From the press release: "DiscJockey.com today announced an enriched, commercial-free service that will offer its popular radio-like music channels to subscribers for a modest monthly fee. The new service, which will be available next week, is designed to appeal to 'hard-core' listeners who tune in every day from work or home...

"Dave Giunta, Vice President of Business Development, said, 'We will continue to develop our advertising-based site and are working actively to integrate audio ads and highly targeted campaigns to our very desirable listeners. However, advertising revenues alone are not sufficient for a site like ours, especially when online advertising sales are slumping industry-wide. The high cost of streaming means that each new listener has an associated cost that cannot necessarily be offset by advertising revenues...'"

Ed Ryan, on the Streaming Magazine site, has an interesting take on this development, here (see the Commentary section).



BY PAUL MALONEY
Britain's Internet-only StormLive is a Hot A/C radio with a lot of personality, a sleek site, and nice "auto-loading" player.

StormLive is no jukebox/database streamer. They focus on the "personality" part of the station for sure. A small roster of live "E-Jayz" present the music, sell the promotions, and deliver celebrity and entertainment content with frequent between song breaks -- 24/7 (there aren't many broadcasters going 24 hours nowadays).

The importance of the "personality" facet of the station is underscored by the placement of the E-Jayz link at the top of the left-hand navigation bar, and the far left on the nav bar on top. Plenty of emphasis is given to the profiles of the different E-Jayz -- each of the dozen or so has his or her own page with a photo, some personal information, an e-mail link, and a short description of their particular show.

The star of this team seems to be Triumph underwear model (it's a Brit thing) Nell McAndrew...heretofore known as "the real life Lara Croft of Tomb Raider." StormLive can also count British pop star Kim Appleby as a staff member. The personalities really seem to have an open reign when it comes to injecting life and variety into the stream of music. They interact with each other, react to news, and express opinions about the music -- just like good "broadcast" radio is supposed to be.

For a "hit music" format, we would've thought there'd be more along the lines of promotions/contests (called "competitions" here)...but there's is a "more coming soon" notice on the contest page. The dark blue colors and "lightning" animation effect certainly does give it a futuristic feel (the station's slogan is "the future has no frequency"). There's a "Cybermix Top 10" where visitors can vote for their favorite songs in seven distinct genres (a wider variety of music than we heard on the station). The site also features the full week's E-Jayz show schedule, and a playlist of the week's highest rotated songs.

After the first visit to StormLive, their customized WindowsMedia player automatically opens and connects the stream when you revisit the site. The animated lightning effect and the slogan reappear on the player. The stream had a nice sound quality, with no stuttering or rebuffering (from halfway across the world!) over our cable modem connection.

More Internet radio should be like StormLive: the personality and "life" of broadcast radio, on a worldwide scale.

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• New Media & Autos: Is the Free Ride Over? Representatives of the satellite broadcast and radio hardware industries discuss the new competition of satellite and Internet radio in cars.
• Streaming: What’s In It for My Station? The strategic and marketing issues surrounding streaming your radio station on the Internet.
• Can Radio Survive the Broadband Revolution? Representatives of Arbitron and Coleman Research will show what they found in their study of households with broadband access and how their behaviors and attitudes compare with "normal" radio listeners.
• The Internet, The Law and You Legal experts have advice for broadcasters on their Internet activity, such as music copyrights.

Over at the Gavin show, things appear to be a little bit more music-oriented. Some highlights for radio:

• Radio vs. New Media: A Fight to the Finish? RAIN's Kurt Hanson is one member of a panel which will examine how evolving new technologies might impact the “old media” world of radio.
• The First Annual Wammy Awards New awards to recognize excellence and achievement in music on the Internet.
• Radio: Competing on the Net Execs from traditional and Internet radio provide some practical solutions for stations.
  

We hope to provide you with reports from both of these shows next week in RAIN. You can register for either of these events online -- for the NAB, here; for Gavin.com, here.

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Michel Marriott for the New York Times has written a very nice article on a few of the new consumer jukeboxes. The idea behind these products is to make it easier to listen to your music by storing and sorting the selections from your unwiedly CD collection or hard drive that's overrun with digital files.

Here are the products:

-- "The AudioReQuest ARQ1 Digital Music System by ReQuest Multimedia, at $800...is designed primarily to copy songs from CD's (it can also copy from cassette tapes and vinyl records), translate their tunes into MP3 files, store them and play them. Introduced this year, (it) can hold up to 320 hours of music if the songs are recorded at the near-CD-quality bit rate of 128 kilobits per second. To take full advantage of the AudioReQuest's best features, you need to link it to a home stereo system, an Internet- linked PC and a television set...

-- "The only device I tested that is truly tempting was made by Creative...its Nomad Jukebox ($500), introduced this month, is a portable music player about the size of a portable CD player, but it is heavier and holds the equivalent of 150 CD's of music. What it does, once linked to a PC or Mac by way of a U.S.B. cable, is store more than 100 hours of MP3 music files on its six- gigabyte, shock-resistant hard drive.

-- "The Escient TuneBase 100 ($3000)...plugs into an Internet connection, a CD changer holding 100 or more CD's and a television, or an optional $2,000 L.C.D. touch-screen controller. Drawing upon PC technology, the TuneBase locates a unique identification code for each CD and automatically goes online to the Compact Disc Database, which contains all the information a CD would ordinarily display on its cover, like the name of the artist, the song titles, album cover art and liner notes. That information is then downloaded into the TuneBase's hard drive and shown on any display screen connected to the system."

Read the entire New York Times article here.

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	Everyrule.com Just exactly what it sounds like. Games, sports, etiquette, TV game shows, casinos, grammar, and the very useful International Regulations for Avoiding Collisions at Sea. By the way, you must be outside, with your shoes on, and the car must be in sight before you can call "Shotgun." Check the rules here.
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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

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