Yeah, windows media probably more than itunes now since so much garbage is on there. I have statistic data on my station listener counts throughout a week and can look back so if I got listed somewhere I can tell. For example I recently started paying radiotower.com for a premium listing because I noticed about 50 website vists a day and at least 25 tuneins from that, so I would consider that worth it on a daily basis. It's a little harder to track than something like windows media or iTunes where you get listed one day and suddenly you go from like 100 listeners to 500. Nowadays do not expect that, too many people are "in the game now" and the industry will have to adjust, I assume by most people going off the air or something.
What would really help if the two big tuners would do quality checks, these crap ass . and number stations are just SAMs on random with no one putting any work to it. Me and several of our friends recently were "fired" (hostile takeover) from .977 and immediately replaced with automated SAM because Jeff got greedy and wanted the money all to himself rather than pay the station managers. And guess what? No one seems to care, his listener numbers barely dropped off and now he's raking it in! I've seen people have their pro websites rejected from banner ad providers that were picky, I wish the tuners were that way.
Regarding the dots and numbers, I've asked both biggies and microsoft's answer is that they're "working on it" but I don't think Jeff will take losing his dot lightly, nor Donnie and others their numbers... The only way to solve it is randomizing or some other shuffle methods, someone will always be at the top if its in alpha order. iTunes however says that they are in the process right now of changing some and I saw Jeff lose his dot already, so they care, kudos to them!
I don't mean to sound like I'm badmouthing the people who run the tuner, Ryan at Apple and the various people at Microsoft are always very nice and quick with changes, but its very possible they are doing 50 other jobs and don't have time to listen to each new station for 30 minutes and grade it, and granted if you're not a radio pro you cannot really tell the difference between SAM automated shuffling and a real station (except SAMs crossfading isn't exact and I've heard a couple of rough transitions before).
I can't speak for Live365 but its less of a tuner and more of a whole broadcasting package, personally I've never used it but actually depending on the type of account you have any more than like 300 listeners will cause you to hit the legal ceiling for the royalty license you have, so I think you're still limited there in that way (last time I checked).
