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Microsoft Creates Static With New Webcast Feature
An anonymous reader writes "Radio stations are upset because Microsoft is cloning their playlists -- creating sounds-alike internet radio stations without the commercials."
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Maybe if all the radio stations across the US didn't sound exactly alike....
Thanks to ClearChannel, it's next to impossible to differentiate between radio stations in the first place.
Most radio stations (or chains/groups whatever you want to call ClearChannel and their ilk) employ a program director who's job it is to survey the listening tastes for the station's target demographic in the local market and create playlists that will ensure that the highest possible number of people will listen to their station without channel switching, thus ensuring that the maximum number of ears catch their advertisers promotions and maximizing their return on investment.
Of course, what this guy really does is receive oral sex from hot young record company... um... "representatives" and ensure that they don't need to pay royalties for ad jingles.
95% of commerical radio blows goats. Unfortunately, college radio is now so afraid of offending somebody and being sued, very few of the real ground breaking programs are permitted to exist.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
One thing that sucks more than Microsoft are the comercial radio stations with crappy repetitive music and slogans like "Lite Rock, Less Talk". I hope Microsoft steals all their playlists.
Bill Conway, program director and station manager for San Francisco's KOIT-FM was surprised when he learned from a reporter that Microsoft was using his station's call letters and well-known slogan, "Lite Rock, Less Talk," to promote a mimicked version of KOIT.
it's one thing to play the same songs as the local stations and remove the idiotic DJ banter and brain-numbing commercials (a service i would consider paying for, if i actually listened to radio instead of CDs), but it's another to do it so blatantly that you even rip the fucking slogan.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
The slogan is one thing. There's a station here in Michigan that has, "Light rock, no talk," which is effectively the same thing. But the letters are a different matter. The four letter callsign is supposed to be unique for all television/radio broadcast stations, and is usually trademarked as a matter of course when starting the station. Add together three things: 1. They're using the station's (un-unique) slogan. 2. They're using the station's unique callsign. 3. They're playing the exact same tracks as that station. Things aren't nearly as funny.
If I were MS, I'd be worried about infringement of compilation copyright. Anthologies have an independent copyright claim by the editors in virtue of the arrangement, in addition to copyright claims in virtue of the items anthologized.
Someone's making a sound-alike station? Well duh!. When so many stations sound the same and have such a narrow scope, they become very easy to copy.
There's an simple solution to this: don't limit your radio station to a freaking playlist!. If all your DJs do is provide inane chatter while they shuffle around stuff from the same list of 100 songs, how long do you expect to maintain any sort of competitive advantage?
Oh, that's right, with ClearChannel dominating the airwaves, they didn't need to compete. That's how the industry let itself slide into this playlist dominated model to begin with. So now Microsoft can come along and say "Hey, we're just like $YOUR_LOCAL_RADIO_STATION, except we suck less!"
Sigh. End Rant.
If MS took a station's playlist and played it, exactly as the radio station did, then the radio station could probably sue MS for violating its "compilation copyright" - the general look and feel by which the radio station presented the music.
But MS apparently isn't doing that. They're apparently aggregating playlists in order to get a sense of a station's music genre, then using it to select from the songs it has the right to broadcast. The aggregation and selection process probably gets MS around the compilation copyright problem, especially if MS presents at least one song that is *not* on a station's playlist. So I'd guess that if they do what the article claims they do, then they're fine.
That strikes me as utterly walking into a law office and screaming, "Sue me!" .. but then, Microsoft has enough money to fight or even intimidate, but it seems completely pointless. It's hard to believe MSN could be so blatant, normally there's some craftyness to their attempts to lose money, but this... geez.
"It results in a more pleasant experience because you don't have the ads or the DJs,'' Rob Bennett, senior director for MSN Entertainment, said during a press briefing last week.
And a more pleasant, profitable experience for MSN Entertainment...
genuine-bolex-watches
I'm pretty sure they mean bollocks, or should have...
Copy radiostation formats
Use their call letters
Profit!
Hm..
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I said most radio stations not all, and if appears you've never listened to any NYC radio station.
Why is this a problem? Just because it's Microsoft?? Radio sucks because of the commercial load and the DJ chatter. I understand the financial motivation of radio stations, but as a guy who just wants to hear music, I welcome an alternative.
:-)
I don't see a problem with 'soundalike Internet stations -- stripped of local DJ chatter, traffic, weather and commercials'. I kinda like it.
Maybe it'll raise the bar for radio stations that assume that we _like_ listening to commercials and find their DJs witty...
Maybe if I finish my sentence, I'll confuse less people like you.
Maybe if all the radio stations across the US didn't sound exactly alike....
you would be able to switch stations in a major market and hear different playlists.
Maybe if all the radio stations across the US didn't sound exactly alike....
people would actually listen to the radio instead of complaining that it all sounds the same.
Maybe if all the radio stations across the US didn't sound exactly alike....
there wouldn't be the need for Microsoft to introduce a service like this.
An interesting question is how does this work with MS DRM and MS hopes to sell music. Anyone can rip the stream and get free music this way, and be quite safe from detection. I did not RTFA, but is there some DRM in the MS player that prevents this? Is this going to be linked to the music store and used to generate sales? How are the labels going to react to MS streaming thier music?
It sounds fishy but if it is for real it would be one of the few arguable innovative things that MS has done.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Given the recent trademark lawsuit of Microsoft vs. Lindows for sounding too much like Windows, I find it ironic that mere months later Microsoft would start selling radio stations that *even explicitly say* "Sounds like KMEL JAMS 106.1".
Microsoft: you can't have your cake and eat it too.
While that is true, in some cases there is an obvious "Right" and "Wrong" to the law and to the public eye (Not nessecarialy the same things). The Eolas patent on plugins was absurd and we had every reason to cheer Microsoft FOR THAT CASE, even if not overall.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
They are "using" the call letters in the sense that they are mentioning them. They aren't claiming that they are the station. There is nothing wrong with mentioning the name of a competitor. For example, if you were making generic soda, you could say "Compare ours to Coca-Cola" on the packaging, as long as you didn't misrepresent your product as being Coca-Cola. Generic brands do this all the time.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Of course, the question is why anyone would want a pay service that uses the playlists of mainstream stations.
I made the comment a few years back that broadcast radio is an enormous waste of bandwidth, because the content is so repetitive. It's far more efficient to download the content once and cache it locally. Then all the station has to broadcast is a playlist, using tiny bandwidth.
At the time, that was a joke. Now it's a viable business model.
...just has to monopolise every game he plays! It's an obsession, I tell you - the boy needs to see a shrink!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And they're snagging the call letters of their carbon copy crapola stations?
As one poster noted, it's hard to know who to hate...
But the facts are simple: if radio stations had REAL DJs that were allowed to play whatever the fuck they wanted to, and then hired DJs on the basis of the depth and breadth of their musical selections and the cleverness of their song choices, there is No Way M$ could copy that, as each DJ would be regionally dependent on local taste. Example: the DJs of San Francisco might not fair very well in Oklahoma City. But it would all be by Sensibility, which is the most crucial marker of aesthetic choice.
But Bog Forbid anyone figure THAT one out... the closestthing you can do is get a live365 station but that's expensive and a bit of a rip off...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It's not the Programming or Music Managers that make radio the repetive drivel it is, it's the listeners. Start advocating and turning your friends onto some good music, fill out the damn ratings books (and nobody can listen to 180 hours of NPR a week, I've seen this.) and stop listening to "the best hits of the 80's and 90's" chanells with 500 songs in rotation, and you might end up with a good radio station due to market pressure.
"I'm surprised they would co-opt the brand names of every radio station in America without permission,'' said Bill Conway, program director and station manager for San Francisco's KOIT-FM.
(heres someone who's lived in a cave,never watched news media and probably used a macintosh all his short naiive life)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
This will never go to trial though. Some higher up at Microsoft will come to his or her senses and put a stop to this nonsense.
I agree it'll never go to trial. What'll happen, though, is that Clear Channel and friends will get scared and negotiate with Microsoft; for example, will do an exclusive distribution deal through Microsoft's version of the iTMs. Then, Microsoft wins; Clear Channel wins; the RIAA wins.
Oh yeah, Real and Apple lose.
Microsoft surely doesn't want to be in a position of being a radio station disk jockey. What they want to do is tie up that content, and to do that you can't just ask Clear Channel politely; you have to give them a deal that they can't refuse. This is the big stick that drives CC to the bargaining table on terms favorable to Microsoft.
Microsoft will maybe be someday called on this tactic by someone who is willing to go the distance; maybe not. Maybe that foe is IBM--or maybe Microsoft is smart enough not to take on the Real Big Fish--like the Chinese government, or Wal-Mart. Time will tell.
--
$tar -xvf
Nope, they sued over trademark infringement. And they behaved pretty reasonably -- if the article you linked is correct, they were trying to protect the brand, not to make easy money through litigation, and they reached an amicable settlement that gave everyone what they wanted, and the only money that exchanged hands went to charity.
I don't know about you, but I reckon that's how the law is supposed to work.
Case 1: A US company, using US-based servers, is comparing itself to another US-based competitor, in violation of German advertising laws.
Case 2: An Australian in Australia ran a warez group whose active membership contained a number of Americans and which used a number of US servers for what it was doing.
It'd be naive not to recognize that there are several significant factors in the second case that support America at least having a claim to extradition while such factors are completely missing from the first case.
The record labels spend tons of money trying to get popular stations to play their songs. In college, I was the music director of our university's station in Boston. We had TEN watts. Yet, we got servicing from every major record label, just about every indie label and were bombarded by calls and promortions from the independently hired promotions companies (paid by the majors).
All this because we were in one of the top five markets in the country. One spin on our station reached more ears than one on a 50,000 watt college station in the middle of east bumfuck. So we got more attention than them.
The fact that a label only has to convince a single station somewhere to play their song in order to get it on Microsoft's copied playlist must be making them salivate as much as Pavlov's dog at a firehouse.
Maybe there'll be a fight between ClearChannel and MS, but the RIAA must be loving this... And they'll side with MS...
-bs
That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
I also have interned at a radio station. I have a few friends in the buisness as well. Basically, in my opinion, it is the programming managers fault. No one at the stations that is incharge of programming has a passion for music, they are just trying to play things that they think people will want to listen to, instead of playing new music that they themselves have discovered and have a passion for. The ratings books don't help, as there isn't anything worthwile to listen to in the first place. I am turning my friends on to new music, because there isn't any on the damn stations! All of the power is held by those that control the media. If you just stick to what sells with out ever taking a risk, your buisness will succeed and continue on a predicable path. As large as radio/mass media companies have become, they cannot afford the risk of deviating from the established buisness practices. So basically its a buisness decision that prevents new interesting music from being played. It sucks, but thats what allowing large media companies ( thereby reducing new innovative competing companies) leads to.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.