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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."
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
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?
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"
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..
not sure about AOL stuff, but XM online offers either 32k or 64k windows media streams...
they sound about like a 64k and 128k mp3, respectively
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. =)
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.