Find songs that have played within the past 7 days on the nation’s top 2,600 radio stations, CMT, FUSE, MTV, and VH-1. Rate currently playing songs right now to influence charts & chat with other listeners.
Archive for the ‘Radio Stations’ Category
What’s playing in America
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007Can Social tools save plain ole’ Radio?
Monday, March 26th, 2007Over at GigaOm Rags Guptagives his view on the future of radio:
Social networking around music has emerged as a class of Web service. While terrestrial radio has yet to fully embrace this, music social networking represents a large opportunity for terrestrial radio stations to gain relevance and currency online. Fundamentally there are two functions around music that social networking can fulfill…
He’s got a fair point, radio is really well positioned to gain from music lovers sharing and comparing music online. Nokia have been trying to bridge this with visual radio (pretty awful multimedia content and radio mash-up) and yes.com aggregates 2,600 US music stations output to show the zeitgeist.
Stations like XFM are really trying to bridge the gap and have excellent content to drive people to the site and some great forums to keep people there. Part of the problem is radio is still fairly fragmented when it comes to marketing with stations mostly managing their own budgets and never really having a huge push together to tackle online. The exception of course being good old aunty who is fantastic at building online service and discussion around music radio as well as branching into social networks like Second life.
Thanks to Ed for the link.
The Future of Radio
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006Ofcom have just announced a consultation document entitled the The Future of Radio.
Digital Radio and its future are at the heart of the study. DAB in the UK is growing, no suproses there, but the study also looks at the standards used to broadcast digital radio In the UK. MP2 is the current standard-de-jour. You don’t need to be an expert in digital audio to know that there are better systems around, MP3 and MP4 for starters.
MP2 has worse sound quality than FM and is a backwards step. The biggest drawback with MP2 is that you can get two better quality MP4 stations in the same broadcasting space as MP2. This means there is more space for more stations.
Jack Schofield in the Guardian has raised this issue a number of times over the last few weeks and is leading the campaign for the use of MP4 (sometimes confusingly called AAC+).
The problem I have with Jack’s campaign and the possible switch to MP4 is that I own two digital radios that won’t play MP4 and three FM radios so if this campaign is successful I’ll need to buy 5 new radios. As we speak the number of digital radios sold with MP4 playback is almost zero in the UK so I won;t be alone in having problems if this change happens.
The study also mentions TV over DAB. Virgin Mobile recently launched the Lobster phone which can receive DAB-TV. TV broadcasting takes up a lot of broadcast space further limiting the number of radio channels out there.
So what should be done. All new digital radios in the UK should support both MP2 and MP4. MP4 should be introduced in tandem with MP2 and DAB-TV should be phased out and introduced as the analogue TV broadcasts are stopped. I wonder what Ofcom will decide to do.
BBC to introduce more podcasts
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005Free Thought Radio
Friday, April 15th, 2005
I don’t know what’s scarier, the religous injustice this station talks about or the way the creepy presenter speaks.
Talking about religious persecution in medieval France, of how peasants were dragged behind horses for not giving themselves to God in between Frank Zappa classics, Ok for five minutes but don’t listen for too long ‘coz it’ll drive you a bit mental.
Secret Agent from Soma.fm
Sunday, April 10th, 2005
I’ve been listening to this for most of the afternoon:
Secret Agent -
The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life. For Spies and P.I.’s too!
Art of the Mix
Monday, April 4th, 2005I forget how many mix tapes I must have made in the last ten years or so – I was rooting through some stuff over the weekend and I came across a tape I made about 8 years ago. My god, how sad was I? Think Fat Boy Slim segwaying into something by, and I am so embarrassed to admit this, T’Pau. What was I thinking?
Anyway, last week on Mitch Benn’s Crimes Against Music they covered this very subject – and it seems I’m not alone in being really frightened about my mix tapes coming back to haunt me.
I also came across this little site over the weekend where you can set up virtual mixes that you can share with friends or just about anybody. The site will even print CD labels for you – genius.
A further bit of foraging turned up this, Unheard.org which lists US Public Radio shows that offer something a bit different.
On of the first streams I loaded up was a show called A-Side, B-side which is 90 minutes of mix tapes taken from Art of the Mix. Now be careful as some of mixes, are well, sketchy, but others are really ace – happy listening folks!
A real shame (please switch things back BBC 7)
Monday, March 21st, 2005I’m sure I’m not alone in being a bit peeved with BBC Radio 7 for changing their evening schedules.
I listen to Radio 4′s excellent comedy every evening at 6.30pm when I get back from work – after which I usually switch over to BBC 7 to hear a repeat of ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’ or ‘Just a minute’. But to my utter dismay BBC 7 have started playing older comedy – which although funny is not nearly as good as more recent stuff.
So if anybody from BBC 7 is reading this – switch things back to the way they were!