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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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So they've claimed its creation. Now they have the next couple of years to patent it.
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Maybe if all the radio stations across the US didn't sound exactly alike....
any intellectualy property expectations of a playlist?
What's next? Accusing someone of copying the order of items on a store shelf?
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
I might consider listening if they would just play something *different*.. How many times per day can you listen to No Doubt covering "It's My Life" before you can't help but ram an icepick through your head?
Thanks to ClearChannel, it's next to impossible to differentiate between radio stations in the first place.
Make a copy that has the DJ chatter, and strip out the music instead?
With all due respect to WIOG, they have shitty music. If it weren't for the fact that their DJ/intern chatter is hilarious (most of the time), I sure wouldn't listen.
First I've ever heard of Microsoft ever copying Anything!
Given Microsoft's own stance on such things, I imagine they'll have no problem coughing up licensing fees to use the call letters and slogans of the 900+ radio stations they're copying.
The problem isn't that Microsoft sounds like other radio stations, the problem is (to quote the article) "MSN Radio promotes these online channels as being "like'' a favorite local station, "but with fewer ads, no DJ chatter and less repetition.'" They're using the actual call letters from the stations.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
What's the order of who we hate more again? I can never remember if Clear Channel scores higher on the Evil Index than Microsoft... ;-)
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
M$ is paying their royalty fees, we'd all sure hate for the RIAA to go after M$!
Snicker, snicker, giggle, guffaw, and the gut rumbling belly laugh.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
What's this? They're misusing their four letters, and a slogan that any halfwit with a marketing degree signed in crayon could come up with? (And has, all across the country?) Oh, please stop, I'm gonna bust out cryin'.
John Allers, you owe me a new keyboard. Mine is full of Dr. Pepper.
You might want to tell Clear Channel that. They've obviously not gotten the memo.
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
People love to act like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What they often forget, is that your new "friend" may be equally as much your enemy as your declared enemy. Usually, it is best to just let your enemies kill each other with their own resources.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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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Wow, that's a new low for Microsoft. Not only are they copying their playlists but they're also selling the streams on the local call letters *and* their taglines. Pretty low business move, even if it's not technically illegal. However if any of these stations have a trademarked slogan then they have grounds to sue MS.
As easy as it is to fall back on the, "Radio sucks, too much commercials" line, and as much as I despise radio, most of the stations in my area play between 40-45 minutes of non-commercial crap.
It's just different crap. DJs with their stupid jokes, stupid callers with their stupid jokes, etc. etc. In fact, I'd rather listen to commercials than that junk.
We do have several stations that play 45 minutes of music without commercial interruption, unless of course you count the interruption to tell you that you're listening to 45 minutes of music without commercial interruption.
Even though, it's till not 80-20 by any stretch of the imagination...although those screaming car ads do seem to last hours.
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.
More radio, less reboots
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 $YOUR_LOCAL_RADIO_STATION, except we suck less!"
Sigh. End Rant.
That strikes me as utterly walking into a law office and screaming, "Sue me!" .. but then, Microsoft has enough money to fight or even intimidate, but it seems completely pointless. It's hard to believe MSN could be so blatant, normally there's some craftyness to their attempts to lose money, but this... geez.
"It results in a more pleasant experience because you don't have the ads or the DJs,'' Rob Bennett, senior director for MSN Entertainment, said during a press briefing last week.
And a more pleasant, profitable experience for MSN Entertainment...
genuine-bolex-watches
I'm pretty sure they mean bollocks, or should have...
Copy radiostation formats
Use their call letters
Profit!
Hm..
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nobody is making you listen to M$ radio... or any radio for that matter. /. the servers...
But if you'd like to leave the radio cookie cutters at home, may I suggest www.wfmu.org, which has been streaming RA and MP3 streams for years and now a Slashdot-friendly Vorbis stream as well. And if you don't like what's on now, you can listen to more than two years of archived programming as well.
I hope I didn't just
--- the webhamster at wfmu.org
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
I'm surprised MS can get away with "broadcasting" those radio stations' call letters. That might be an FCC violation as IIRC the call letters are registered with a license that the FCC issues each operating radio station.
-Randy
The case Microsoft is relying on is Playboy v. Terri Welles. Welles was a Playboy Playmate of the year. She put that information in the metatags of her website. Playboy sued saying that Welles' use of the terms Playboy and Playmate violated its trademarks.
The court ruled that the fact that Welles a Playboy Playmate of the year is, well, a specific fact. And because she was exactly what she claimed to be, there could be no confusion in the marketplace.
Microsoft's use of stations' call letters, however, will obviously lead to confusion. It would be like Pepsi putting it's "like Coke" right on its labels. Sure, Pepsi does takes "like coke." but the confusion in the marketplace would be too great. Basically, the fact is too generalized.
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.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
... it would be interesting to see if Microsoft feels if that were a violation of their trademark.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Eh, my local station (102.7 WEQX out of Vermont) is very, very good, they play new music before the ClearChannel stations, old favorites the CC wouldn't dare play because they weren't big enough hits and local and regional music you can't hear elsewhere. They even have long commercial free blocks, like 5 to 11 pm -- though I suspect it's because they were having trouble selling ads and that scares the shit out of me.
It would be a shame to see such a great station (a lot of people I know say it's the only station they will listen to) disappear because of crap like this MSN deal. Of course, I'm not too worried about it...MSN's clone stations, by nature, can only copy. Stations like WEQX get their following by doing new things, like Sunday's Download show (playing great music off new CDs you may never hear again because they have no budget for promotions). I would never take MSN over EQX...but I'd certainly take it over dumbass reactive pay-for-play ClearChannel stations.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to run a modern rock station on the same model as NPR/PRI affiliates, as an alternative to corporate rock that sucks or college rock that has no market and no antenna worth a damn. You know...commercial free rock picked by real DJs with good taste and skills on the mic, supported by bi-monthly fund drives...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
Somebody help me out, I am confused? Who should I hate in this article? Microsoft of Radio stations and their RIAA connections? Who is the good guy? I am all confused, I think I am going to have a seisure?
...and call it "U".
:P
That way, they can give back "F", "U", and "D".
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
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.
The radio stations vs. MS - who does /. hate more? Head will explode as geeks, nerds, and other basement people decide among two (count'em, two!) evils!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I work at one of the stations that Microsoft copied in the MSN Local Stations list. (We're one of the top 5 stations in our market.) Since we're part of an independent broadcast group (not controlled by Clear Channel, Infinity, Entercom, Fisher, Sandusky, etc), we have a great desire to protect our branding which we've worked so hard to build. I wouldn't be surprised if our legal team will be filing a lawsuit here in the next week or so.
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
Well, self-same DJ's are not shy of threatening to "bury" bands who are rude to them - see this very interesting transcript which touches on threats made by a bunch of syndicated radio commentator wankers and Australian punkers Frenzal Rhomb.
Also touches on some of the other issues being discussed here with 'taste consolidation'. A good read, in my opinion.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Boo hoo. Look up Clear channel on Google and come back to me again bitching about monopolies.
It's been a long time.
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.