The radio audience ratings service RAJAR has published the first full quarter of figures since the launch of a DAB trade-in scheme called ‘Radio Amnesty’, fronted by ubiquitous luvvie Stephen Fry. The aim was to induce households to exchange their FM radios for a DAB radio. The result? DAB’s share of digital listening has fallen for the first time.
radio
Lords: Analogue radio must die
Digital radio isn’t great and the public doesn’t want it, but you’re going to get it anyway. So recommends the House of Lords Communications Committee today. 90 per cent of the UK listens to radio, and 94 per cent of listeners are happy with what they’ve got. The Lords accept most of the points made … Read more
Home streaming is ‘killing music’
Two weeks ago a US market research company caused a panic in the music business when it reported sales of MP3s had declined. DRM has all but disappeared from digital music, while music catalogs and retailer choice have grown… and yet the volume of digital song sales fell. Ironically, it’s the major labels’ darling Spotify that’s bearing the sharp end of the backlash.
Two thirds of people don’t download unlicensed music at all, it’s a minority pursuit. But that “honest” mid-market is not only losing the habit of buying CDs, it hasn’t acquired the habit of buying digital songs either. NPD found that between 2007 and 2009, about 24 million Americans stopped paying for music in any form.
BBC pulling back from the DAByss?
Simply because Tim Davie, the BBC’s new radio chief, has a background in advertising and marketing, that isn’t a reason to assume everything he says is a lie. It’s more charitable to say he’s well practiced in the dark acts of spinning, having learnt the trade at Pepsi and Proctor and Gamble. And so you … Read more
Radio whinge(r)s
Ed Richards cocked a sympathetic ear to the troubles of the commercial radio business yesterday – but the Ofcom chief could offer little in the way of instant pain relief.
With an end-of-life government meandering to its termination, and Carter’s Digital Britain review soaking up all the attention of bickering departments, he can’t set policy.
Largely as a result of their own greed, financial miscalculations and lack of innovation, large radio companies are suffering. They want to slash costs and merge. Richards, who was addressing the “Radio 3.0” conference in London, listed his preferred solutions. One was to put more emphasis on news and local radio as a community information service. (You could almost hear teeth grind at that one). This was especially useful “during flooding or heavy snow” or other times of crisis. (The grinding continued).
DAB: A very British failure
Emergency talks to save digital radio are taking place in Manchester today, the FT reports. Unloved, unviable, and often unlistenable, DAB is a technology the public clearly doesn’t want; so it comes as no surprise to learn that coercion will be used to persuading the public to get on board. With DAB, we’re expected to … Read more
Orb turns MySpace into a personal radio station
Just as you thought the MySpace phenomenon was running out of steam, tomorrow will see the biggest innovation to the site since it launched.
This one doesn’t come from MySpace itself, however, but Orb Networks. Orb already allows you to listen to or view media stored on your home PC (music, playlists, photos or TV channels), at work, or on a mobile via it’s “MyCasting” service. Now it’s added MySpace integration to the list of features. Using the Orb client MySpace users can upload songs to their MySpace page – and stream them.
A drag and drop client makes the operation trivially simple.
Last year, El Reg was the first to notice how MySpace is really a radio set of sorts: you push a button, and out streams music. There’s only four songs per station, and there’s millions of stations – but it’s still radio.
Digital music nirvana isn’t impossible, it just takes longer
An early look at on-demand streaming of your own music. The cloud buzzword hadn’t caught on back then…
The idea of being able to play your music anywhere, on any device, has become a cliche without quite coming to pass. Viewed from a distance, this looks like one of technology’s greatest failures.
If you’re acquainted with Orb, Sling Media, or MP3Tunes – all of which fulfill that promise to some degree – you’ll know how close we are to this goal. But for every breakthrough, it seems, there’s yet another setback.
Look a little closer, and we see that for the most part it’s not the fault of the basic technology components. The networks are in place, the hard drives are big enough and the processors are fast enough for “audio everywhere”. And all are fairly affordable to a critical mass of the market, although the cost we bear is undoubtedly higher than it was in the analog era.
“If I can play it to myself, then I should be stream it to myself on any of my networked devices,” says Orb Networks’ EVP of product marketing, Ian McCartney.
Politics and greed are the problems.
This week Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes service enabled subscribers to play their iTunes music collection on their TiVo. That’s no thanks to TiVo or Apple, though. It’s possible because subscribers first upload their iPods to the “cloud”, in this case MP3Tunes’ servers, which then performs transcoding if needed.
Orb does something similar, although with a different architecture. In its case the PC punches a hole out to the network, and via Orb’s servers – which also transcode if necessary – allow any device to access the media. Another approach, taken by Sling Media and a host of consumer electronics companies, is hardware based. Like Orb, the media files remain on your own devices, rather than being cached in the cloud. Sling concentrates on TV access, but the problems all three face in getting an end-to-end approach to work as expected are very similar.