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Turn on the radio

Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 12:23

Brian Heywood looks at the potential of Internet radio for both mass and niche markets

Even so, this approach does give you features that aren't available to the traditional broadcaster. For instance, if you like the track you're hearing you can click on a link on the playlist to find out more information, or even directly purchase the album online. The more traditional programmes also benefit from being on the Internet, since the programme is supported by web content giving more information and links to websites or artists mentioned. The only real downside is that you have to be seated at your computer to be able to hear these programmes, although this is probably more of a indictment of the shortcomings of the browsers supplied on mobile computers and phone devices than anything else.

On top of the production, administration and hosting costs, the cost of licensing for this kind of station is far from insignificant. The minimum cost for this level of programming is around £650 a quarter, with just over two-thirds of this going to the PRS/MCPS LOEL and the rest going to PPL. This money has to be paid upfront to the licensing authorities and then compared against the actual statistics that are submitted by the station after the transmission. If you generate more than your predicted royalty payments - say because you've gained more listeners than you expected - you'll have to retrospectively pay a top-up fee. Alternatively, if you generate less royalties than expected there's no refund and the collection agency gets to keep it - a classic 'heads I win, tails you lose' situation.

Pandora.com

Another interesting approach to the web radio theme comes from an American outfit called the Music Genome Project. Since the year 2000, it's been creating a database of over 10,000 different artists, ranging from the popular to the completely obscure, and analysing the tracks to define them in terms of their musical 'genes'. These are the attributes that define their musical identity - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics and so on. All this information is encapsulated within an automatic playlist generator called Pandora, which interrogates you about tracks or artists you like. Then using the Music Genome database it can generate a list of tracks that fit in with your music preferences, not limited to the artist you specify.

The tracks are played back using a Flash-based player, which lets you provide continuous feedback so Pandora can tweak your playlist according to your preferences, as well as giving you an opportunity to purchase the music if you want. This provides one of the main benefits of listening to the radio - that is, hearing new music - while also giving you some control over the playlist (and incidentally eliminating one of the most annoying aspects of radio, the DJ). Unfortunately, you can't actually fully use this service unless you have a valid US ZIP code, as the music licensing means they can only offer the service to US residents. However, they say that they're working on internationalising the service.

Copyrights and Wrongs

It isn't really surprising that copyright owners want to protect their intellectual property assets, especially on something as portable as a music file. Sometimes they go over the top, as shown by Sony's recent Digital Right Management debacle in the US. But despite this, it's possible to use the Web to get a far broader connection between artist and listener than ever before. And it's not just the professional artist that can take advantage of this technology. Consider that, historically, some of our most famous artists were part-timers - Holst had a day job as a teacher and Robert Burns was a civil servant. And Internet radio is only one way of getting your music out; podcasting and download services are very effective too and have their own licensing implications.