Media Sites Come and Go - Page 8

While there are thousands of online radio stations, very few even begin to approach the theoretical PRS, for the prime characteristic of the PRS is user programmability. Typical online radio stations deliver one, or perhaps a few, sequential programs, just as their terrestrial counterparts do. But there are a few sites that allow a certain amount of user customization.

One of these that seemed to have a bright future was Onair.com, which offered a wide variety of programs covering different musical styles, and allowed the listener to customize the program to a certain extent. Alas, their online radio site was quietly shut down recently, and their site now touts their streaming and hosting solutions. In industry-speak, they’ve remade themselves from a content provider into a technology company, which is often something of a last-ditch effort to get some cash flow out of a company’s intellectual assets.

More disturbing in a way is the recent announcement by IUMA that they have closed the site to new artists, and suspended online CD sales. They claim that the site will continue, and I hope they do. The Internet Underground Music Archive is old Web, and a classy site that was ahead of its time. As the name implies, they feature unsigned artists, and were doing so back when the very idea of audio on the Web was pretty far out there.

So much for the bad news. Let’s take a look at what’s still out there.

One hopes that Yahoo isn’t going to disappear any time soon, and their audio offerings are quite extensive. Yahoo offers several different ways to listen to music. Their so-called "CD Jukebox" has a good amount of music to offer, mostly unsigned acts with an occasional big name here and there. But it isn’t really a jukebox in the sense we’ve been discussing, which lets the user set up custom playlists. Yahoo’s CD Jukebox is nothing more than a set of links to audio streams. Nothing very earth-shaking here.

Yahoo Radio is a little closer to our Holy Grail, but still has a long way to go. This is not a radio station in itself, but a sort of specialized directory of radio stations. You can select six user- defined preset stations within the player. Handy, but again, not enough to make you throw out all your CDs.

For a little more customization, and an interesting approach to the concept, check out LAUNCH.com. This lets you set up your own custom radio station, which will randomly select cuts from a playlist within parameters that you specify. First you check favorite artists from a (rather limited) list. The station will play tunes by those and similar artists. As each song plays, you can choose to skip it, and also give it a rating to determine how often it will be played again. The interesting thing is that the custom stations created by users are also available to other users. If you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own station, browse until you find an existing station created by a user of similar tastes, and listen to it, or even use it as a template for further customization. Shades of the early Web!

The problem with LAUNCH.com is that so far, their musical selection is limited to a few dozen well-known artists. A programming engine this powerful is overkill unless there is enough material in the database to create some really specialized programs. But powerful it is, and it may represent an important model for the next wave of media programming.

RadioMOI is another music site that allows user-defined radio stations. In addition to a very extensive music-on-demand section (one of the few that allows playing individual tracks — the catch here is that not all tracks from every album are available), RadioMOI has a feature called "I’m the DJ" that lets users search the database of available tracks, and add selected tracks to a custom program. These folks have definitely got the idea, but the user interface is rather clunky, and the overall site design leaves much to be desired.

RadioMOI seems to be financed by ads, both banners on the site and audio ads inserted into the programs. It remains to be seen whether audio ads are any more effective than banners, which are now inspiring a lot of skepticism. But they do give owners of media sites another product to sell, which can't hurt.

Next Wave of the Web: Building the Perfect Radio Station, Part 2 - Page 7
Next Wave of the Web
The Technical Side - Page 9