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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!