Programming Interactive
Internet Radio
Create your own 'radio stations' that
send you exactly the type of music you wish to hear
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Internet radio can not
only avoid all the distance limitations of regular radio,
but can also be personalized to give you a unique set of
music programming.
Part
two of a three part series on intelligent interactive
internet radio services;
see also :
1. An Introduction to
intelligent interactive internet radio service
2. Creating your own personalized music streams
3. Specific services reviewed
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It can be frustrating
listening to regular broadcast music - 'oh no, not that song
again'! How many times have you wished that a telepathic
programmer would read your mind and send exactly the music you
like and want to you, with no effort required on your part.
Sure, we can always create
'playlists' of music to listen to, but these are fixed and
unchanging, and become predictable and boring. And much of
the time when we're listening to music, we don't want to be
interrupted every 3 minutes or so by the need to select the next
track to play.
Now there's a completely new
alternative, and one which is close to the ideal 'mind reading
programmer' scenario.
Here's how to create internet
'radio stations' that will uniquely stream a selection of music
that you will like.
How Complicated is it to Get
Exactly the Music You Want?
Well, you'll probably never
get 100% all the time exactly the music you want - but then
again, most of us don't even know 100% for sure what we want all
the time. If there are exact pieces of music you
specifically want to hear, and/or in a specific order, you
should buy the music and then play it through an MP3 player.
But in terms of describing
and fine tuning your preferences so that you consistently get
music you like, it is astonishingly simple and only takes a
little bit of information from you to get the process started.
Simply 'seed' the process by
telling the service a bit about what you like, and then perhaps
work through some of their suggestions - they'll generally
suggest some additional styles/groups/songs based on what you've
already specified. You really only need to make a few
selections to start with, and then start playing the music.
From that point, you can
fine tune the process, track by track. Plus you don't need
to be stuck listening to something you don't like - generally
there is an option to skip a song any time one comes along that
you don't like.
You can generally
communicate with the service either through their website on
your computer (or sometimes with a special music playing program
on your computer) or through one of the other music playing
devices such as an iPhone or Logitech Squeezebox.
How to Design Your Own Music
Stations
When you are creating your
own music stations, you have one major policy decision to make -
do you want to make a music station that covers all of
everything you like, or do you want to make a series of stations
covering the different genres you enjoy?
We recommend that you do not
try and make a 'one size fits all' station, and instead you
possibly create several different stations. You might want
a 'golden oldies' station, an 'easy listening' station, maybe an
'instrumental' station, and so on.
In my case, I have classical
stations that I've focused on things such as '19th century
romantic/nationalist composers', 'opera', 'piano music', and so
on.
The reason to split into
different stations is easily understood if you compare it to
painting. If you remember back to when as a young child
you'd paint or draw with crayons, what would invariably happen
as you mixed more and more of the lovely vibrant colors
together? You'd always end up with a muddy brown, right?
It is the same with this
type of preference system. Maybe some of the time you like
one easy relaxing gentle music, and some of the time you like a
very active hard beat style of music. If you tell the
system that you like both, it may end up being confused, and by
seeing you like music that scores strongly at one end of some
attributes, and also liking music that scores strongly at the
other end of the same attributes, it might merge and blend these
and tell itself that you like all music anywhere along the range
of formats, which means you've ended up giving the selection
system conflicting and confusing information that reduces its
ability to zero in on specifically the styles you like.
So - generally better to
choose separate stations for each different major style of music
you like.
Some of the services then
give you an option that you can select to choose music chosen
from across all the different station formats you've designed.
That is the best way of then getting a broad mix of music, all
of which you like.
Creating multiple stations
also means that you have specific options for the mood and
situation. You might have a 'quiet sophisticated music'
station to play when you have friends over for a dinner party,
and a 'loud dance music' station for when you and your friends
end up drinking too much and wanting to cut loose!
Rating the Music You Like and
Dislike
Once you've created and
start playing one of the themed stations of music, you then have
a chance to rate each piece of music as being a good or bad
choice, so as to influence how the system chooses future pieces
for you.
This is simple and obvious,
but there's one thing to consider. When you are rating the
music, remember the theme or style of the 'station' that you've
designed, and then rate the music for how closely it matches the
type of music you like within that genre.
This helps to keep your
different stations, each with a different style/theme/genre
clearly distinct and separate from each other, and this
consistent rating and theming of each music station makes it
easier for the service to do a better job of getting you exactly
the pieces of music you'll enjoy.
Licensing Restrictions on Your
Programming Choices
It is no exaggeration to say
that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives a massive amount
of dominating control over how music is played to the owners of
the music copyright.
Just like movie studios have
been slow to embrace and work with the new forms of
playing/watching movies (they even initially tried to outlaw all
forms of VCR - a technology that subsequently saved rather than
destroyed Hollywood), so too are music producers slow to
understand and work with the potential offered by new music
services such as these intelligent interactive internet 'radio
stations'.
On the one hand, internet
'radio stations' have to pay a fee to the music owner for every
time any song is played to anyone. Depending on their
licensing agreement, every piece of
music you listen to costs the service some money (some services
instead pay a flat percentage of all the revenue they earn
instead of a per song royalty). This
contrasts very unfairly with regular broadcast radio, where the
radio stations only pay flat fees to the music owners, not a fee
per listener. Internet radio stations have to pay
substantially more to pass music on to you than do regular
broadcast stations, and as a result, the established radio
broadcasters have been attempting to slow down the spread of
favorable business models to the new online services - services
which massively threaten their own survival.
But, wait - it gets worse.
Not only do internet music services have to pay draconian sums
of money, they also have to struggle with massive restrictions
on how flexible a service they can then offer to you. The
restrictions are as stupid and counter-productive to the best
interests of the music owners as they are annoying and
detracting to us, the potential listeners of the music.
But try explaining that to the mindset of people who saw (and
still do see) things like vcr's as major threats rather than
benefits to the movie industry.
What this means is that some
things you think you should be able to do are not as easy or
possible as they could be. This is because the music
copyright holders want to force you to actually buy the music
from them whenever possible, rather than sell the music to you,
play by play by play. So if you want to have total control
over exactly the music you hear, then these restrictions are
designed to force you to buy the tracks one at a time (or CD by
CD) and create your own playlists.
But if you're willing to be
a bit more flexible about the music you hear, then the
restrictions aren't so galling.
There are two main
restrictions you'll notice. The first is that your music
specifications have to remain somewhat generic - you can't say
'I want to create a music stream that only plays me music from
the first five Beatles albums' for example. Instead you'd
have to create a station that had those five albums as specified
things you like, but that would result in a stream with a mix of
music from those albums and lots of other similar sort of music
from other groups too.
The second restriction is
that you can't keep skipping tracks every time you get a song
you don't like. This is so you can't use the skipping
feature as a work-around; in the example above, you'd
theoretically be able to skip every song that wasn't on the
first five Beatles albums. By limiting the number of times
you can skip tracks each hour and each day, the music owners
again limit the degree of total control you have over your
listening experience.
So when you encounter these
limitations, it isn't the music stream providers being unhelpful
and obstructive. It is the limitations imposed on them by
the music owners.
Fortunately, most of us
won't find these constraints too bothersome, and will enormously
enjoy the music we get from the music streams we design.
Part
two of a three part series on intelligent interactive
internet radio services;
see also :
1. An Introduction to
intelligent interactive internet radio service
2. Creating your own personalized music streams
3. Specific services reviewed
FTC Mandatory Disclosure :
I was not given any of the products written about on this
page by their manufacturers. I have not been paid money to
write this article.
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Originally published
23 October 2009, last update
21 Jul 2020
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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