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AOL and XM Joining Forces for Online Radio
Josh writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL and XM are joining forces to make available 20 XM music channels plus 130 of its own available to anyone on the internet for free starting this summer. AOL members will have free broadband access to 70 XM channels, although apparently there are plans for a $5/month option for non-subscribers. The deal means AOL Music specials will make it onto XM's channels, and XM promos will be heard across AOL Music's properties."
This could be a good thing for non US countries (or wherever broadband isnt 'dirt cheap')
Speaking as someone from Australia, where we are still fairly limited by bandwidth, the great unwashed masses will LOVE IT. Seriously - most broadband down here is still limited or throttled to stupid amounts, so anything that gets them free music channels for free is going to be H0T!
wonder what connection the speed is.
AOLTimeWarnerXMMSNBC......
Free, if you are paying for AOL.
Sirius already has free access to all of its music stations - if you have a subscription to Sirius.
Jeff
Next up, AOL will publish the worst of the music onto CD's so that you can surf AOL offline. The new CD's will be made by the billions and distributed to a snail mailbox near you.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
Listen to the XM CEO on NPR.org
XM Satellite Radio has added more than a half million subscribers in the last 3 months and shares of XM have quintupled over the last 2 years. Questions discussed in the npr broadcast: Can XM continue its meteoric growth? When will satellite radio become profitable? Is there room for both XM and rival Sirius?
sportsdot
The slashcode sports site
How long until spammers and spyware authors figure out how to have audio ads played constantly throughout the "ad-free" XM radio channels?
I'm not sure if anyone looks forward to the days that XM content is sponsored by V1@g@ra!
I'm a big tall mofo.
I would gladly pay a monthly fee for hearing music that I can't choose, and maybe advertisements every now and then! It's like radio, but it costs money and bandwidth!
for years, techies laughed at users of AOL and said it wasn't the "real" internet. AOL didn't work with normal browsers, wouldn't allow one to have access to normal things, etc.
There is a HUGE market for that now. Imagine an environment where spam is mostly non-existent because the network is isolated and only approved hosts can send email. Imagine an environment where sites didn't do mischevious things to your system. There's a market out there right now almost screaming to get the very thing for which AOL used to be criticized. There are millions of people out there that don't want 15,124,617,179,945,562 different search results for what they're after (esp when only 5 of them will be what they actually want, the first being on page 20 or so, and the rest will be trash), and they don't care to have to deal with all the other junk out there.
A couple nights ago I was looking for something online, and my wife and our roommate were in the room goofing off. After having to wade through pages of squatter-crap and such that had all the dumb tags that improve search engine results, I yelled "what have you people done to my beloved internet? It was a wonderful place until you all started getting on too!" I was only half-kidding. I never used AOL (I owned an ISP back in 95, and after that went to broadband for personal use) but I would count myself as someone that would sign up for a trusted environment.
Stern, who signed a five-year deal with the other satellite company, Sirius, worth an estimated $500 million, left no doubt about his allegiance at the event. "Once you start listening to (satellite), it's like crack," Stern said to cheers. "You will be addicted."
XM has to do something to stay competitive with Sirius to stay on the map.
sportsdot
The slashcode sports site
Geez...who the hell uses AOL?
me too!
Maybe now I won't get so freaking many AOL CDs in the mail.
Will the paying XM Subscribers have the option to NOT hear the AOL advertisements?
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
by providing an iTMS Subscription service, ala Napster's "On the Go". Napster offers (reportedly) poor quality, no indie music and no support for the Mac (all of which are deal killers for me.) If there were a similar, but done right, "on the go" subscription service for iTMS, for me it would put the last nail into "broadcast" music radio (not that it had much life anyway), be it satellite or otherwise. Apple could provide daily (hourly?) "radio" playlists sans "radio personalities" (and perhaps even some with "personalities" inserted between some tracks if you wish) that you can select to sync directly with your iPod to carry it with you. And with that on your iPod you can skip forward, back, pause, etc. Try that on XM. Not to mention that you could do it yourself, including exactly what you wanted, if Apple extended iTunes so that, with a subscription, the iTMS became part of your iTunes "Library", and thus applicable to "smart playlists".
--- What?
Just because you are wrong, it doesn't mean you are stupid.
For places that have plenty of bandwidth but no radio reception (remote areas), it might work. I work 25m below ground and can't get any of my favorite radio talk shows, so for me it all depends on the content.
what's the difference between this and iTunes radio channels?
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Triple J
Triple M
ABC Radio
And that's just the first three radio stations I could think of in my home city of Sydney.
I assume so.
Tried to use their free Movielink service. Not just Windows only but IE5+ only.
AOL is my oldest email account so for 5 bucks a month I'll stay with them for sentimental reasons.
As a musician I believe that music ought to be free. I can't bear the thought of my work only going to horrible radio stations that are going to try to make the kids buy things they don't want.
But I'm powerless to stop it.
When my album is recorded my preference will be to make it available for download from a simple website. This will provide excellent exposure for my performance and encourage people to visit my performance. Very few musicians make good money from CD sales - they traditionally kept the public enjoying the performance and sparked enthusiasm for visiting a show. The very best of us perform in large stadiums, earning thousands of dollars in a single night (of lip-synching).
I'll be encouraging the kids to build up nice big playlists so they don't have to listen to the radio tell them what to buy. I don't think that AOL internet radio is a useful step at this point.
If you enjoy radio, then I suggest you listen to Triple J - available from the ABC website www.abc.net.au.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
What about spinner? It got bought by netscape and then by AOL. Now it's the internet radio offer from AOL. Any idea where it fit in the picture?
"Failure is not an option, it come bundled with the software"
What they're using with the $3/mo increase to subsidize.
Bring back $9.99/mo with no Crappie and Anthony, no internet streaming (I'll pay extra thanks - can't use it at work anyway), and no AOL junk.
Makes me glad I signed on for 5 years last month at the old rate.
I've been a subscriber for a couple years, and they recently "forced" everyone to add their online radio bit to their subscription, in the form of a $3/mo rate hike, but then you get the online radio for "free". So far, I've been very underwhelmed, for a couple reasons:
1. The player uses lots of Flash trickery that doesn't work well, as far as I can tell- the ticker that tells you what song you are listening to is frequently wrong.
2. The player itself is WMP, which is useless to me at home (with no Windows machines); I loathe their choice, but I'm sure they had to go with WMP due to contractual concerns from the record labels, and WMP offers strong DRM.
3. The real killer, though, is the shitty quality- the "high quality" mode is only 64kbps, and sounds like crap. I am not an audiophile, and most of my music is 128k/160k mp3's, which sound great to me. XM radio sounds great to me. XM radio online sounds terrible. So, it's pretty much worthless, IMHO.
Its interesting, with the internet it would be relatively cheap to set up a "radio" station, compared with the huge overhead of launching satellites etc.
With wireless internet becoming more prevalant/cheaper over the next 10 years in suburban/urban areas, satelite radio could be obsolete in those areas (bumped by cheaper internet radio), so they need to get the brand and marketing out there. Its also cheap for the satelite radio stations to stream over the internet since they've already paid to "program" each station.
Interestingly enough you can listen to low quality streams already. Actually large difference in quality between an high quality MP3 and satelite radio is convincing enough for me not to subscribe when my XM trial is turned off. (I can tell the distance in a moving car with road noise etc..) Although the selection on satellite radio isn't bad, my collection is better..
If it doesn't let me custom build my own radio station, then there is no way I'm switching from LaunchCast from Yahoo
Its cheaper too. =)
AOL was the first large influx of the general public to the internet. They destroyed newsgroups. Places like sci.math and sci.crypt used to have regular readers who were experts in various areas and you could ask intelligent questions and get answers (same for other newsgroups). Then came all the kids looking for help with their homework and people who didn't know what a FAQ was. AOL was blamed for this, but they aren't really unique any more. It might be nice if a large bunch of consumers go back into isolation.
From a strategic point of view, this seems consistent with what XM has done and says it will continue to do -- be ahead of Sirius on technology. They had their satellites up first; they've got the first walkman-sized radio, and now they've got a way to allow millions of more users hear their signal. XM is focusing on how users hear them, while Sirius is focusing on what users hear...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
You can listen to all the XM channels online since you're already a subscriber. Chill...they just opened it up as of March.
You are only popular on the Internet.
Wahey! Welcome back Fast Tracker 2!
Bah. Just more pesky kids re-using once great acronyms. Grumble grumble.
you're probably stealing mp3 from p2p or usenet anyway.
While the technical underpinnings may be fascinating for this new music distribution system, the fact remains that the core content is still the same. It's plain old jive-ass radio; the same as you would get (and from which you would want to get away) from Clear Channel. Irritating announcers, insufferable commercials, lame music. Just coming to you through the wire instead of the air.
The real alternative to radio is to use the internet to find people who have the same or similar interests in music that you do and also have large collections. Then use DVD burners to put 70 albums on each blank disk in a stack of DVD media. Fry's has stacks of 25 DVD+R this week for about $7.50 US, which is roughly about $0.29 per DVD. With good quality OGG or MP3 recording, that's about 2000 songs for a dollar in media cost. You would also need an inexpensive DVD writer for your computer, which is about $70.
This way for a few dollars you can get most of all that you would ever hear on any of these new specialized radio channels. Copy the songs to a hard drive that will interface with your car or home (PC) stereo, and use a randomizer program to play songs from the collection.
No irritating announcers, no insufferable commercials, no lame music, no Clear Channel, and no high radio access fees. Or join groups of other people who have the same interest in music. When someone finds an exceptionally good song in the collection, they can send a message to the others in the group about it.
You can get all the other radio functions, weather, sport scores, traffic reports, celib news from the web. Commercials too, if you want them.
Once Sirius started doing something like this with Satellite TV, the number of promos they run doubled, all directed at those who got the service for free, trying to get them to sign up. I wonder if XM can come up with a better way to advertise to them; no point annoying current subscribers like Sirius been doing. Or this is a bad sign for us subscribers?
I was waiting for this to happen, it was only a matter of time, and I'm glad that it is happening. But why did you pick AOL? My god; couldn't you have joined up with Google or Yahoo, or someone better than AOL? Ugh. I still need to use the AIM service through Trillian because my friends refuse to move to Jabber.
I'm f#$king magic!
Quick! Short XM!!! :P
Regards;
Dish Network's America's Top 120 - $37.99 - you get TONS of channels and all of the Sirius channels. It's a great deal. I miss my dish (new apartment looks right into a big line of redwood trees.. can't put up the dish)
DirecTV doesn't have Sirius, but I think they still have some canned music channels..
Howard Stern is just another feature that sirius will have. If uncensored Stern is what makes people decide to go to Sirius, great. They also get all of the music too. :)
:)
Sirius already has some good stuff besides Stern.. Radio Bam is kind of funny and Lance Armstrong has a show that he does out of his house too. One of the alt rock stations has frequent band interviews that are usually pretty good too.
I've had Sirius for a while now and have been really happy with it. Having Howard Stern will just be icing on the cake.
You can listen to most of the Sirius stations online at sirius.com. This is free for subscribers, and non-subscribers can get a free trial.
Sirius is really just better than XM. Better music, no commercials, and free internet streams for when I'm at work or in a hotel on the road. Also, Howard Stern will be exclusive to Sirius in Jan 2006. Like him or not (I do,) he's a huge draw....
that XM has more than just music stations right?
-
I'll just dump all these lusers and check out a podcast that interests me. It's free as in both beer and speech. I'll be supporting the community and not these fatcat corporations.
Ah good, looks like they will soon be introducing the worlds first radio virus!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Everything AOL has touched so far has died (Nullsoft, Time Warner, etc.), so I hope their accursed touch of death will kill XM...
In any case, my dad already gets XM Radio Online with his normal XM subscription, so it doesn't really affect me too much, other than I will be able to listen to XM Radio during study hall and not have to log in or anything.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
http://www.somafm.com/ is my mom's favorite, aside from ours, of course (http://www.theoryradio.org/)
So I don't really see why this is even news. Is it news? Free radio?
I love Sirius and their $12.95/mo fee is totally reasonable for a gah-zillion commercial-free (and Clear Channel-free) channels.
And wasn't there another SlashDot article about XM raising their monthly fees and including streaming audio much like Sirius?
-Normal
P.S. On a side note, from 7-11 tonight (monday) Vanessa and I will be doing our weekly show on http://www.theoryradio.org/ with a webcam on http://www.digitalsquishy.com/webcam.html. It should be weird.
http://www.theoryradio.org http://www.main-streets.com http://www.ant-life.com http://www.webworksla.com
The article says "The co-branded service will be free to all Web users, with a premium counterpart that includes more stations for a small monthly fee."
But, the slashdot writeup says "apparently there are plans for a $5/month option for non-subscribers"
Will it be free to non-subscribers or not? If so, then this is significant.
I'm not sure why you would want to pay to listen to online radio when WOXY is free. And they are even currently beta testing AAC+ streams which sound pretty sweet. During the week they have live djs that play requests and they are always commercial free.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
You won't use Sirius because you don't want to be able to listen to him?
Yes. Next week, I am moving to mainland China, so I won't be exposed to other detrimental content on the 'net.
Stern is a tired old relic. O&A are much, much better and will last a lot longer than Stern, who is becoming a parody of himself. I used to be a huge Stern fan, read his books, saw the flick, and loved them all, but he's really not funny anymore. He's not even putting any effort into it. O&A are no longer on the premium channel, so you don't have to pay extra for them anymore. Sirius is throwing themselves into debt with boneheaded stunts like this. Their stock is in the toilet, and XM is much stronger financially.
Current XM subs will continue not to recieve advertisements.