WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED "TEN SCOOPS IN TEN DAYS" We've been giving you original reporting on stories involving radio and the Internet every day for the past two weeks in RAIN. And we've got even more coming soon! (Thanks to all of RAIN's crack team of interns for helping us successfully live up to this promise.)

Virgin Mobile has introduced the world's first mobile phone with a built-in MP3 player: Now available in England, the Samsung SGH M-100 will set you back £349.99, which is about $510.76.

According to a brief piece from The Register, the phone, which has actually previously been available elsewhere in Europe, is equipped with 32Mb memory (which handles just over half an hour of music), stereo headphones and a microphone.

And the music automatically pauses if you receive a call. Controls include: play, stop, skip, shuffle, and a graphic equalizer. Its power storage will allow it to play music for nine hours (which I guess is great if you want to hear your music mix 18 times in a row).

This phone seems to be only one small step away from having wireless Internet radio access -- or at very least the ability to download a half-hour of your favorite radio station into it. ...

From Radio & Records:

From Radio & Records: "Yahoo's deal with Learfield Communications, Enlighten Sports and ISP Sports will allow displaced sports fans and alumni to follow their favorite college teams through live audio and video broadcasts on Yahoo! Sports. Look for sports coverage of 22 colleges and universities, including Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina and Syracuse.

"Both Learfield and ISP produce and market collegiate sports, including radio play-by-play and call-in shows. In related news, FoxSports.com says its Saturday webcast of Nebraska's season opener against San Jose State was the first-ever live webcast of an NCAA Division I-A college football game.

"Both Clear Channel and Entercom shares fell $3.88 Friday on analysts' concerns that radio ad growth will slow in the third and fourth quarters as fewer dot-com firms buy time and the radio ad market runs out of room for rate increases. CCU closed Friday at $68.50 on volume of 14.2 million shares — almost five times the three-month daily average — while ETM closed at $37.44, a four-month low. Analysts say Clear Channel and Entercom were hit hard because of their presence in 'wired markets': cities that have a large Internet company presence. 'Markets that have a lot of dot-com business are really feeling the pain now,' Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Gordon Hodge tells Bloomberg, because that money is no longer there."

From Radio & Records: "Revenue for the three months ended June 30 was $177,895. Net loss widened from $938,159 (15 cents per share) to $2.9 million (31 cents). Feed The Monster says the increase in expenses and losses resulted primarily from new personnel, space and equipment the company added since fiscal Q1 2000. FTM, which develops websites for major-market radio stations, currently is pursuing $2 million in bridge financing and is also exploring longer-term financing."

IndiaFM seems to be part of a much larger destination of celebrity and entertainment from that country. It's a fairly simple site that carries 16 channels of various kinds of Indian Music -- from classical to Punjabi to something called "Dhamka 2000" -- and it's available any time you feel the need!

While the page is simple and easy to load, a rather heavy Flash graphic dominates, and makes looking at it rather difficult. We imagine most users would load the player and then explore elsewhere. The player itself isn't anything fancy, either: just a pop-up window with an embedded RealPlayer (no customized controls) and a few banner ads.

Back on the site, there are links to online music shopping and to make dedications or requests. Interesting note: there are no live DJs. How can there be "dedications?" Are they written and sent via e-mail?

Something here that you don't see in the US: a link with lots of song lyrics. From what we understand, it's not legal to reprint song lyrics without permission (from the publisher?). And as with most things, permission equals payments...so no lyrics. But this site has tons of 'em. Are the copyright laws in India more lax? Are our friends at IndiaFM radio lawless anarchists? Has everyone involved worked together cooperatively to cut a deal that improves the consumer experience?

We have to confess an ignorance of Modern Indian music: if there was anything wrong with the music selection of some of the stations, we wouldn't know. The classical station, however, was certainly pleasing enough -- our only gripe is that the relatively low quality of the stream (16k at best) would probably alienate most from wanting to listen for long stretches, or on higher-quality speakers. Still, this is a refreshingly simple site that focuses on the music and little else.

Do you have an opinion, a news tip, or a suggested feature story? Simply click the headline at left to bring up a convenient pop-up form and share it with all of us!

Reprinted from Friday's edition:

From Radio Ink: "GetMedia.com is yet another Internet company that has gone under. This one, a company that attempted to provide e-commerce solutions to Radio stations. GetMedia even lured Joe Carrife, a highly successful San Fransisco radio station sales manager to 'the other side' but it was not to be.

"There has been no official release from the company, often there never is. However, the word is that the doors are officially closed and everyone is out. Other indications are that the company has been unable to pay its advertising bills for quite some time. A leading website that details companies that go out of business called F*&%ED Company.com has Getmedia.com as a 100 on the scale of 1 to 100 for companies bailing out."

GetMedia was providing a combination "What's playing" feature and CD store for stations including KLLC/San Francisco. See the feature in action on the "Alice@97.3" website here or visit the GetMedia website by clicking the screenshot above.

Read the full piece in RadioInk.com here. And visit the very entertaining F*&%edCompany.com website -- the site's name and logo is a parody of the magazine "Fast Company" -- here.

... You know, it had always seemed odd to me that the company was never able to afford to get a reasonably professional-looking logo. -- KH ...

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This story coming later today in RAIN. Please check back!

"Clinton Threatens To Drop Da Bomb On Iraq" Read the news story here, or visit The Onion's home page here.

September 12-14	Digital Coast 2000, Los Angeles, featuring a panel on Internet radio moderated by RAIN's Kurt Hanson
September 20-22	Gavin.com: Music on the Net, San Francisco
September 20-23	NAB Radio Show, San Francisco
Sept. 29-Oct. 1	MOBE/Internet & Technology, Chicago
October 5-7	Billboard/Airplay Monitor Seminar, New York
October 9-12	QuickTime Live! Conference, Beverly Hills
October 10-12	Streaming Media Europe 2000, London (NEW!)
November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
November 12-14	Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) "Broadcasting 2000: On-air / On-line," Calgary (NEW!)
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA, featuring a brand-new national study on Internet radio usage presented by Eric Rhoads & Kurt Hanson

xxx

Try it out! Explore the wide world of Internet audio by clicking the screenshot above.

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