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partridge writes "Carson Daly's simulacrum is the new Max Headroom. I guess this makes Clear Channel Communications the current embodiment of Network 23? Now we just have to wait for the blipverts to start making consumer's heads explode."
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Old, amazingly well-done (for the time period, and medium)cyberpunk show. Main character, a reporter, had an artificial simulacrum named Max Headroom. Worked for network 23. The network created high-energy bursts of commercials that would occasionally cause people's heads to blow up. Reporter investigated. Etc.
Carson Daly rose to fame as the host of "Total Request Live" on Viacom's MTV. Less well known is his side gig as a superhuman D. J. With a little help from digital editing, Mr. Daly can do a top-10 countdown show tailored to the phoned-in requests of radio listeners in 11 different cities without actually knowing which songs he is counting down.
Mr. Daly's syndicated radio show, "Carson Daly Most Requested," is produced by Premiere Radio Networks, a unit of the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications. The program runs each weekday on 140 stations -- most of them owned by Clear Channel -- although only 11 receive the digitally customized version that seeks to simulate a local program.
"Most Requested" has been on the air for nearly two years, but only recently have people not directly involved in the program become aware of the extent to which technology is allowing Mr. Daly to cozy up to local listeners. Radio experts say the program involves perhaps the most extensive use yet of digital audio processing to offer localized shows from a central location. And members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements.
Clear Channel executives and Mr. Daly declined to discuss the program and the technology. But according to former Clear Channel employees, Mr. Daly spends several hours a week in a studio in his Manhattan apartment, reading scripts with short song introductions and longer segments of D. J. patter. His audio feed is transmitted to Los Angeles, where the show's engineers turn the segments into digital files and drop them into a database.
With a lot of cutting and pasting, the engineers create 11 customized hourlong countdown shows for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and two national pop and rhythm-and-blues countdowns for other markets. The customization means Mr. Daly can seem to be telling listeners in a particular city their most-requested songs for that day -- without ever seeing the city's top-10 list.
Clear Channel has been widely criticized for its use of so-called voice-tracking technology, which enables prerecorded D. J.'s to sound to listeners in a distant city as if they were both local and live.
Opponents of media consolidation say the technology allows Clear Channel to ignore its regulatory mandate requiring the company to have local stations serve local audiences.
In a case that will go to trial this week, the National Labor Relations Board is charging that Clear Channel violated the contracts of the staff at WWPR-FM in New York, a hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues station known as Power 105.1. The suit argues that the station began using a voice-tracked Los Angeles D. J. without union authorization.
The company has said that the show, "Power After Hours," was a syndicated program, which the contract allows.
Mr. Daly's show uses technology that is similar to voice tracking, but industry experts said that the digital manipulation of the host's words and phrases is so extensive as to put the show in a league of its own.
"This tells you that Carson Daly, as a brand and a personality, is worth the extra studio effort," said Tom Taylor, the editor of Inside Radio, an industry newsletter. "The technology has been advancing to the point where you can do that and make it sound really good."
Steven Dunston, a sound designer and editor in Los Angeles who worked at Clear Channel's Premiere Radio unit when the Daly show began in early 2001, said he helped build its innovative database, which had tens of thousands of audio samples in it.
He said that because Mr. Daly had only a few hours a week to devote to the program, phrases like "coming in at No. 4" were recorded once and stored in the database for reuse. The call letters and phone numbers of the 11 stations, in Mr. Daly's voice, were inserted throughout.
"It really was fascinating from a technological angle," Mr. Dunston said. "Nothing had been done to that extent before."
People close to the current show said its operations had changed little since it began. A spokeswoman for Premiere declined to answer questions about the production of Mr. Daly's show, saying that was proprietary information. She said Mr. Daly was unavailable for comment.
Not all of Mr. Daly's sentences are digitally constructed. The show's writers give him longer segments, like gossip roundups and customized introductions for New York and Los Angeles. But much of the material is written with recycling in mind, so a joke about Christina Aguilera that is used to introduce the No. 3 song in Boston can be used on another day when the song is, say, No. 6 in Atlanta.
Mr. Daly's unconventional countdown only recently caught the attention of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents broadcast personnel and opposes voice tracking. Peter Fuster, the chapter's assistant executive director, said the union had previously thought that the show was just a national countdown with local branding.
Mr. Fuster said, "We're looking into whether the customized package that they are preparing for New York violates our collective bargaining agreement" at Z-100 (WHTZ-FM), the station that carries the show in New York. If the station is giving Mr. Daly's show a list of songs to play, that would essentially be voice tracking, which is not allowed under the contract, Mr. Fuster said.
Mr. Daly is likely to be even more pressed for time now that he has his own late-night television talk show on NBC, "Last Call With Carson Daly." But when he needs some time off from his radio work, the database lets the countdown roll on. Before he goes on vacation, the show's producers try to make sure they have enough sound clips so his voice can introduce top-10 lists that have yet to be compiled.
That has not always gone smoothly. Mr. Dunston, the sound designer, said that at one point a new Michael Jackson song, "You Rock My World," unexpectedly showed up on the charts. Mr. Daly was unavailable that day, and because he had never introduced a song by Mr. Jackson, the engineers had to dig through old recordings to find a segment in which he made an offhand reference to the singer. Then they hunted down bits of the song title and assembled all the pieces.
"We had to cobble things together," Mr. Dunston said.
...the legal ramifications of voice tracking, or the fact that since CCC started this, there's only been one instance where they've had a song show up that they didn't handpick^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanticipate making the Top 10.
This is just a simple case of a radio station using technology to bring high profile talent into a market.
It's been done for tens of years. Ok, so technology now allows them to fine tune it up to every tiny little word -- that's kind of cool, actually -- but anyway, do you really think Casey Casem or Dick Clark knew anything about half the cities they were broadcasting in?
It's America's Top 40 Dance Band Stand! Broadcasting right here in Minnoke!
The union's just looking to save their local DJs some jobs. Carson Daly is not going to appear on every radio dial. The fear is, though, if people tune into this, maybe they would like more high profile talent on their other radio shows.. not local talent. Good luck unions! ugh, would hate to fight that fight..
It would be cool to hear Carson Daly stuttering over his words digitally and repeating a star's name over and over and over again.
Max Headroom was great, however he was clearly from far in our future (the 20 minutes they suggested was obviously an gross underestimate). Current technology only allows creation of fake personalities with absolutely no charisma (has anyone seen Carson Daly's talk show?).
Hopefully with increased technology we will be able to create in the future a media personality with the charisma of Max Headroom.
I have talked with someone who have worked for
the likes of Clear Channel and other large
multi-station broadcasters.
This has been going on for at least two years now,
especially with the larger chains.
As I remember, he told me that the announcers
would say a catalog of phrases to be digitized
and cataloged into a data base. They would say
each city's name; common street names, names of
businesses, common school names, common church
names; the list goes on.
With this massive database of phrases (and many
that can be used for different locals; Saint
Mary's Church could be in Buffalo or Atlanta),
now they can put together just about anything
and make it 'local' to you.
What is interesting is that many of these stations
are becomming nothing more than a transmitter.
Studios, productions facilities, and even sales
and marketing have all but dissapeared from the
local scene. All of that is done remotely.
Local companies that want to buy ads now deal
with the national office. They come up with a script. The script can be assembed via computer
using the announcer's voice. Only if something unique needs to be said, does the announcer say anything. After all, Henrys' Fine Drycleaning
has probably been used before the Henry's Fine
Drycleaning in your hometown decides to advertise
on the radio.
School sports scores, news, and so forth, can be
handled remotely.
Cleara
The on-air personality is inches away from being a thing of the past. I have a lot of friends that work in radio. Most of them have had the stations they work for bought by clear channel. Most of my friends that are still on-air personalities (many are unemployeed these days) are being pumped out to at least 3 stations with little tweaks being done to the audio to make it sound like they are local. Frequently celebrity interviews are mocked up from a stock tape of the celebrity answering questions with the DJ's voice dubbed between even.
I keep hoping that eventually people will notice how sterile, packaged and crappy it is and that independent stations will be able to compete by way of superior programming. However, apparently people don't give a rats ass. They don't even notice how shitty radio is these days.
From the article: "...members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements." Groups like the RIAA apparently are not alone in wanting to make sure new technology doesn't disturb existing revenue streams, and wanting to thwart it if it does. This kind of thing reminds me that geeks seem to live in a completely different continuum from the rest of the world.
What would things be like today if, for example, computer programmers and electronics engineers had reacted in the same way to things like code-generating tools, CAD and microcircuitry, clinging instead to the practices of hand-entering 1's and 0's and wiring everything with a soldering iron, because more streamlined methods might threaten our jobs? I envision something like the computers in the movie Brazil, coexisting with pheumatic message tubes.
A good exemplar: calling this show local content is like calling ketchup a vegetable. And that's what they've doing for all this time.
What's to stop some enterprising folk from making their own, highly subversive versions of Carson Daly from recordings of his show?
What's to stop those recordings from being either broadcast locally from pirate rigs, or injected into a Clear Channel satellite feed?
Ok, maybe state and federal laws and the wrath of the FCC, if you care about that kind of thing.
>>Is it still cheaper to pay real people to do it all?
Let's see..
CGI rendered porn model - millions in development, artwork and rendering time, plus expensive render farms to do the computations.
Drug addict in her late teens - $20 worth of crack and a Sony Handycam.
Yes, it's cheaper.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Does this remind anyone of the DJ 3000 from the Simpsons episode "Bart gets an elephant" ?
Boss: This is the DJ 3000. It plays CDs automatically, and it has three distinct varieties of inane chatter.
[presses a button]
DJ 3000: [stilted] Hey, hey. How about that weather out there?
Woah! _That_ was the caller from hell.
Well, hot dog! We have a weiner.
Bill: Man, that thing's great!
Marty: _Don't_ praise the machine!
Boss: If you don't get that kid an elephant by tomorrow, the DJ 3000 gets your job.
[Marty punches it]
DJ 3000: Those clowns in congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.
Bill: [laughs] How does it keep up with the news like that?
The more "old" sci-fi type stuff I watch, the more erie it is how similar we've become. How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs? How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having? How long before Max is invading MY TV screen?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.