But walk a mile in much younger shoes. If you could access what you want when you want it from a device that fits in your pocket, wouldn't you?
Very true.
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But I assume they must pay that IF they also have a streaming option? When I was putting together this database (40000 MP3-type streams and another 40000 AAC-format streams) - they must be paying a lot of money? The American ones were the only ones with geofencing, other than some Scandinavian countries' stations (Sweden probably has to play nice in the legal world given how much money Spotify makes for them). There is one huge streamer based out of the UAE that has individual stations for each of 700 of the most popular music acts/artists in history (almost all English-speaking) but they added about 40 Bollywood artists in the last 6 months. Still, they cant possibly afford the copyright fees. The UK doesn't geofence outward but apparently TuneIn fences inward in the UK after a major court case a few years ago.
Whatever technical merit Spotify ever had that got them to the number one spot today, I figure if they had started out in the United States, they would have been sued into oblivion and never got off the ground at all. Now, algorithms in the Spotify cloud are mostly responsible for young listeners' exposure to new music.
Correct.
It depends. Pandora did basically the same thing before Spotify and didn't get sued. It was started by a musician who said a lot of things the music industry liked. They celebrated him for creating a new revenue stream for music. Then he sold to Sirius.
What is going to become of it? Were you planning to upload it in a common format like .m3u8 some place people could download it from easily, like the internet archive?
You can bet on it.
Good question. I guess I could do that in the near future. Since I'm really just focused on hardware. But I did put a lot of work into curating it and am a bit hesitant that someone else out there also building similar hardware but without the dataset could speed ahead of my own product by just taking the whole data set and copying it. If I knew it was just various people using it for their own personal purposes then I wouldnt have a problem with sharing it. The geocoding also wasnt trivial since every station is pinpointed on a map -- for example the Boston list has a bunch of stations from Waltham and Newton or Cambridge or some other lesser known place but I filed them all under Boston since that is the target market. I had to do that for tens of thousands of stations and even that didnt turn out exactly perfect
People use Github to host lists of m3u8 links for free IPTV streams (two examples). You can also put donation links on Github pages. What about that? Perhaps it could become an ongoing labor of love project that you receive tip jar money for. Meanwhile by having it on Github it can be shown to be your work (perhaps you could put it under one of those open source licenses) to defend against theft for profit.
I'm going to look into that. When I started out I found a few of those M3u8 lists - a lot of them had broken links though. Normally when I think of GitHub I think of the kind of coding that I'm doing on this microchip.
I would also say that these guys are VERY good for a dataset, and they are relatively open. You should check them out:
FMSTREAM - The Radio Stream Directory
Easy access to live radio. Free, non-commercial, no tracking. About 100.000 stations, 200.000 streams. Select bitrate, list frequencies. Aiming to include all available streams of each program. One of the biggest resources on the internet.
fmstream.org
Thanks. I'll do that.
Just one thing. Please don't let people here (including me) convince you that your dream hardware idea is so ill-advised that you have to "run! run away while you still can!" These guys are career experts and they're obviously correct about radio being obsolete to the young. But millennials and zoomers aren't the only people who buy things, and crucially, you said -- and perhaps they overlooked -- that your invention costs $10 bucks to put together. Which makes me think you might be working with commodity ASICs you're programming yourself and maybe even companies like PCBWay to cheaply fabricate prototype boards for you, if you aren't going full Mr. Carlson's Lab and fabbing simple boards yourself, using a 3D printer at home to make housings, etc. If there's any possibility that's what you're doing, then the warnings you've received here might not apply after all. Yes, they would apply to a traditional manufacturing scenario -- one where you were possibly looking into initiating expensive non-programmable ASIC chip and board R&D with the aid of hired engineers, and then investing considerable $$$ contracting with a conventional factory overseas to have big runs (tens/hundreds of thousands) manufactured on traditional assembly lines. But if all you're actually doing is what I described vis-a-vis home-programmed ASICs and DIY or PCBWay boards, then you probably have little to fear from building fifty or so units on your kitchen table and then floating them under the noses of carefully targeted radio geek communities online to see if they "go viral" and prove to be saleable.
Here, please watch this in full:
The person who made these wifi232 dongles (which are absolutely awesome to anyone who remembers BBSing) did them entirely DIY too. He also didn't have any large target market in mind that would make high-cost research, or high volume traditional manufacturing, worthwhile financially (the dongles are for a pathetically obsolete pursuit). Yet he sold out his initial fabbing run completely, simply from having the idea to float some demo units to "influencers" on Youtube who ran computer review channels with decent followings, hoping they would be amused enough with the novelty of his idea to review one and instantly generate a free infomercial. You could do that yourself. There are many radio geek channels on Youtube, plus channels run by people who just love receiving novel gadgets and exploring them on camera. People like Techmoan (internet radio review), Farpoint Farms (same), Todderbert (same), Fred in the Shed (same), and OfficialSWLchannel (same) come to mind. If you believed you could get a couple Youtube people with geek audiences to play with your prototypes on camera, you might be able to start off with kitchen table sales to niche audiences and possibly gather momentum from there.
Anyway, I just wanted to add all this, as I would feel terrible if your idea might have potential if properly guerilla marketed this way, and me suggesting you put your database on Github for birdseed contributions cheated you out of it. That was just a last resort suggestion, in case you really did decide there was no hope otherwise.
Edit: another person who reviewed the wifi232.
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I thought that too.... and it was staggering on my phone making it challenging to read.
I often thought of the format :
all request radio _ we might be asked to take this outside ( feel free to message me ) but what happens when a station goes "all..... 90s" for a weekend and plays that song that you never knew the name until you heard it last Saturday and Shazam'd it and thinking all these years
and never could find it in YouTube
ie primitive radio gods. try finding that without know the title.
or, when the all 90s weekend produces a sound byte " oh s*** they're actually playing that " _ why can't this be the
actual format ??? not the all request lunch hour - but the true format.
yes, you will have discretion, do not play songs, boundaries but..... let's go.
you may not get the number one spot in the ratings but you will have the chatter and attract advertisers and sponsors will know people are tuned in.
Don CT
.... also take notice of the reaction when the radio drives have the legal version of pay 4 play -- and the reaction you get when you have the donation to make a wish buying your songs 🎵 and for the next tier ( higher $ donation amount )
you can have songs out of the format...
yes charity brings out the best and the checkbooks, but for the listener it holds them to needing to know what song will be next instead of the formulated predictable playlist.
.... also take notice of the reaction when the radio drives have the legal version of pay 4 play -- and the reaction you get when you have the donation to make a wish buying your songs 🎵 and for the next tier ( higher $ donation amount )
you can have songs out of the format...
yes charity brings out the best and the checkbooks, but for the listener it holds them to needing to know what song will be next instead of the formulated predictable playlist.
Where's the NAB when you need them. It's time to restart that 'Radio is Beautiful' campaign....call it 'Radio is still beautiful!' Do TV ads, billboard, radio spots. Reinforce what's great about radio.
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