to pull it out of thin air without any of the real life connections you need to make an Internet music chat room work. Happily, someone remembered and brought a new one to my attention: Ost+ Piano and Strings Music. The community has a nice rules page that lays out its mission very clearly. Basically the focus is on music from film, anime, and the classical traditions. So you’ll hear some Chopin, followed by some great anime and game soundtrack tunes. A lot of good spirit among the users, and the community is supported by ClassyBot, a smart room management program.

One of the coolest things about plug.dj is that it has a DJ History feature. This was pointed out to me by Nantes, one of the Ost+ community staff. Just go over to your playlist area, and the top purple colored item should be titled “DJ History.” It is searchable, so community participants can refer each other back to memorable tunes played earlier. I was able to get a real sense of the flavor of the room from this feature. Definitely worth a visit.

While we are on the subject of classical, I am totally digging SoundCloud’s classical channel, which is featuring some amazing stuff. SoundCloud programmer Ahmed Gado from Mansoura, Egypt has been queuing a host of nice slow sensuous Oud/jazz/Hector Villa Lobos-ish pieces. I could listen all day. During my Saturday visit this was followed by Kiev based composer Benzab Abdi‘s Mowlavi Opera. And if that wasn’t beautiful enough, next came a user fan of the exquisite Danny Norbury with selections from his album Light in August.

This stuff is all so great, and when mixed in with traditional classical music (I caught a great track of JRhodes performing an Alkan piece) it is redefining classical music, making it come alive again. While we are at it, a second shout out to WQXR’s Q2 living composers channel. In a recent post I missed mentioning the excellence of Q2 late morning deejay Phil Kline. I caught him the other day and was struck by his eloquence and enthusiasm. The problem is that, situated as I am here in San Francisco, I tend to listen to west coast morning radio shows, rather than the east coast ones. But below check out a YouTube of his community cassette, CD, and mp3 ensemble composition, Unsilent Night.

The pieces’ website describes its origins as follows:

“It all started in winter 1992, when Phil had an idea for a public artwork in the form of a holiday caroling party. He composed a multi-track electronic piece that was 45 minutes long (the length of one side of a cassette tape), invited a few dozen friends who gathered in Greenwich Village, gave each person a boombox with one of four tapes in it, and instructed everyone to hit PLAY at the same time. What followed was a sound unlike anything they had ever heard before: an evanescence filling the air, reverberating off the buildings and city streets as the crowd walked a pre-determined route. Phil says: ‘In effect, we became a city-block-long stereo system’.”

Enjoy! BTW: Reports have it that YouTube is working the release of some kind of SoundCloud-esque service. And Deezer may show up in the USA this year!

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

The post Classical communities at plug.dj: if you can’t make one, join one appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turntable.fm shut down its last component earlier this year: Turntable Live—a concert version of now gone turntable.fm. TT.fm founder Billy Chasen reflected on the end of the Turntable project in a blog entry posted on Wednesday:

“Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups. It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue and a hard industry to work with. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties and services related to supporting music. It’s restrictive. We had to shut down our growth because we couldn’t launch internationally. It’s a long road. It took years to get label deals in place and it also took months of engineering time to properly support them (time which could have been spent on product).”

As I’ve said before, while the actual products that Chasen and his associates created wound up being unsustainable, their online chat room based music sharing concept lives on in services like plug.dj and Soundrop. That is an enormous achievement, for which they should be proud. I was sometimes disappointed at the level of vituperation that was directed at Turntable by various room developers, as if misjudgment isn’t a given for any venture.

The Internet is sometimes compared to the American frontier. If that comparison is apt, a comment by former Colorado governor Dick Lamm seems appropriate. “Failure,” he once said, “is as American as apple pie.” The quote comes from Patricia Limerick’s book Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Path of the American West. “To many Americans, the West promised so much that the promise was almost sure to be broken,” Limerick notes. And no sector of the wild wild ‘Net offers as many breakable promises as online music sharing. Go back to Napster and start making a list. Two hours later you’ll still be working on it.

The reality is that the fate of every major independent online radio service is uncertain. Take Pandora. As we posted last week, a United Kingdom research firm calls the beloved music streamer’s business model a house of cards, largely because of royalty costs.

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

It’s easy to take a hard line on all this. This is what capitalism is all about, right? Entrepreneurs take risks and reap the rewards, or not. But government plays a huge role in the imagined online “free market” music ecology. Many services, including Last.fm and plug.dj now depend on licensing agreements with YouTube.com and SoundCloud for their online content. And like westerners depend on government regulated water systems, these bigger services in turn depend on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to avoid being sued out of business every time some singleton user uploads an illegal video or music file or two. A nice chunk of the economy of FM music radio is about the fact that Uncle Sam doesn’t require music stations to pay performance royalties to musicians. Meanwhile broadcasters endlessly protest the prospect of Federal Communications Commission public interest “mandates” directed at them, such as localism requirements. But they aren’t above broadly hinting at mandates for other industries—such as a directive that mobile phones include FM tuners.

The truth is that the online music sharing environment is laden with uncertainty, unprofitability, and unsustainability for musicians, developers, and consumers. For developers unequally apportioned royalty costs represent a huge growth barrier. This in turn means that the Internet radio sector continues to stall, shortchanging the possibility of meaningful income for most musicians. It also means that many online music services will never get past the Juke Box tune dispenser phase of their development, denying consumers the rich possibilities inherent in true audience based radio.

That’s why eliminating inconsistent and unfair copyright royalty rules is so important. It’s why protecting nascent services from rent seeking ISP practices is crucial—a potential example would be allowing wireless ISPs to set low data caps and then sell music applications the privilege of exempting their data from a consumer’s data use ceiling. And it is why strengthening public media is critical—greater government support for public music radio in all its forms, listener-supported, college, community, and NPR based.

As turntable.fm demonstrated, the market often accomplishes wonderful things, but only up to a point. If online music radio is indispensable to us, shouldn’t we set aside at least some portion of the Internet/FM landscape as a place where failure is not an option?

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

The post Beyond the wild west: government and the future of music radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Plug.dj, the online music/chat room service, has a great blog post on making online communities work. The seven tips go as follows: help your visitors feel welcome from the start; use social media to promote your room; make sure your staff are nice people; post clear community rules and guidelines; be multilingual; stage events for your users; and advertise your site.

I would add an eighth tip—well, maybe it is just an observation. The strongest online communities come from networks of people who know each other off line. I suppose that it is possible to just be one person, have a great idea for a chat based music sharing room, and launch a big hit over the course of a few months. But my experience is that without real off line connections—a network of friends and associates ready and willing to pitch in to make a turntable-style room a success, it often won’t get very far. This is probably true about lots of social media related projects, but is particularly the case with music/discussion rooms.

But maybe you disagee? Comments on this thesis would be welcome. In any event, here are some more items that have appeared on my dashboard over the last week:

The folks at Fist in the Air have posted a new alpha stage music sharing service. It is called bmpur.com, and like a lot of these new web based applications, it is lots of fun, but hard to describe. Basically, once you have registered or logged in via Facebook or Twitter, you can post tunes via YouTube or SoundCloud or blogs or even news links. They become part of your registered identity and other users can follow you, thus following your songs. The aggregate of everybody you follow becomes your “feed,” which cascades down from the top of the web page. So you just sort of pick and choose whatever is descending from the collective audio waterfall and play it (hat tip to Aaron Ho for bringing bmpur.com to my attention).

Milk Music with Dial – Foster the People

Meanwhile, Samsung has come up with a new music application called “Milk Music,” available on the device maker’s Galaxy smartphone line via Google Play. It looks real nice (see image on right). The music comes from Slacker, and the strategy seems to be to create an app that makes genre listening very easy. To wit:

“Milk’s distinctive dial design provides a more intuitive and natural way to listen to music that is more organic and fun. With no log-in required and no need to think of a specific artist, song name or browsing through a list of choices, you can just starting listening to music instantly. From Pop to Jazz and everything in between, the dial displays up to nine genre-based stations featuring a wide variety of music listening choices, with a simple and quick turn of the dial.”

No question about it, this is what lots of consumers want: mobile music curation that they don’t have to jump through hoops and distractions to access—and that includes logins, likes/dislikes, and self-created search based channels. There’s a ton of people out there who just want to get to the tunes, especially when they’re driving to work or at the gym. They’re the opposite of the music chat room crowd; just pick some nice songs for them and enough of the podcasts, personal curation, sharing on Twitter, rooms, lists, playlists, communities, or DIY wuddever.

Last for this post, Rhino Records has a neat 80s playlist on their Spotify app they keep fresh with the assistance of the team at Slicing Up Eyeballs, who focus on “the legacy of 80s college rock.” The list is called “Just Can’t get Enough.” The sliced eyeball experts updated it on Friday. It is definitely worth a listen, as are the other Rhino lists, which include The Monkees, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Joy Division, and The Smiths. Most intriguing, the Rhino app includes “guest musicologist” playlists hosted by individuals identified as “Catherine B,” “Alex P,” and “Joshua F.” Who are these mystery people? And how does one become one?

Got an application, or startup, or playlist or something you want noticed? We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post The secret to great online music room communities: real off line connections appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am enjoying Epic Dance Music, a beta application that draws from SoundCloud searches to create terrific dance playlist stations. Over the weekend I listened to a list riffing off of my initial pick: “Catgroove” by Parov Stelar. This was followed by a Decibel Junkies tune, DJ Trademark’s “Uncontrollable,” MGMT Kids, “BlogsDemodaCE,” Hello’s very amusing “Arrow in the Knee Remix,” and Klayplex, “Lights.”

Epic Dance progenitor Nicholas Abramovic sent us a brief description of the project. “While the website is designed with an EDM [electronic dance music] focus (since there’s a clear lack of discovery in this genre) you can find tons of non-EDM music such as Drake and John Mayer,” Abramovic explained. “Currently we’ve generated over 600k song-specific stations and this list is growing every day.”

In other SoundCloud news: looks like progress is being made on BBCode formatting to embed the SoundCloud music player on PHP/Mysql powered discussion boards. Developer Muhammad Rahman has the announcement up on the vBulletin discussion list. The BBCode formats as so:

[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/jenniferlopez/jenniferlopezliveitup[/SOUNDCLOUD]

You can take a look at a sample embed here. BTW, I totally agree with what the Dope Music blog says: “Despite the numerous bugs and updates experienced over the past year or so, I personally believe SoundCloud is the best music hosting platform there currently is.” SoundCloud is such a terrific resource—full of unpredictable yet high quality stuff. If you are doing anything interesting with the application, please drop me a line.

Meanwhile Plug.dj (which also lets you search through SoundCloud tunes) has announced a couple of improvements to its community turntable room environment. These include the ability to scan the various room communities that your friends haunt, and listing your favorite communities, too. Now users can “filter” communities based on a variety of criterion: friends, population, favorites. Users “favorite” a community by clicking a star next to it on the list.

“This is just the first of many planned updates to the community list to make it easier to find communities relevant to you,” the blog post says. “Fixing the community search (we know it’s unreliable right now) is something we will be tackling soon, as well.”

Interestingly, over at Cult of Mac they’ve concluded that, despite all its troubles, Last.fm is still the best Internet radio music service, especially since it tapped into YouTube and Spotify. Here’s CoM’s bottom line:

“It was only recently that Last.fm was struggling to keep afloat due to the success of other, better supported services such as Pandora and even Spotify itself, with the abandonment of its service altogether in almost every country except the UK, US and Germany, for which it announced its intentions to put its desktop radio service behind a paywall. However, with this most recent collaboration [Spotify], alongside the YouTube partnership, all Last.fm web users worldwide will not only have access to a vast majority of exclusive and obscure music, but they’ll also have the ability to choose from a vast catalog comprising the two libraries, for both free and premium users.”

Interesting. I haven’t used Last.fm much of late. Maybe I’ll run over there and update myself on the improvements. Next week I’m going to write about YouTube’s oddly charming relationship with AM/FM radio stations.

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

The post Epic Dance Music: tapping into SoundCloud dance power appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bret Primack’s Jazz Video Guy YouTube channel has an interesting discussion going about the future of the Jazz radio  deejay. The conversation includes a group of aficionados talking about the fate of the Jazz radio show host.

“When I was a young man, which was in the last century,” Primack began, “I listened to Jazz radio and there were these really dynamic Jazz radio personalities who kind of turned me on to the music. Billy Taylor was one of them. He would play the music and he would talk about it. He had a level of expertise. And he engendered a certain enthusiasm.”

Then Primack turned to his guests, first among them veteran public radio Jazz presenter Thurston Briscoe. “How has jazz radio changed in terms of the on-air personalities interfacing with the audience in terms of information and personality?” he asked.

“There are two thoughts that I have,” Briscoe responded. “One. I think that the audience has changed because they have more choices. The way I instructed the announcers at WBGO [Newark, NJ] is to limit their talk. Don’t give me a five minute explanation as to why you loved that song, when you learned it, what great musicians are playing, because people want to hear the music.”

” You can give them that information,” he added, “that’s what is great about blogs and things like that. So I believe that that’s what helped save BGO from turning people away, because we’re not going on the air for three or four minutes talking about what we played.”

Agreed, said Linda Yohn of WEMU of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Jazz radio today is “much more fast paced,” she noted. “We have learned to self-edit. Our breaks are max about a minute and forty five seconds these days. So the back announce is quick. What is more important is getting people to tune in for what is coming up.”

“It’s not what you just heard; it’s what you are going to hear,” Yohn observed.

Am I the only one in the room who misses Billy Taylor? Listen to the rest of the discussion here.

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

The post Has the Jazz blogger supplanted the old school Jazz deejay? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I assume that I am not the only Radio Survivorist who follows the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. The show is so beloved that 8tracks.com playlists of all kinds have proliferated in honor of the series. A short guide to them follows. But first, a description of the program for the uninitiated.

Welcome to Night Vale is, by its own description, a series of “community updates” via Night Vale’s community radio station. Night Vale itself is a small desert town engulfed in a kind of magical realist, David Lynche-like, spiritual paranoid state. A public service announcement from the pilot show will suffice:

“Good night, night vale,” an 8tracks.com mix by verygibbous

“Hello listeners. To start things off I’ve been asked to read this brief notice. The City Council announces the opening of a new dog park at the corner of Earl and Sommerset. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park. It is possible you will see hooded figures in the dog park. Do not approach them. Do not approach the dog park. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the dog park and especially do not look for any period of time at the hooded figures. The dog park will not harm you.”

Old women see angels, mysterious “scientists” surface, and World Government black helicopters (possibly) hover about. Often events begin with a veneer of normality, and gradually morph into Salvador Daliesque narratives. For example, in a more recent episode, a group of citrus farmers in the area hold a press conference to celebrate a bumper crop of oranges. “John Peters,” the station announcer mentions (“you know, the farmer?”) tells reporters that “Citrus holds the key to prosperity; citrus holds the key to health.”

“One particular orange here literally holds the key to a one sided door in the middle of the desert,” John continues. “If you find that orange, I will pay you dearly for it. Or rather, you will pay dearly for it . . . “

You get the idea, and so do almost 600 subscribers to the 8tracks.com playlist service. These 8tracks mixes have Night Vale appropriate titles such as “Do Not Approach the Dog Park,” “LIT BY NO SUN” and “If you see something say nothing and drink to forget.” They’re very pleasant lists because most foreground slow, noirish tunes that calm and reassure in a Night Vale sort of way.

8tracks user madmattie’s Night Vale playlist.

I particularly recommend “Oh Carlos,” a reference to Carlos the Scientist. Carlos is by far the most popular playlist subject within the Night Vale category. Cecil, the Voice of Night Vale and narrator of the program, allegedly has a crush on him. Other Carlos themed lists include “cecil and carlos” “perfect carlos,” “we don’t understand anymore a cecilxcarlos fan mix,” “cecilios,” “the scientist and the radio personality,” “head over heels,” and “i’m very into science these days“.

Some of the most popular Night Vale mixes include “And now the weather” (61 likes), “i fell in love in an ordinary world” (310 likes), “well done tamika” (371 likes), “our weather” (144 likes), and “God is on the radio” (326 likes). Dark paranoid lists include: “black helicopters,” “vague yet menacing,” and “this town is only gonna eat you.” Too bad there aren’t more lists dedicated to the “Faceless old woman,” but there is “songs to occupy the faceless old woman who lives in your home.”

I haven’t listened to every one of these mixes, but so far I haven’t found one that I did not enjoy. Congratulations to all these 8tracks Night Vale lovers. And kudos to 8tracks for making this kind of fan creativity so easy.

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

The post Welcome to Night Vale: the 8tracks playlists appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some days earlier, news surfaced of another innovation. Last.fm is developing a beta player that accesses music on YouTube for its subscribers. A rather amusing Last.fm YouTube explains the feature, to the bemusement of at least one follower. “So what’s the point of paying a subscription fee if all I get is a YouTube video?” asks Reloaded 211. “I can just go to YouTube and look it up myself. This makes Last.fm pretty much useless.”

Well, not exactly. One gets a very different listening experience at Last.fm than ones does wandering about YouTubeland, and of course the company is experimenting with all kinds of content (e.g., Spotify). Brad Hill over at the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) notes that the YouTube move will save financially struggling Last.fm money.

“The tactical product change saves in the content-cost department, as YouTube handles rights management and royalty payments on the back end,” Hill writes.

But it appears that one ought not to traverse this route without some experience and support. A lone high school student named Luke Li decided that he would just up and develop a listening application that tapped into YouTube and investor beloved SoundCloud, and he got a little tap on the shoulder from the Recording Industry Association of America late last year.

“We demand that you immediately cease making this application available for distribution,” the RIAA wrote to Li. He quickly complied.

“I’m 18 years old, and I definitely do not want to get sued,” Li confessed in a December 31 blog post. “I am not a lawyer, so I’m not sure if this is exactly a cease-and-desist, but I definitely did not want to test the RIAA out on this case.”

To be fair, Li thought what lots of people might think. YouTube is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” policy. As long as the operation keeps a reasonable eye on infringing content and takes down illegal stuff when rightsholders complain, the service is in the clear. So under those circumstances why can’t smart high school kids with programming skills tap into the YouTube API and work their magic? Well, maybe they can. But if Li stuck to his guns, I’m guessing he would have had to prove to a judge and jury that he was keeping a top eye out for illegal content as well, which he probably didn’t have the staff for. So the wise lad resolved to get out while the getting was good.

All this raises larger issues. As better prepared music streaming companies tap into resources like YouTube and SoundCloud (hello plug.dj), these big repositories of audio will slowly morph into what amount to government protected public resources. To recap: the DMCA offers three crucial liability limiting safe harbor provisions to entities that allow user uploads (pdf, see page 12):

• The provider must not have the requisite level of knowledge that the material is infringing. The knowledge standard is the same as under the limitation for information residing on systems or networks.
• If the provider has the right and ability to control the infringing activity, the provider must not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the activity.
• Upon receiving a notification of claimed infringement, the provider must expeditiously take down or block access to the material.

Without these provisions, it is safe to say that YouTube, SoundCloud, and similar entities would get the living bejeesus sued out of them and quickly cease to exist. These DMCA standards have thus far survived two concerted attacks. The first of these was Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google for infringement. Google won round one of this battle, but Viacom has appealed the case. Second was the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a crudely crafted law designed to end run the DMCA. It was stopped by public outrage.

If big sound/video repositories like YouTube and SoundCloud continue to expand thanks to vast armies of citizen uploaders, and more companies tap into them to provide creative services to the public, and the DMCA continues to survive, and the relationship between YouTube/SoundCloud and those smaller companies survives legal scrutiny, we will have come to an interesting place in the development of Internet radio. Entities like YouTube will have become quasi-public resources—state protected reservoirs of audio and video, if you will.

Think lakes, canals, forests, rivers, highways, the air waves. Welcome to the New Audio Commons. Where it goes after that, I am not sure.

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

The post Last.fm and the YouTube commons appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Paul Riismandel suggested that I take 8tracks.com for a spin. I am enjoying it—a versatile playlist application that interfaces with at least half a dozen other social networking systems, including YouTube, SoundCloud, and Wikipedia. I get an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feeling with 8tracks, which exemplifies the direction that many social networking music apps are moving towards—maximizing connectivity between users and with other applications.

Let us suppose that you are doing your math homework. Log into the 8tracks web app (there’s mobile, but best to start on your desktop), click “explore,” then select some of the tags offered, or type in your own. If you choose “math,” then add “homework” . . . voila! You get a user playlist (or “mix”) titled “Love & Mathematics.”

It’s the “perfect mix,” the creator says “for sitting at your desk doing math homework or making love with the lights off. For getting productive or reproductive.”

Feeling tough and hyper-competitive? I selected the tags “pregame” and “badass” and got a playlist titled “Leather and Beer,” very focused on the Arctic Monkeys.

You can make your own mix via 8tracks’ library. Or you can log into your SoundCloud account and add tunes from there. I’ve got an 8tracks playlist titled “La Belle Epoque,” dedicated to late-19th and early 20th-century classical composers. It has twelve “likes” so far, but that may only be because 8tracks mistakenly added it to its “Emo” music categories list.

In any event, once you’ve created a mix, you can share it via 8tracks interfaces. You can Facebook it, Google Plus it, Pinterest it, Tweet it, and embed it (as per the above right and below). You can play portions of your playlist on YouTube if the tune has a matching video. When tunes queue up, Wikipedia entries on performers and composers sometimes appear. You can create “collections” of mixes. You can comment on mixes.

There’s an iPhone version, an Android version, and a Windows mobile version. 8tracks is free. You can get it without ads, of course, but for $$$. Here’s another of my playlists: “Noir Music.” Enjoy!

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

The post 8tracks: the kitchen sink playlist app appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I teach history courses at a big university in California. Classes started three weeks ago. One of mine takes place in one of the largest lecture halls on campus. I walked into the room, which holds almost 200 people, and there on the corner of a front desk sat two CDs, one by Tom Waits, the other by Joyce Manor.

I immediately wanted to put them in my bag, especially the Waits album. It was “Rain Dogs,” one of my favorites, because it contains his amazing noir song “Walking Spanish,” which I am pretty sure is about being on death row. But I knew that taking them away would be wrong. Somebody surely will come back and pick them up, I thought. So I left the CDs on the table.

Second class: they somehow migrated to a corner desk that functions as a lost and found spot. There they sat, alluringly, waiting for their true owner to return.

Third class: they’re were still there! But I’m a man of principles, so fuggetaboutit.

Fourth class: I gave up. Gimme those CDs. “It’s day four folks!” I declared to my class. “I’m taking these CDs! Sorry!”

I heard a few “doh”s and groans among the students, but mostly they were pretty meh about the announcement. “What gives?” I thought to myself. Thousands of kids from multiple classes have walked past that podium with those yummy looking CDs sitting there for weeks. Nobody took them. Why?

I came up with two theories. Theory one: they’ve never heard of the artists. I asked some of them about Tom Waits. Sure enough, he drew blanks at the student cafe. I felt a bit old. But one kid sort of remembered. “He’s the guy with the gravely voice, right?” Right, I said, and did an imitation of his song “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” They all knew him now and laughed. And I surmised that even if they lacked knowledge of the artists, curiosity would prompt at least a few of them to take the CDs.

So I tested Theory Two: these kids are so hooked up to Spotify or some similar service that who cares about CDs any more? I asked around. Yes, we use Spotify, a majority of them told me. Faculty too, actually (with a slightly guilty tone among some with whom I spoke).

Anyway, I took the CDs home and I put one in my desktop. It prompted me to decide which application I would use to listen. I was not sure. It’s been a while since I audited a CD on my home computer, I realized. But I’d like to listen to Tom Waits, I thought.

Maybe I’ll just use Spotify . . .

The post Unclaimed Tom Waits CD: am I old or is it Spotify? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am perusing various radio production related Indiegogo campaigns. There are so many that it is hard to keep track of them as they come and go. Some succeed. Others flop. Still others have trouble getting above about 65 percent of their goal. The good news is that Indiegogo lets you keep whatever money you raise. We’ve already written about Radio Free America’s campaign to develop a platform that helps put college and community radio station online with steady live streams and on-demand archives. Now RFA has raised its $20,000 goal, almost two weeks ahead of schedule.

Here are some other open campaigns:

Subhash Kateel’s Let’s Talk About It radio campaign is still active. The show, which deals with issues like immigration, gun violence, and similar topics has run for the last three years on Miami’s business station, WZAB (880 ” the Biz “). “Now, we are looking to build a new home,” LTAI’s Indiegogo project page says. “We want to create our own studio space and buy our own equipment that will allow us to broadcast the real talk that you have come to expect whenever and where ever we want and you need.” This campaign seems to be doing well. As of this writing it has reached 70 percent of its $8,000 goal.

Then there is the Pissed Off Radio Underground Compilation Volume I. Pissed Off Radio describes itself as a “DIY weekly radio show that plays  unsigned and independent punk, hardcore and metal. It began as a hobby, explains host Ken Kelleher, but “when a few people started actually listening, I figured I could do some good with it.” PO’d Radio then got a bunch of Punk and Hardcore bands to contribute tunes for an anthology. All the money goes to St. Jude’s hospital for kids with cancer. So far PO’d Radio has reached $708 of its $1,000 goal.

Other open campaigns: Loud Mouth interactive RV mobile radio wants $85,000 for new equipment for an RV mobile station; San Francisco Bay Area KCSM jazz deejay Jim Bennett is running a campaign to fund his live local jazz recording project; the TMOTTGoGo Internet Radio Station wants to expand its live programming; Aloha Radio Theater in Kihei, Hawaii is producing a pilot program to publicize its work, Radiofrequez.com needs cash to upgrade its studio; Block Report radio is running a campaign for an Internet radio station.

The rest of the campaigns on this list are closed.

The Survival Radio Network offers shows about the challenges of running a small business: “SRN also serves other genres ranging from women’s empowerment, indie music, arts, life coaching, meta physics, holistic medicines and much more,” the project page notes. The Indiegogo campaign sought funds for radio equipment, campaign costs, and a permanent studio location. By October it reached 53 percent of its $1,000 goal.

The members of Autonomous Interactive Radio said they were raising cash for a plane ticket to Ljubljana, Slovenia to attend a conference panel at that city’s Digital Media Workshop. “Then we will make our own community radio in Nairobi, Kenya,” the project page continued. AIR is backed by arts organization Wasanii Mtaani Ni Sisi, a coalition of more than 50 artists from various tribes based in Nairobi. “We provide a platform for underground Emcees who are both visual and verbal artists while at the same time creating positive social change in our society.” The campaign made $595, sixty percent of its goal.

By July of 2013, Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio 2.0 had raised a bit over $11,000, around 64 percent of its funding objective. “For over seven years,  Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio  has been the leading voice in bringing the mysteries of ancient Gnosticism and other alternative traditions to a modern meaning,” the Aeon Byte campaign page began. But: “With the demands and opportunities of a changing landscape in media and technology, Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio needs to adapt in order to reach farther and even survive.” The project sought $17,500 to update Aeon Byte’s website, release a new version of its book Voices of Gnosticism, obtain better software, and computer equipment.

Blunt Youth Radio hails from Portland, Maine. “Every week, we create a live show from scratch—hosting, producing and engineering—taking on topics that interest us, from our own perspectives,” noted the project page. “We’re raising money to fund an epic trip to the Digital Waves Youth Media Festival in NYC. Not only is the festival an awesome opportunity to meet other youth producers, learn from professionals, and hone our craft as media makers—but we’ve also been invited back to host our signature event—the Media Slam.” The campaign ended in October of 2012 and reached a little over half of its $2,000 goal.

Maui, Hawaii based BSOS – Camp Exotica Radio is a live streaming Internet and Low Power FM radio station. “We are looking to fund the first year of broadcasting and live streaming on the internet,” the campaign page explained. The project sought funds for a remote broadcasting studio, automation software, hosting/streaming, a micro broadcaster license, and station hardware. By February of 2012 it had raised $1,260 of its $2,500 goal.

Other campaigns: Old Time Radio, the Web series raised about 60 percent of its goal; the Save Local Radio T-shirt fundraiser took in $325 of its $500 goal.

Read about more projects by inputting “radio” into Indiegogo’s search engine. We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Indiegogo awash with radio production campaigns appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, I bought an Xbox One with Kinect over the holidays. I’m trying to remember how I talked myself into the purchase—something about being able to communicate with my TV via voice. “Xbox! Go to Skype!” I commanded. It worked, except I didn’t have anyone to Skype with at the moment. “Xbox!” I declared. “Go home!” (this reminded me of a movie). Then Xbox explained that it wanted me to create an avatar and a tag. So I did. Then I downloaded one of those horrible fighting games and deleted it in fifteen minutes.

Impulse purchase, my Superego scolded. “Is this all there is?” I asked out loud. In response, Xbox mysteriously moved me several pastel green Xbox boxes to the right, at which point I noticed Xbox Music, which offered me a one month free subscription, which I took. Here’s the thumbnail assessment of Xbox Music. The sound is really good: excellent out of my Sony HDTV and even better than Spotify on my desktop and Android. And if you are looking for a less visually complicated interface than Spotify, Xbox Music is for you. Basically you get your options plus a big overhead screen that wants you to check out artists like Lourde and Kanye West. Very sleek.

But beyond that, Xbox Music doesn’t offer anything new. You can search for stuff and make playlists and listen on your Android or iPhone. You can share your tracks on Facebook (not Twitter as far as I can tell). You can type in some category and you’ll get a “radio” station based on your choice. But at this point I’m guessing that eight out of ten folks will ask why they should pay $9.99 a month for this instead of just listening to Pandora gratis.

The thing is that Xbox Music could be so much more if Microsoft thought about it like the company thinks about games. Xbox Live games are all about sharing. You can play them with friends by searching for their tags and adding them to your friends list. You can follow other game players or get followers. Why should these options be limited to gaming?

My sexy Xbox avatar: finster237.

So three suggestions for Xbox Music.

First, make it accessible for anyone who maintains an Xbox Live subscription. It is hard to imagine that Xbox Music is going to pick up that many subscribers based on a monthly fee of $9.99. After all, Pandora One is $3.99. At least give Xbox Live subscribers a substantial discount.

Second, integrate Xbox Music into the friends and followers system. Your followers should be able to access your playlists and chat with you as you pick tracks and listen to them. You can receive “achievement” points for doing various things with Xbox Music (such as adding a certain number of playlists). Adding friends to Xbox Music should also qualify you for achievements.

Third, integrate Xbox Music into the games themselves. Xbox should offer you the option of using your Xbox Music playlist as an alternative to a game soundtrack (assuming that there is one).

The social experience on Xbox Live is immensely complex, while the same experience on Xbox Music is comparatively poor. Perhaps if Microsoft thought about music the same way that it thinks about games, we might all enjoy a much more musically rich Xbox experience.

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

The post Memo to Microsoft: think of Xbox Music as a game appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Hallowed New York City classical radio station WQXR’s “Q2” channel is now well over three years old. I am a big fan of the service. It is one of the few places in the classical music radiosphere in the United States where you can consistently listen to a high quality stream of contemporary classical music on a 24/7 basis. Let me dispense with my mixed feelings about classical radio in general before getting to the unqualified praise section of this post.

I believe that contemporary classical music should be integrated into the larger classical music picture. Instead, most classical radio stations restrict themselves to a very limited and conservative version of the “common practice period” of classical music. You hear lots of Baroque (Bach), Classical (Mozart), and Romantic (Chopin) content on these stations, but not much else. Pre-Baroque content is filtered out because it is mostly vocal and most classical operations avoid music that foregrounds the human voice. Post-Romantic content is filtered for anything that smacks of twelve-tonalism, non-western scales, pop music hybridity, prepared instrumentation, and, of course, the human voice again.

The result is that your typical classical music radio station functions as a sort of a portable easy listening museum for the work cubicle. This is unfortunate and sad. Real classical music is the music of God, of history, of nations, of utopia, dystopia, empire, and revolution. It is a wonderful conversation about the past, present, and future of the human race full of tone poems, operas, sonatas, symphonies, song cycles, and solo performances. But for a long time San Francisco’s principal classical music station adopted the very odd motto “Everyone Remain Calm.” This has nothing to do with real classical music. Ludwig von Beethoven did not want everyone to remain calm. “Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman,” Beethoven famously declared.

WQXR’s main FM signal in NYC more or less adheres to the cubicle approach, albeit better than most. Consider some of the Tuesday, December 3 schedule. You’ve got your Gluck, your Berlioz, your Chopin, and your Haydn. Looking for some 20th century sounds? There’s Richard Rogers and, to the station’s credit, the neglected composer William Grant Still. But beyond that the adventurous will find little of cheer.

But let us be fair—many classical radio stations barely make ends meet these days. They’ve been dropping like flies recently; see KDB in Santa Barbara, Wilmington Bach in North Carolina, and KXTR-FM in Missouri (now an Internet station). So it is understandable that the survivors have adopted risk averse, narrow format strategies, even if those strategies don’t always save them.

In that context, WQXR’s Q2 is a welcome adaptation and compromise. It is separate from WQXR proper, but still very accessible. You can listen to it via the HD2 channel of WQXR 105.9 FM, or via a 128k audio stream from your desktop, or via iTunes or Tunein.

Q2 has a variety of program hosts, all of whom are passionate and expert about 20th and 21st century classical music. My favorite show is The Brothers Balliett, identical twin composers and performers who say that they “work tirelessly to one-up each other. This drive creates a self-fueling passion to write the best work, listen to the best music, and learn as much as possible.” I strongly recommend reading their “ten point manifesto,” which begins with “We are the Brothers Balliett” and ends with “We believe in the groove.” Then there is “Sample Rate,” which explores “adventurous sonic manipulations,” and “Hammered,” a show dedicated to keyboard music.

As these program descriptions suggest, Q2 plays avant-garde content, but not too much. Lots of wonderful tonal music pervades the stream. Right now the station is broadcasting its “new music countdown.” Q2 listeners were asked to send in their favorite compositions of the last 100 years. They were broadcast through the weekend and into this week. Here are the last ten compositions played (last time I checked):

78. Kaija Saariaho – L’amour de loin
77. Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 7
76. Igor Stravinsky – L’histoire du Soldat
75. Edgard Varese – Poeme Electronique
74. John Adams – Short Ride in a Fast Machine
73. Edgard Varese – Ionisation
72. Caroline Shaw – Partita for 8 Solo Voices
71. Alban Berg – Lyric Suite
70. John Adams – The Chairman Dances
69. György Ligeti – Atmospheres
68. Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 6

In an ideal broadcasting world, these great pieces would stream alongside Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I am grateful for Q2 and its innovative bid to keep contemporary classical music alive. You can contribute to WQXR’s Q2 here.

Further reading: a scholar’s assessment of WQXR and its website. We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Classical segregator or savior? The case for Q2, WQXR’s online “living composers” channel appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Shortly after we posted my review of Soundrop, Spotify’s chat room application, Soundrop marketing Vice President Thomas Ford wrote to us. “I think you published just a few weeks too soon,” he observed. “We’re planning to launch the new Spotify app tomorrow [December 17]. I hope it helps solve some of the interaction issues by making the chat more noticeable and not on a slider.”

And indeed, the new Soundrop is greatly improved. The screenshot below shows a much more integrated application, with chat, user votes for songs, and pretty much everything else on the same screen (click the image for a full screen picture). Activities are easier to keep track of. The app is no longer overwhelmed by the rest of the Spotify user interface.

Indie Wok: a Soundrop room on Spotify

The Android Soundrop application

You can also access Soundrop on your Android mobile via Google Play (that is, if you’ve got Spotify Premium mobile service). In addition to “Live” mode, in which songs get played based on user votes, a feature called “Top Tracks” lets you play the the most popular 50 tracks from the room’s history. Soundrop calculates Top Tracks by noting which tunes get “starred” by Spotify users.

Finally, some rooms will get help with metrics, including the “total number of streams, unique listeners, number of tracks starred, number of tracks added and number of votes,” according to the press release that we received. I’m not sure how Soundrop will decide which rooms will get that bonus, but I’m betting that performance will be a factor.

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

The post Better Spotify chat rooms with updated Soundrop appeared first on Radio Survivor.

brandwatch.com

A new survey by Brandwatch reconfirms earlier findings about United States radio stations and Twitter—the relationship could be a lot more dynamic, particularly for commercial music radio stations.

Here is some of the Brandwatch data:

• Only around 0.06 percent of radio listeners tweet about a US radio station. “This is 10 times less frequently than listeners in the [United Kingdom],” the study notes.
• Radio station followers are far more likely to interact with a DJ’s Twitter account than the account of the DJ’s radio station—around 54 percent more likely. The downside of this is that DJs “were also more likely to be negatively discussed.” Interestingly, most on air hosts don’t tweet much about their radio station per se. “Of all DJ’s tweets, only 5.5 percent are about radio.”
• “Radio stations are not interacting with their listeners; instead 75% of their interactions are with celebrities and brands.”
• “Tweets that mention brands receive less interaction from fans.”
• The radio stations that Brandwatch studied tweeted around seven times per week. That was much less than UK stations: on average 46 times a week.
• US radio stations tend not to tweet on the weekends: “Stations are cutting down frequency of tweets over the weekend, which doesn’t pose a problem with sleepy Sundays, but effectively [misses] out on Saturday’s popularity for audience twitter activity.”
• TV broadcasters do a lot more tweeting than radio broadcasters: “Over half (52%) of official TV show Twitter accounts engage with fans compared to just 26 percent of radio stations.”

Some of Brandwatch’s findings are very close to those of a study conducted last year by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University.

“The use of social media is now almost universal in TV, with all categories going near or into the 90-percentile range,” the report concluded, but while “radio continues to make strides in the use of social media,” it “remains well behind television.”

Given the new Brandwatch report, I’m not sure I see a whole lot of striding. It’s not like Twitter users aren’t trying to communicate with radio stations. Earlier this year I did a search of the phrases “hey radio station” and “hey radio stations” and “hey radio” on Twitter, and got an eyeful.

Some of the tweets:

“Hey radio. There are a lot of songs other than Ho Hey and that god awful Bruno Mars song. Just sayin.”

“Hey radio, give Dustin Lynch a break. I’ve heard “Cowboys and Angels” about 17,467,500 times today.”

“Hey radio there’s more artist then just Rihanna Justin bieber and Kesha just thought I’d let you guys know”

“Hey radio can you play Diamonds by Rihanna 30 more times? Not sure I’ve heard it enough.”

PS: Don’t get the twit-o-sphere started on Rush Limbaugh. In any event, there are a lot of ways to interpret the US radio station/Twitter disconnect. One obvious motivation may be a desire on the part of commercial music radio station managers to avoid spontaneous interactions with listeners, as evinced by the typical commercial music station’s listener-free air sound.

This thesis is supported by another of the Brandwatch survey’s observations: “[N]egative tweets about a station mostly go without response from the station, possibly further embittering the unhappy listeners.” The study was based on an analytics sample of 35,000 mentions of radio stations over the summer of 2013.

Hat tip to Brad Hill of RAIN.

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

The post Commercial music radio, DJs, and Twitter: why the disconnect? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

SoundCloud is five years old as of last month. There are two kinds of radio on the application. You can access established radio networks that archive their shows on SoundCloud. For example, you can listen to BBC World Service Radio, which is a mix of BBC public affairs shows,  including my favorite: World Have Your Say.

But you can also tune into independent deejay mixes that self-identify as radio stations. These are somewhat harder to find. If I search “radio” within the SoundCloud application, I tend to get established broadcasters. But if I search “soundcloud radio” on Google, I get extremely fun dance radio stuff, including . . .

Radio Yacht: a postpunkish mix of tunes produced by acclaimed album-makers Jona Becholt and Clare L. Evans. “We currently live in Los Angeles, California, but we both grew up in Portland, Oregon , and consider Marfa, Texas to be our ‘spiritual home’,” they say on the Team Yacht website. “These three places come together to form what we lovingly refer to as the Western American Utopian Triangle.” (Check out @yacht’s new single “Party at the NSA,” which features a guitar solo by comedian Marc Maron).

Pro Era Radio: a very elegant rap channel; its principals hail from Brooklyn, New York. Much of the content comes from Joey Bada$$, CJ Fly, and Nyck Caution; pro Era Tumblr page here.

Pacha Recordings Radio: AngelZ (Angel Zorilla), who hails from Ibiza, Spain, is the fireball behind Pacha Recordings (the “true sound of Ibiza”). Every track is a beautiful extended one hour disco mix, with Pacha and staff periodically IDing the stream in English and Spanish. He’s also got a YouTube channel and a podcast.

Too Good for Radio: TG4R is an EDM [Electronic Dance Music], Hip Hop, and Indie network. “Listening, sharing, and talking about music makes us happy,” the station’s web site says, and identifies Jared Smith as its founder and CEO. Plus: “He’s won the Nobel Peace Prize.. twice.” Wow. Congrats on the Peace Prize, Jared—also on this nice SoundCloud channel, speaking of which . . .

The Mashup Radio: This SoundCloud channel is (big surprise) all about mashups. If you go to themashupradio.com, there’s even more: mashup TV, interviews, podcasts, and events, but it’s too much for an old guy like me. I just love the SoundCloud station, which is simple and focused.

Laid Back Radio: The Laid Back project (LDBK) was born in Brussels in 2002 as a weekly radio show. Now it’s an online radio station and an urban music SoundCloud mix that streams very enjoyable tracks. “We also advise artists and organisations on how to develop their online communication and re-think their (digital) activities,” the group’s profile notes.

I could listen to these radio stations forever. Megakudos to SoundCloud for creating the platform where they rule. BTW: I cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature. Tell me about some more.

The post Six awesome SoundCloud dance radio stations appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I spent some of this weekend up to my nose in Soundrop, a Spotify chat room application. Soundrop has been available for about two years. I wouldn’t call the feature competition for plug.dj or its predecessor, Turntable.fm, but it is around and worth knowing about if you are a Spotify fan.

To access Soundrop you need a Spotify account, of course, and also access to either Facebook or Twitter. I’ve got all three applications. When I clicked Soundrop’s “Get Soundrop” button, it took me to another page with a “get on Spotify” link. Clicking that activated my Windows based Spotify program. I signed in and let Soundrop install on my version of Spotify as an app.

You need to sign into Facebook or Twitter to get full use of Soundrop—specifically the ability to add tracks, vote, and chat in the rooms. Once you’ve logged in via one of these social networks, you can fully explore the Soundrop universe.

Immediately upon signing in the feature offers you a variety of rooms: genre rooms, theme rooms, and popular rooms—the latter defined as rooms with lots of Spotify users in them. I jumped into a space titled “Indie Wok,” which defines itself as a “mix of all things Indie.” Last three picks of the room as I write: Franz Ferdinand, Joy Division, and the Arctic Monkeys. It’s a nice sound.

How do Indie Wok tunes get queued? Click “add track” and add a song to the play list. Indie Wokkers then vote on your suggestion. The tracks with the most votes get to the top of the play list. I can literally see songs I’ve voted for elevate up the queue.

This is an interesting and in some ways more positive method of programming a room. There’s no “dislike” or in plug.dj’s case “meh” button anywhere. Tunes get voted on before they play, not afterwards.

But if you are really looking for online chatting while music plays, I’m not sure that Soundrop is your best choice. Although Indie Wok had 139 visitors when I came by, nobody was chatting. Indeed, “nobody is here,” somebody strangely told me in the chat box. I’m not exactly sure what that meant, but I dropped by some electro and dubstep rooms and didn’t pick up a lot of discussion there either.

Also, Soundrop doesn’t make much of an effort, visually speaking. There’s no attempt to construct some sense of a physical room with deejays spinning disks. To be fair, it would be very difficult to create that kind of presence within Spotify’s overbearing metastructure.

Still, Soundrop greatly improves Spotify for me. Although I like Spotify’s play list feature, I don’t normally want to park myself in some music app and play tunes I know over and over again. And I don’t want some database algorithm doing it for me either. Call me an old fashioned romantic, but I still think that music is better with humans making the choices.

Other features: you can “favorite” a Soundrop room and it will appear at the top of your room directory. You can turn the rooms’ latest offerings into a Spotify play list. You can share a room as a web URL. And you can create your own room. That’s Spotify/Soundrop in a nutshell.

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

The post Dropping by Soundrop: Spotify’s chat room feature appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Turntable.fm‘s latest blog post reached my inbox on Friday. It focused on Turntable Live, a new feature in which Turntable room participants interact on a real time basis with bands. Then came this last distressing paragraph:

“As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the Live experience. It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs. If we also want to give Turntable Live a real shot, we need to fully focus on it.”

I’ll save the decline and fall analysis until later in this post. What is important to note first is what turntable.fm accomplished.

Much of what passes for “radio” on the Internet is nothing of the sort. Yes, you get to listen to anything you like, but all by yourself. There is no deejay; it is not live; and there is no audience to speak of—unless you think that millions of people isolated from each other listening to different tunes constitutes an audience. Call that radio if you want. I call it the Automated Music Industry, which offers something that boils down to Bowling Alone with headphones.

Billy Chasen, Seth Goldstein, and the rest of the turntable.fm team made a huge splash in 2011 by demonstrating that online radio can be more than your own personal Fortress of Solitude. They did so by inventing something that can be roughly described as distributed deejaying. Turntable.fm software allowed users create dance club atmosphere “rooms” and share the task of playing songs for each other while chatting—the tunes uploaded or derived from a database. I was a bit of an anomalous user. In 2011 and 2013 I spent many happy hours in tt.fm’s single classical music room, Classical of Any Kind, sharing great music with a cohort of students who appeared to be mostly from the University of Colorado. But I also visited the jazz and world music rooms, where the content and company was outstanding. Sometimes I even ventured into the huge electronica rooms, just to share in the youthful frenetic joy.

You had to be there in 2012, hanging around in DJ Wooooo’s amazing house/electro room. Turntable.fm was nothing less than a discovery, an invention, a breakthrough.

But tt.fm also faced many challenges. Aside from how to provide and pay royalties for music, audience retention quickly became an issue. In 2012 Goldstein candidly acknowledged the problem at a social media conference in San Francisco, noting that he wished the service was more “background.” Turntable.fm is “really engaging for a small community,” he observed. “Because typically, if you use Turntable, you go in and you get addicted, and spend four days of your life not doing much of anything else. And then you say, ‘I just can’t do this any more. I’ve got to get back to my life.’ Right?”

The operation then launched a more “background” site, Piki.fm, but it failed. Next the group ended user uploads and allowed SoundCloud searches. That saved money, but apparently not enough. On top of all that, it appears that the service never resolved how to accommodate the multitude of requests for changes, extensions, or alterations of the software coming from users full of ambitions for their rooms.

I asked online music web developer Aaron Ho for his perspective on turntable.fm’s relationship with its “power” users, Ho prominent among them for a while. He prefaced his comments with respect. “I do love turntable.fm and I think it helped many artists and in general had many very cool things about it,” Ho noted, but:

“Besides the core reasons that TT is shutting down (cost of running it compared to monetization), the biggest loss has been the user base. The user base I feel left because of stagnation of the site and the overall lack of user input being added to the site.  For the first year of the site many features were requested by the users and these feature requests were ignored.  When features were added they were completely novel and not at all what the users requested.  When users were requesting multiple playlists we got stickers.  When users were requesting the ability to customize the room we got the ability to zoom.  Many of the features users requested were quite simple to code, for example the ability to have room information and change it was a great feature to add, but it did not happen [until] after the site had been going for over a year.  The stagnation of the site lead to many users and power users getting bored with the site.  Even the power users that were there from the start and help to spread the site from the start just ended up leaving.  Communities and friendships that had formed initially on the site went elsewhere or just died out.   As less and less users appeared and daily room numbers dropped the overall quality of the music also dropped.  Power users that would search hard for music just stopped bringing new music.  With there being no reason to play music (points being useless other than bragging rights, people stopped caring).   Without power users room modding became harder and harder. It became less and less worthwhile for mods to stay and police rooms.  This helped to bring down communities that had built up around the rooms.  When users of rooms were just randoms, chatting quality and talking went down and less and less people cared to do things together.

From the stand point of a blog / site owner (http://www.sosimpull.com), TT become less and less useful for promotion.  Many sites and users would bring new artist in to do events.  In the beginning the events were fun, but very very hard to accomplish due to all the rules set in place by TT.  For example many artists that were playing their own music were not allowed to tag them with there artist name because after so many plays of a song by the same artist the song would just skip.  Many new artist that never used TT had troubles with this.  They would not understand why their songs were skipping and many times we would have to have the artist change the meta data of their MP3s while the event was going on.  This made events not run smoothly and in general made TT, the artist, and event organizer looked unprofessional. As that went on it became harder and harder to get events and many times artist would just refuse to do an event because TT would not turn off these rules.  I myself sent quite a few request weeks before the event to try and get the rules turned off or at least to not skip songs. (This did get fixed over time, but still was not the best fix and required talking to a gatekeeper to help you out).  For a while it was even hard to get TT to even market or announce events, this changed, but still was not the easiest process.  With all the work it took to get events going and the total lack of promotion by TT or customization of the room to help promote the artist or even organizer all of the events just became a work of love, rather then a tool of promotion for the event organizer/site/business.

Without users that loved the site TT become more and more boring.  TT wouldn’t have gotten as big or would it have been as functional without users giving time to better TT.  TT to me was unusable from the start without browser extensions.  Rooms and Events were also almost undoable without having bots (made by the users themselves) to control who could get up, for how long, and to boot/ban users there were just trolling the rooms.   So I guess in conclusion, to me, the fall of TT was an example of lack of taking user input and putting it to use.”

In addition to all this, by early this year turntable.fm faced competition in the form of a new and similar service, plug.dj. Around the time when Piki closed, my tt.fm stories started getting comments like this: “And so the exodus from TT to plug.dj continues. Plug.dj has been slowly bleeding TT dry of all their users. It’s no wonder with a more responsive support team! A little customer service goes a long way IMHO.”

As sympathetic as I am to user frustration, turntable.fm deserves more than bitterness as its epitaph. I doubt that Plug.dj would exist had tt.fm not launched its pioneering user interface. I hope that Turntable Live thrives. Beyond that, I am sure that scholars will identify Turntable as a breakthrough moment in the history of Internet radio, one that will be built upon in a myriad of wonderful ways.

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

The post What Turntable.fm accomplished appeared first on Radio Survivor.