Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 5:00PM
Abstract:
With the recent rate hikes impacting Internet radio, only the big guys benefit. Or do they? Will Internet radio look and sound like FM in the next five years? If so, how can the little guys survive? And, considering the challenges and costs, why would they even want to? This session will explore the positive and negative aspects of entering and staying in the Internet radio space, discuss how to make independent Internet radio work financially, and provide expert opinion on the future of Internet radio.David Hyman (Moderator) - CEO, MOG Inc
Nancy Miller - Sr Editor, Wired Magazine
Anil Dewan - Dir of New Media, KCRW Radio
Tom Conrad - CTO, Pandora
Anu Kirk - Dir of Product Mgmt/Rhapsody, Rhapsody America LLC
Conrad: They are focused upon the move from broadcast to unicast of stations that understand what you want to listen to.
Kirk: There are many value addeds: album art, bilocation, artist info, xml data…
Conrad: There are three ways to look at matching music to a person’s taste…
Quantatative metadata - metadata about the beats and data of the songs
Qualitative data - genre, editorial voice
Social or collaborative systems reveal linkages
Pandora has moved away from solely rely on the music genome and now a combo of all three.
Kirk: It turns out that many people like a tastemaker/DJ - like KCRW.
Dewan: How do we use tech to do radio better? Create interactions. We are Old World meets New Wolrd while keeping curation and building this up with technology.
Conrad: There is nowhere to go to find out about what is most popular. The focus is not pushing but leaving the site a blank slate for the user. We think of ourselves of radio. Although terrestrial radio may have screwed up, there are may things that worked about it: simplicity, community, serendipity and repetition is not all bad. People like what they have heard before.
Kirk: What is different between that and a CD changer?
Dewan: Each DJ does not have playlists. they create it from scratch.
Kirk: DJs vs. robots both come out to 80% in the long run. [Me: I think this is a specious example, the ease with which I can switch up a station on demand with Pandora precludes the sameness of DJ vs. robots. It is harder to switch to another good DJ whereas on Pandora I can pull from dozens of stations.]
When will the reality of ubiquitous broadband give us streaming radio?
3G providers are scared that one or two users can drown a cell tower with streaming radio.