RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter

From ZDNet News: "A start-up called ClickRadio Inc. is launching an unusual radio service that plays from computer disk drives, starting with music from one of the biggest record labels.

"The New York company hopes to differentiate itself from other music ventures with a hybrid technology that avoids the herky-jerky quality of Internet broadcasting, also known as streaming. Instead, ClickRadio plans to distribute software that comes with hundreds of songs by major artists. Professional programmers will organize the music into channels based on musical style, which users can listen to while sitting at their computers.

"ClickRadio, which has been working in secret on its plans for nearly three years, designed the service to satisfy record labels worried about piracy on the Web..."

To read the full piece in ZDNet, which is excerpted from yesterday's Wall Street Journal, click here.

BY KURT HANSON
This is the startup that you first read about in RAIN when Charlie Kendall joined the firm last December (here) and again when they announced the signing of a number of big-name radio consultants including Scott Shannon, Tony Gray, Patti Galluzzi, Max Tolkoff, and Jim Wood last month (here).

The concept is apparently that users will be offered the opportunity to download -- or receive on disc -- a initial library of 300 songs in a desired format category. (This will take up about 600 megs of disk space.) Once the library and ClickRadio software is on their hard drive, listeners will not need to be connected to the Internet to listen to ClickRadio, although songs may be updated when listeners have an Internet connection established.

ClickRadio will offer interactivity to the extent that listeners can skip songs they don't like and vote for selections to be played more or less often.

According to the article, the service will be advertising-supported and is set to begin operating on May 11th.

	Questions to ponder:
	Is ClickRadio a solution to a problem that's already solved? After all, as people are getting faster modems and audio players keep improving, the "herky-jerkyness" of buffering is already becoming less and less of a problem. (Lots of people are hearing near-CD quality over 56K modems via existing Internet music services.)
	Let's do the math: 300 songs in 600 megs of space is 2 megs per song, even if you allow no megs for commercials or other station elements. With such small file sizes, can ClickRadio's encoding technology really permit better-than-Internet-radio quality sound?
	Unless I'm mistaken, aren't other services like Sonicnet, LAUNCHcast, and WWW.com already giving listeners the ability to vote to play a song more or less often and/or skip songs?
	The Wall Street Journal had an funny chart: "What Makes ClickRadio Different?" Reason #1 was, "It's radio programming for PCs." (In reality, thousands of channels of that already exist.)

On the other hand, I admire and respect almost every one of the consultants they've engaged to work on this project, so that leads me to believe that maybe they are onto something.

Contribute your opinions here.

The USC/Inside Radio Internet Conference, to be held next Wednesday through Friday at the Phoenician resort in Scottsdale, AZ, promises to be exclusive and upper-end event, taking place at one of the top desert resorts in America.

And Inside Radio publisher Jerry Del Colliano has agreed to give away the final seat at the conference (a $1395 value) to one lucky RAIN reader...today!

Speakers at the event are scheduled to include consultant and futurist John Parikhal, former AMFM CEO Jimmy deCastro, Interep's Adam Guild, Arbitron's Bill Rose, and University of Southern Califonia professors Titus Levi and Kenneth J. Lopez.

For the full conference agenda, click here.

You'll be responsible for your own airfare and hotel accomodations, but Inside Radio has one extra reservation at the sold-out Phoenician resort (pictured) that they'll transfer to your name if you'd like to stay at that luxurious (but admittedly expensive) resort.

And we're not stretching this RAIN contest out over four weeks like our first one, either.

To give you enough time to adjust your plans and book your flights, this contest was "Enter this morning, win this afternoon!"

The deadline for entry was 2PM CDT today.


April 26-28	USC/Inside Radio Internet Conference, Phoenix
May 15-18	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Boston
May 22-26	Real [Networks] Conference 2000, San Jose
June 12-14	Streaming Media East 2000, New York City
June 14-17	R&R Convention 2000, Los Angeles
June 14-17	PROMAX & BDA, New Orleans
July 13-16	Upper Midwest Conclave, Minneapolis
August 3-5	Morning Show Bootcamp, New Orelans
September 20-23	NAB Radio Show, San Francisco
October 5-7	Billboard/Airplay Monitor Seminar, New York
November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
Did we miss a major conference? E-mail us here.

The 72 eligible entrants are listed at right in the order in which they entered.

Consultant and futurist John Parikhal flipped the coin that determined the winner and the two alternates.

Here's the random-selection technique we used: For the first coin flip in a sequence of seven flips, heads meant we'd select entrants #1-64 and tails meant we'd use entrants #65-128. Similarly, for each subseuqent coin flip in a sequence, heads meant we'd use the first half, tails meant we'd use the second half. And we agreed that if the winning number was greater than 72, we would have no winner from that sequence and we'd start a new one.

Here are the coin-flip sequences that determined the winner and the two alternates:

	Coin flips							Winner #
Winner	H	T	H	T	T	H	H	45
(Too high; no winner)	T	H	H	T	H	T	T	76
Alternate #1	H	H	H	T	T	T	T	16
Alternate #2	T	H	H	H	T	T	H	71

If you count down the list of names above, you'll see that name #45 is "Jetman...", who is actually Gary Cheney, who works for NBC in Los Angeles. Congratulations, Gary!

If Gary fnds he can't attend the conference next week, the first alternate is "Robin@S...", who is Robin Goldstein of The Schnauzer Logic Radio Co. in San Jose. And if Robin is also unable to attend, the second alternate is "Laura S...", who is Laura Stanfield of BoomboxRadio.com in Phoenix.

Thanks to everyone who entered! And we'll hopefully have more fun and games and fantastic prize pacakges coming in RAIN soon.

From a company press release: "NetRadio.com™ (Nasdaq:NETR) -- a leading Internet broadcaster of originally programmed audio entertainment through its Web site www.netradio.com -- announced today its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2000.

"Net revenues for the quarter were $565,000, an increase of 228 percent from $172,000 for the same period a year ago. Net loss for the quarter was $4.3 million, or $.43 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $2.6 million, or $.45 per diluted share, for the same period a year ago.

"For the quarter, unique listeners grew by 87 percent to approximately 2.5 million while average time spent listening remained at approximately 1.5 hours per daily visit.

"'Again we exceeded analysts' expectations for the quarter in terms of both revenue and net loss,' said Ed Tomechko, president and chief executive officer of Netradio.com..."

For the full press release, including a look at their financial statement, click here. For a look at their stock price (including trends) and market capitalization, visit Morningstar.com here or Quicken.com here.

So...what's their audience size?
Again, the press release doesn't give the exact figure we need for the calculation, but it does say that those 2.5 million people visit "several times per month." Shall we assume that's three days per month? ("Several times" could theoretically be several different listening events that all occur in one day, but I think that's unlikely.)

Assuming three days of visiting per month per person, at 1.5 hours per daily visit, that would give NetRadio.com an AQH audience size of 20,800 persons (assuming a 30-day month and that all listening is Mon-Sun 6AM-12M. It's 15,600 if you're calculating based on a 24-hour broadcast day).

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In an article a couple of weeks ago on a proposed Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless Internet protocal (about halfway down the page here), I inadvertantly left hanging the question of what an NPRM was.

Several RAIN readers actually answered the question, including...

"Imagine, wearing your Walkman headphones..."

-- Paul Christensen (paulc@mediaone.net)

April 6, 2000
8:09:55 AM

NPRM refers to Notice of Proposed Rule Making, a statutory process for implementing changes to FCC rules and regulations.

Unquestionably, the development and deployment of high-speed wireless networking will take an already burgeoning industry another exponential leap forward.

The infrustructure is in place now with existing cellular and PCS networks. Through technical modulation advancements similar to that of Multispectral Solution's "UWB," the Internet will be poised to unlock its access capabilities and transcend itself from fixed locations to a mobile and portable environment.

Imagine, wearing your Walkman headphones plugged into a Nokia multimedia cell phone, listening to your choice of thousands of netcasted radio stations.