From the Christian Science Monitor: "In the coming age of the dominance of Internet radio, the most important question may be: Will you take your music with or without a DJ? If the intensity of the exchange on a recent Internet radio panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is any indication, the question is very much open for debate...

"Most of the younger members on the Internet radio panel thought computer-driven personalization is the key - music tastes are not decided by a DJ, but by you and other users of the music service you choose. For instance, when you register at the sites, you create a user profile. That profile may be matched against other users with the same tastes...

"Older members of the panel reacted with disdain to this idea, believing instead that, as one panelist put it, "DJs have made more music stars than personalization." In this view, DJs remain an integral part of the music selection process...

"The biggest challenge for companies that use personalization, however, will be overcoming the privacy concerns of members, who may be reluctant to divulge so much information about their personal tastes because of concern about how that can (and will) be used.

"Ultimately, both models will have advocates. Some people will want the choice of satellite radio with someone to make the nitty-gritty listening choices for them, while others will prefer to do most of the virtual legwork themselves. In the end, radio will be transformed in ways that wouldn't have seemed possible 10 years ago. And that will make us all audio winners."

Read the entire story here.

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BuySellBid.com CEO Jay Shepard released these statements regarding his company's alleged involvement in the so-called "Internet Twins" scandal.

"'We have concluded our internal investigation and we find no reason to believe any children have ever been sold or auctioned on BuySellBid.com.'"

ABC News allegedly featured the BuySellBid.com web site as part of a story which said the web site was involved in the marketing and selling of children.

"'We are still waiting to hear from ABC News regarding their sources for these claims of our involvement. We remain committed to assisting the authorities in their investigations.'"

Effective immediately, BuySellBid.com suspended listings and ads related to adoption and adoption agencies.

"'I agree completely with British Interior Minister Jack Straw who has called this entire episode "revolting." BuySellBid.com stands ready to support all law enforcement investigations and we call for swift prosecution of all involved in this terrible scandal.'"

The BBC One evening news displayed the online classified company's logo during its coverage of the story yesterday evening.

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"Your database is worth a substantial amount of money..."

Did you see the story in today's WALL STREET JOURNAL, "Disney Unit Offering $50,000 to Toysmart to Kill Customer List"?

Apparently Toysmart is going out of business and Disney (with a 60% share of Toysmart) is faced with two issues:

1) They don't want the list to be sold to another company. Cause...

2) Toysmart had promised its customers that the data would be safe and would not be sold or shared. "The controversy over the list's disclosure has been embarrassing for Disney, which has aggressively lobbied the FTC against encouraging passage of broader privacy laws covering Internet sites."

What's the point to radio? Your DATABASE is worth a substantial amount of money to other companies and can become a strong asset of your station.

-- ruth@presslaff.com

"Measurecast captures both our Real and Windows streams..."

Concerning a recent comment by RKorich@aol.com, "Your MeasureCast ratings reports are very misleading... So far, MeasureCast is ONLY measuring Real Broadcast Network streaming sites... Not one Windows Media streamed station is included!...

3WK (#13 in the last Measurecast rating period) is streamed via Intira - not Real Networks, and Measurecast captures both our Real and Windows streams.

Check your facts R!

-- Wanda Atkinson 3wk.com

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Reprinted from yesterday's edition...


BY KURT HANSON
Those of you who've been reading RAIN for the past few months will recall that last summer we assigned our crack team of interns the project of building their own Internet radio station, in hopes of helping them gain a better understand of the issues we're covering in RAIN. (If you missed the earlier installments in this series, you can catch them here, here, and here.)

In previous installments, RAIN's interns have selected a format, "ripped" music from CDs onto hard drives, encoded those big ".wav" files into smaller ".wma" files for streaming purposes, set up a database of those titles, and designed the look of a player via which those titles could be played.

Today, we reveal the fruits of their efforts: An commercial free (so far) Internet-only radio station called, creatively enough, "RAIN Radio!"

If you'd like to try listening to RAIN Radio, you'll need to be using the Windows operating system (Macintosh support coming soon) and have Windows Media Player installed on your system (Real version coming soon).

If those two criteria are satisfied, you can listen to RAIN Radio while you read RAIN simply by clicking on the image on the right, or on the player below.

Here are some of the issues that RAIN's crack team of interns had to address to get RAIN Radio to its current state:


Fortunately, a couple of RAIN's interns last summer had good programming and coding skills and were able to design a customized "shell" to Windows Media Player to give our station a unique look. (With Internet radio, a lot of the "stationality" for which traditional radio programmers use audio can be expressed visually in the player design.)

By building a shell for the Windows Media software that already exists on your computer, we got the advantage of having our own unique presentation (plus the "skip" button and CD cover art) without forcing listeners to download a custom player.


In our "jukebox" approach to Internet radio, each listener hears a different, randomized list of song titles. We did, however, add two techniques to make RAIN Radio sound more like real radio: (1) We established a ten-song artist-separation rule. (2) We created a few "power" records by putting the same song into our playlist database more than once.


Among the features intended to give RAIN Radio a unique look, we decided to display album covers for the last three albums played. To implement that feature, we had to build a file of album cover art, either by scanning the CD covers we owned or by grabbing the graphics from a source like Amazon and shrinking them to size. (An unresolved question is this: If one of our goals is to encourage the listener to click the image, go to Amazon, and buy the record, is this "fair use" of the artwork? It seems like it should be.)

We tried to add enough artists to each format to honor the rules of that act -- e.g., making sure that the same artist doesn't come up more than four times in a three-hour period. But Congress didn't address the question of whether whether "Wings" and "Paul McCartney" are the same artist or two different artists.

(And how about "Jefferson Airplane" vs. "Jefferson Starship"? The same artist or two different ones? Then how about "Bruce Springsteen" vs. "Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band"? How about "Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks" vs. "Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks"? If Congress is going to get into the business of regulating music programming, Congress needs to get down to specifics!)

Of course, there are lots more issues left to address, and we'll get to some of them in the next installment of this series. Aside from reaching an agreement with the RIAA, we'll cover the topics of selecting a streaming provider, adding both banner and streaming audio ads, adding production elements like sweepers, signing up with a ratings service, and developing a marketing plan.

But until then, we hope you enjoy RAIN Radio!

February 1-4, 2001	RAB 2001, Dallas, TX
February 21-25, 2001	The Gavin Seminar 2001, Miami, FL
February 26-28, 2001	Broadcasters Website Sales Conf. 2.0, Tempe, AZ