Web Radio Negotiations Carry Poison Pill

Adambomb writes "It seems that the deal that saved Net radio at the 11th hour, the new terms that would limit the maximum fee for multiple-channel Web radio broadcasts, contains a hook. To qualify for the cap, broadcasters must work to ensure that stream-ripping is not feasible. Given that the analog hole will always exist as far as I can imagine in such scenarios, is this even possible?" The article mentions the measures Net stations could easily take but have been reluctant to — lowering bit rates, playing jingles over the music, cross-fading songs. How long before they are backed into using these techniques?

Comments

What the.... fuck... was this?

[Sneakernets]

Impossible. Nothing was saved. As long as microphones and Full duplex cards exist, and a headphone jack, you cannot...

Why is my nose bleeding?

Re:What the.... fuck... was this?

[AKAImBatman]

I don't think that the analog hole is the real concern. The question that everyone should be asking is: How many pirates get their music from web radio? Does anyone even bother trying to record web radio?

It seems to me that the RIAA members are stuck back in the 1980's when everyone used their tape decks to record music over the airwaves. We're not there anymore. Most people care enough about the audio quality that they'll either purchase the song from iTunes (more convenient, less hassle!) or download a copy from P2P that someone else has already pirated. And I can tell you that the "someone else" probably didn't use net radio as a master. He probably went out and purchased a single CD, ripped it, and (if he was enough of a jerk) returned it to the store as defective.

The RIAA and its members need to get their heads out of their rears and get with modern times. Dollars to donuts says that any study on the piracy of net radio would find it to be nearly non-existent. Their worries amount to nothing more than chicken little crying "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" If by some miraculous event the studies showed that people were stream ripping, then maybe it would be a good time to embrace services like iTunes to their fullest extent?

Offering the product that people want at a price the market will bear is the best thing that any music company can do. The people who would spend the time engaging in stream ripping or P2P piracy aren't going to pay for the music anyway, so you gain very little by spending your time trying to stop them. Having DJs talk over music has never stopped freeloaders in the past, so I don't see why it would stop them now.

Italian Radio

[Bios_Hakr]

When I lived in Italy, I noticed the DJs always talked over the first and last 20 seconds of every song. A friend told me it was so that people don't record the music.

It's kind of annoying, but understandable. The RIAA wants to use MTV and radio as an advertisement for CDs and DVDs. The artists want to use the CDs and DVDs as an advertisement for live performances. The radio stations want to use music as a filler between their own advertisements.

In the end, everyone makes money.

Re:Italian Radio

[value_added]

When I lived in Italy, I noticed the DJs always talked over the first and last 20 seconds of every song. A friend told me it was so that people don't record the music.

That's been going on since the 60's that I remember, and probably longer. It has everything to do with the DJ's sense of self-importance (making a living delivering monologues will do that to you), and the station's need to interject commercial sponsor or promotional messages wherever and whenever possible. Any musical intro to a song would invite a voice over. The tail end of a song, if not cut off altogether would similarly be talked over.

There was a brief respite during the 70s when people started buying LP albums (singles were dismissed), migrated to FM, and drugs became popular. On a given night, it wasn't unusual to hear the entire side of an LP album being played without interruption of any kind.

Things changed over time, of course. Drugs fell out of use, the "album version" was replaced by the single, and the need to make money became paramount. Some stations even resorted to increasing the speed at which songs played. Today, commercial radio is like AM radio was way back when (lots of commercials, interruptions, self-promotion, and a limited but rotating playlist) and AM radio turned into .. well, that's another subject. I'm surprised to see that people still listen to commercial radio of any kind.

Already done?

[jgiam]

Sky.fm and Smoothjazz.com are already doing crossfading. Plus they crossfade jingles into the end of a track, so if you try to stream-rip, the jingle gets saved too. I can't speak for the other Internet Radio stations.

Payola killed the radio star

[vivaoporto]

lowering bit rates, playing jingles over the music, cross-fading songs. How long before they are backed into using these techniques?

That can be really annoying. I remember listening to over the air radio in Brasil, in the middle nineties. FM radios were beginning to consolidate, and to cave into the pressure of the Majors, they began with this annoying habit to cut the music, crossfade into the other, to play the station jingle over three times over the song right over the catchy chorus. The list goes on and on.

Today, it is impossible to listen to radio there, not because of all these problems, but because payola there is rampant, and if you are lucky, you get to listen the same 50 songs over and over and over again. Once I recorded 24 hours of radio programming, and I was able to identify a group of 8 songs (I can remember the exact number) that played at least 4 times that particular day, and one that played every 2 hours. That was a special spot on the programming called "the song of the week", played every two hours, every day, for 7 days. The other radios had a similar sport, with variations in the name ("the best of the week, the hit of the week"). It is a mafia, and it is not exclusive on U.S.

Payola killed the radio star, and the internet will kill the payola star. Well, at least one man can dream.

Re:Payola killed the radio star

[KDR_11k]

50? That sounds like way more than the stations here seem to play, they got maybe one hour worth of music that they shuffle and reshuffle all day while making horribly bad jokes and retarded lottery games. It's hell to work in a job where coworkers want to have the radio running for the whole time (not an office job though, mostly manual labor). Pop songs have way too mcuh repetition in them if you listen to them only once (they loop the chorus at least ten times after the verses are over, just to hammer it into your brain), adding reruns should be against the Geneva convention. I'm not sure hammering music into someone's head is a good way to make sales, when I hear a song 20 times a day the last thing on my mind is to buy it and hear it EVEN MORE.

Besides, we don't have any indie stations here. There was one once but it got bought out by a big station and now runs the same stuff everyone else is running. You could probably shut down all but one or two stations without decreasing the musical variety at all.

Re:Payola killed the radio star

[Xiaran]

My radio station of choice is triplej in Australia. They have an album of the week rather than a song... and it tend to be new music(either that or the new album of a known artist). DJs will play any track off the album and there will be interviews and discussion of the music, history of the band etc.

But WHY?

[aliquis]

How many do rip music streams? Really? I have listened to lots of di.fm and similair back in the days when I was to lazy to download new MP3s but I have never ripped any stream. I know one guy who did but he only burned the whole mix to a CD-R to play in his car anyway, so it was just a sort of delayed playback.

What's the problem here? The money lost must be so very small.

Same with radio station nowadays, do they really need this kind of system longer? How many people care about casette tapes and record from radio?

They need to understand that we just download our illegal music file by file at even higher quality instead of ripping streams ;D, this is a non-issue.

Re:But WHY?

[Lumpy]

I do. I rip a NPR stream, specifically the car talk and prairie home companion on saturdays to listen to in my car during the week on my commute. No I do not see the reasoning behind buying it in a form that is not playable on my mp3 player (I dont use the ipod in the company car, I use an iRiver) ignoring the fact that I already paid for the show anyways with my taxes and generous donations to my local NPR station.

So I use an automatic stream rip to time shift. I know of guys that time shift "Bob and Tom" radio show because they travel 240 miles a day for work and cant stand having to tune in a different station every 60 minutes.

My world has lots of people that stream rip.

Re:But WHY?

[CastrTroy]

Crossfading and jingles is not harmless to the listener. It destroys the music. If it was harmless, then it wouldn't deter people from streamripping. How would you like it if you were watching a movie, and they decided to play some jingle instead of the dialog from the final scene? I can't remember which country it was (Finland?) but I hear they weren't allowed to play commercials or cut scenes from movies when they were played on TV, because it ruined the artistic integrity, and it's not the way the movie was meant to be seen. Although much music and movies today is lacking in artistic integrity, it's still wrong to cut up and play something over someone else's song.

Re:Ummmm...

[jrumney]

But it is usually just easier to use one of these.

Actually, I use one of these. Same form factor and user interface, but with the global choice of stations that internet radio has over standard AM/FM broadcast. There are some very good Jazz stations with good bitrates in Switzerland and France that I listen to a lot, AFAIK there is nothing of the sort locally since Jazz FM became Smooth FM.

Digital hole

[Joce640k]

All the sound cards I own have an option to record "what you hear".

If you can hear it you can record it digitally.

Even without this there's SP-DIF connectors, etc., no analog conversion needed.

It's all moot though. So long as the RIAA sells CDs in shops then all music will have perfect copies available on P2P, no matter how much DRM they put into the online versions (sorry to break it to you, but your emperor's naked!)

Re:Digital hole

[morgan_greywolf]

All the sound cards I own have an option to record "what you hear".

Even with the sound hardware integrated onto many motherboards these days with the regular VIA, etc., 5.1 audio chipsets, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture pretty much allows you to capture anything the sound card is putting out. So if it can be played on Linux, it can be captured on Linux.

Makes me wonder if they'll preclude open source platforms from listening to Internet radio streams.

Sword of Damocles

[magus_melchior]

I'm convinced that all this (rate hike, denied appeals, last-minute "change of heart") was orchestrated expressly to get every web broadcaster into a deal that favors the recording industry. It's disgusting, in a "Lex Luthor teasing Superman with kryptonite" sort of way.

Crossfading?

[MMC Monster]

I actually like cross fading of music. Am I really in the minority about that? Given the number of music players that have the option, I can't believe that I am.

Re:Ummmm...

[jabuzz]

Thing is that in the UK they are f*&ked when it comes to stream ripping. Any sane person stream rips either the Freeview (digital terrestrial TV with absolutely no DRM) version if available (has higher bitrates) or the DAB version. You do end up with an MP2, but it is a perfect digital copy and free of any DRM.

If you want music, you can just stream rip the Freeview music channels, the hits, TMF, and E4 (weekend morning only for E4). Full of music videos but here is the deal while the video itself is not suitable for stream ripping, as it is overlayed with channel graphics and other stuff, the audio is and you get a nice DMR free 192kbps MP2 file with no fades when you demux it from the video. It is dead easy to cookie cutter out the tracks if you are so enclined.

It would take at least a decade to force out the existing DRM free TV and radio.

Re:Crossfading songs?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a DJ at a local radio station, we're on both online streams, and the AM band. My co-host and I _always_ cross-fade one song into the other. We don't like delays, and we hate that second of dead air between songs. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and it really is an art. It takes timing, skill, precision, and an ear for music, being off by so much as a tenth o a second completely ruins the transition. It takes planning, we don't just take a a bunch of songs out at random and cue them in succession. Some tracks just don't transition well into others. It even allows us (or allows me, anyway) to broaden and diversify our sets by getting away with playing tracks that, stylistically, are outside the confines of our designated programming. Hell, last week, I pulled off a seamless transition from Black Tape for a Blue Girl to oldschool Enslaved, just to prove that point. I'd never have gotten away with it without cross-fading.

We pride ourselves on being able to pull off transitions so seamless at times, our listeners have actually had to check our online playlists to tell when we go from one track to the next. I think it shows that we really love what we do. It makes putting together a 3-6 hour show more fun for us, as it isn't simply cuing music, as much as it is an actual performance. and we'd like to think it makes the show more fun and entertaining for the listeners. Our feedback suggests that our listeners do indeed appreciate the extra effort.

Neither of us have ever really had the thought of how this may complicate the process of ripping streams cross our minds. Frankly, I don't see a point, nor do I care much.

It's not as if you can't find the bulk of what we play (unless it's a promo direct from the record label, or some obscure live recording sent to us from the band, or some of our own original material) on BitTorrent or SoulSeek. You have the artist and title, all you need is bloody 30 seconds to run a search, and given a decent connection, two minutes to download the song.

My Story

[Zo0ok]

I used to listen to music quite much. I bought everything on CD. My iPod made me listen to my music more, and I bought more and more music. After a while they started putting copy-protection on CDs. Around that time I more or less stopped buying music - not as a statement... but I was annoyed and I didnt really find so much interesting music either.

A few days ago I tried www.live365.com, which I havnt used in years. It is great! If it remains open I believe I will subscribe to it (to get CD-quality no-ad radio, that I can play in my HIFI-system at home). I also think I will start buying CDs with those artists I discover at live365. Really. No promises, no threats. I just think live365 may help me find CDs to buy. If they close it I doubt I will discover those artists.

Re:Why would anyone stream-rip?

[init100]

One difference is that the RIAA can lurk on filesharing networks, sending you an invoice if they see your IP address, but there is no way that they can know if the radio stream is saved to the harddrive when a user listens to a webcast. It is thus completely safe from a legal standpoint.

Re:Crossfading songs?!?

[cosinezero]

"It really is a lost art, because it took real finesse for DJ's to get it sounding right with vinyl."

-->It's not a lost art at all; djs in clubs do it every night, with much greater technical skill. Many match beats, some even match key, others even use various tricks with the mixer to provide greater range of blending options.

Really, the art is not dead; in fact, it's come a long, long way.

Why not give customers what they want?

[dpbsmith]

What happened to the wave of business books a few years back about the importance of putting the customer first, and showing that the companies that just concentrated on satisfying the customer--actually, I think "delighting, not just satisfying" was one of the phrases--consistently outperformed the companies that engaged in all the clever-clever manipulation and chiseling and trickery?

If people want to record the stream, let 'em.

They've been doing it for decades, folks. I remember a guy in college whose nickname was "tapes" because he had a huge collection of tapes of popular music recorded off the air. At 1-7/8 ips on open-reel tapes on an analog tape recorder, which dates me and the period.

People always have been able to do stuff like that.

And it never amounts to a hill of beans, in terms of hurting artists or recording companies or whatever, because it's just too much work organizing the recordings and editing the stream to find the starting and stopping points and labelling the tape boxes. And, these days, either accepting handwritten scribbled labels or futzing some more looking for cover art or pictures of the artist or editing CD labels or formatting LightScribe text.

And it tends to be a lifecycle thing. You do that when you're in college and short on cash. People who are willing to put that much work into it are also people who are deeply committed to listening to music and sooner or later most of them get a job and a salary and suddenly they no longer have six hours to edit and organize recording but they do have a credit card and money to buy CDs or iTunes downloads or whatever.

It's like worrying about the possibility that someone could pay for one newspaper but take two out of the vending box. Does it ever happen? Sure. Does it make it worth building a complicated, more expensive vending box? Obviously not, and the newspaper folks obviously understand the tradeoff.

If the music companies just focussed on pleasing the customer, they'd do a lot better than they're doing now. It almost seems as if they're more concerned about the sheer abstract principle of the thing ("but they're robbing me!") than about dollars and cents. They're certainly not showing any concern for their customers.

Simple...

[sterno]

Q: How many pirates get their music from web radio?
A: ZERO
Does anyone even bother trying to record web radio?
A: No

Hello RIAA. See that bag there. It has no cats in it. It will never have cats in it again. Get over it.

Re:Crossfading songs?!?

[megabyte405]

I think you're confusing skilled crossfading (probably with beatmatching, which is generally appreciated) with automatic, "train-wreck" crossfading, where a computer (or a person) simply starts playing one track before the previous one ends, fading between them. That effectively "ruins" the beginning and end of a track, whereas what you're describing adds value to (at least the live) listening experience.

JJJ is a favourite of mine too

[Nazlfrag]

Listen live or browse the archives.

The geeks will love Dr. Karl and the other science shows, like his recent call-in show with Sir Roger Penrose and Dr Kip Thorne (links to mp3).