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TEN
SCOOPS IN TEN DAYS!
We've got a LOT of excellent, exclusive material in
the queue. Look for original reporting on brand-new stories
involving radio and the Interent every day for the next two
weeks of RAIN!
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 BY
KURT HANSON
 The
company behind the live, local Internet-only CHR webcast
ClevelandHits.com has "put their flag in the sand"
in 81 other cities by putting up "Coming
soon" pages on their server for ChicagoHits.com,
FresnoHits.com,
and similar URLs for 79 other metropolitan areas.
Each of those 81 pages includes links to ClevelandHits.com
as an example of exactly what
it is that's coming soon. (For a complete list of the 81
URL's, click the screenshot at right and then click bottom link
in the right-hand column ("We're nationwide").)
How have things been going since RAIN wrote its
first story on ClevelandHits back in June? (See original story here;
note that back-and-forth reader feedback continues for several days
thereafter.)
President/GM Mike Hilber gave RAIN the  following
update: "We
just started advertising on July 17th -- 7,500 spots on cable
between now and the end of the year -- a package that includes MTV,
VH1, E!, Discovery, USA, and ESPN in a 24-hour rotation.
"Right now, if I didn't grow any more, I'm pacing to deliver
30,000 to 35,000 visits per month, and with 10 page views per person,
that's 300,000 page views and 3.5 million hits per month. And my
average length of visit will be 35 minutes within a month at the
current rate."
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...
All right, all right, I can't help myself -- let's do the
math: Although these admittedly aren't audited numbers,
35,000 visits times 35 minutes would mean Mike
would be getting about 20,000 hours of listening per
month.
Since there are 720 hours in a typical month,
that means he'd be getting about 28 hours of listening
per hour -- which would translate mathematically into an AQH
of about 28 listeners.
As the station's promos say, "Get used to it --
there's a new sherrif in town!"
... |
 Hilber
told RAIN, "Local advertiser interest has been really
strong. I've got a lot of deals on the
table for fall; it was too late to pick up any summer
dollars.
He noted, "You know, there's no 'up' for Internet media
-- you have to go in and create the need. You really create campaigns
that include both audio and visuals, and with the live
IJ, it gives us the ability to add the elements of immediate contesting...and
we can guide people to different parts of the site, as opposed to
a silent website, where you have to just hope they find them.
"It's amazing how you can condition your audience with
the IJ being there. For example, we were having trouble getting
AOL users to  go
into the chat room, so we put on a series of spots that said, If
you're an AOL or a Compuserve users, get onto the Internet, minimize
your window, and then launch your Netscape or Explorer browser --
and from that point, we never had any problem with people complaining
they couldn't get in.
"Now we're starting our grass-roots campaign. We have
the van painted up and we're going out and passing out our
'Listen to us' cards -- a business card that says, Hey,
lisetn to us and gives the address and some of the featutres of
the site. We've been giving out thousands of them...
"Now we're combining that with bumper stickers -- it's
just something else to hand out that was cheap enough, so we ordered
thousands of those."
Picutred: Morning DJ T-Luv standing around
on camera while a set of songs and promos is playing.
eQuest
voting results:
The station's concept is that listeners vote from a preselected
list of 20 songs each hour for the songs the station will play
the NEXT hour.
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...
Although admittedly morning drive may not be a huge daypart
for this concept, it looks as if a total of one person
voted in the 7AM hour today. (Here's my math: Each listener
can vote for seven songs. 14.29% is the equivilent of 1/7, suggesting
that a total of seven votes came in.)
These songs were counted down in the 8AM hour with, reasonably
enough, no mention that it was a seven-way tie.
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Contribute your thoughts about Mike's venture capital-funded
project on the new RAIN message boards (here)
or using the form button immediately below.
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Thanks
to the work of RAIN's crack team of interns, clicking
the headline at left should bring up a nice pop-up form.
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BY PAUL MALONEY
Calling itself "an LA based collective of
djs and artists dedicated to the growth of new, positive music and
culture," Dublab
streams various genres of underground,
independent, and otherwise obscure music.
The music is quite interesting -- lots of electronic and
club-stlye music in
the trance/drum-and-bass genre,
with some hip-hop and even old rock (e.g.,
the Kinks) mixed in.
And
the site is certainly attractive enough, with a real unified
artwork style.
But that leads to navigation problems,  especially
if you're new to the site. I guess it's hip to use pretty arbitrary
icons and destinations named Audio Tank, Incubator, and Lab
Rats to find your way around, but for the uninitiated, it's
tough to know where you're going --
and things don't always get clearer once you're there! However,
in all fairness, each of the three major site sections
mentioned above has a sub-menu, and each item on the sub-menus is
briefly explained.
Given all the glitz,
I was surprised that Dublab doesn't have its own custom player
(Dublab, by the way, streams with Real). Not only  would
it most likely have looked cool, but more importantly, a "Now
playing" function could shed some
light on the mass of unfamiliar music.
But there is plenty of original written material about the
music (e.g., reviews, artist features), and about the DJs themselves.
(The hosts take turns with a "Things I like..." bit.)
Dublab is all about the music and lifestyle. For the experimentally-minded,
it could be an ideal place to begin a journey of music discovery
on the Internet.
|
 We'll
send you RAIN's e-mail news updates on a regular basis,
plus bulletins when important news breaks. (In addition, we'll
appreciate knowing that you're reading our efforts -- and
you'll hopefully appreciate reminders to read RAIN.)
You should be receiving
a confirmation e-mail from us shortly.
Thanks!
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Feedback is still coming in regarding last week's various
threads (Napster, GlobalMedia, etc.). Look for more shortly...or
discuss among yourselves
on the new RAIN Message Boards here.
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Try it
out! Explore
the wide world of Internet audio by clicking the screenshot above.
Miss an issue?
Visit the RAIN News Archives here.
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