Jamie said:
too hard you say?
now that k-rock has finally tuned on their HD radio signal, maybe they can put on k-rock 2 on HD-2
I'd like to give it a listen.
It seems that I cannot get k-rock 2 to work on my Intel Mac...? any suggestions
After a closer listen, the sound is just about right, and they play just about the right mix. I really like to top 5 countdown, I don't like the "hacked" segment. I think they might be increasing the bit-rate as they said something about K-Rock 2 in HD. I've only heard spots for Major World, so the sales staff is obviously neglecting the platform. If I were K-Rock and I were serious about making the stream popular and profitable, I would do a few things,
#1. Integrate with Last FM seeing as my parent company paid $280,000,000 for it last year. I'd basically keep the front end page at
www.krock2.com, because it will make it easier to sell to companies as a stand alone entity for locals, but I'd have the social networking engine, the playback engine, and the back end streaming technology held on last.fm in order to let Viacom do the national deals with national companies. Sort of like what we call in Finance, a "white label." (See appendix A)
#2. I'd require user data before listening to my free stream. The thought that any schmo can listen to this stream is garbage. Pah-lease, anyone who wants to listen must have a login, and to get a login the user must provide to provide age, gender data, and location data. And the rebuttal that people wont casually listen without a login is garbage too, people login to read the times, they login to check myspace, they login to blog about radio on radio-info, people log in for everything.
#3. I'd put a rate this song (good or bad, binary solution only) on the front of the player so I had real time market data and didn't have to hire consultants to tell me what my listeners like. And given my login info, I could slice and dice it based on a/s/l.
#4. Podcasts - You need them for the car-ride in the short term until wireless streaming takes off, and you'll need them for your subway commuters long term as a wireless internet signal won't penetrate the tunnels.
Overall, I'm happy to hear new music again. I'm going to see spoon at batter park City on July 11 now (found out about that show on myspace by the way, k-Rock/cbs radio need to improve that aspect to their business), and for the first time in a while I feel good about "Indie" (I guess that's what they call alternative now). As far as inability to stream on a mac, I mean, you bought the thing, ask apple why their machine is incompatible with the world.
# Appendix A - On a further thought about internet radio theory, from a cost standpoint, it makes total sense to have just one central data center streaming to all users nationally. And the big boy advertising firms would save so much time in that they'd only have to do one central deal rather than hundreds of regional deals, I'm sure advertising firms would be willing to pay premium for the ease and accountability of doing a national deal through a central point (especially when that ease means they can cut staff). The problem is, if you move to this centralized model, then you risk allowing regional upstarts (possibly independent of a revenue model, server space is cheap after all!?) to cut into your listener share. The only way to prevent one of those music-over-money pinkos from cutting into your shareholders bottom line is to add value to your super cheap centralized music service, coopting them essentially, by establishing regionalized webpage front-ends, of course, on top of this web page, you'll need a small street team and salesforce for obvious imaging (account management) and revenue reasons (allows a company to do regional deals with the medium sized fish). It seems like CBS already has the infrastructure and, more importantly, the regional market share, in place to move to the inevitable streaming model.
