Our plans for our annual RAIN Las Vegas Summit, which will be held all day on Monday, April 16th at the Renaissance Hotel in Las Vegas, continue to develop. Check here for more info on the Summit as it is confirmed.

From the Media 3.0 blog, by Shelly Palmer: "I am about to do the most technical article I have ever written for general public consumption... All you need to know is that everything I am about to discuss can be done by an average 14 year old with a computer and a broadband connection.

"As you probably already know, on March 2, 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board established a new rate schedule...

"Anyone who has listened to Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) on June 28, 2006 knows that the Leadership does not have a handle on current technology, let alone future technology... — previous RAIN coverage here — The Copyright Royalty Board is made up of learned men, but they just don't know what they're dealing with...

"What is the difference between the published playlist on Hot 97 and the playlist that a metaphoric 'Hot' format Internet radio station might play? Nothing!

"If I know the titles of the songs and have the descriptions associated with them and I am connected to the Internet, do I really need you to send me the songs too?

"Not in 2007.

"We live in a world where metadata (data that describes other data) is more important than the data itself. I don't need you to send me the file of the song. I'm already on the Internet and there are literally thousands of places I can get the files. I just  need the intellectual property of the gatekeeper, the professional program director, the wisdom of crowds, my social network or another trusted source to send me a list of what I want to hear. Technology will take care of the rest.

"By making it too expensive for music lovers or business owners to aggregate and distribute bits and bytes of music files, they will simply accelerate the adoption of an RSS-based (really simple syndication) model of playlist propagation. Why send the actual files, when you can simply send the description (including advertising) and let the consumer's computer gather the files for you?...

"P.S. ...If you are interested in a very short, video-oriented example of an channelized RSS aggregation site, checkout Network2.tv. Then imagine the same type of site with music files. Then imagine that the music files were not accessed from content owners sites, but from 'somewhere out there,'... And it takes no imagination at all to realize that under that scenario, nobody will get paid."

Read the entire post at the Media 3.0 blog.

From InformationWeek.com: "Though widely reported to have been killed by video, the radio star lingers on, propped up by podcasts and Internet streaming, a shadow of its former self. Now, perhaps encouraged by popular interest in Apple's iPhone as a music platform, radio is returning to the limelight, urged on by mobile carriers eager to find applications that justify the price of flat-rate data plans.

"On Tuesday, the hope is that the radio star will get a much needed boost by turning listeners into broadcasters. That's when Microsoft plans to announce a distribution deal to make Mercora's newly updated social radio service, Mercora M v2, available for Windows Mobile devices.

"While the arrangement doesn't (yet) involve pre-loading Mercora on Windows Mobile phones, says Srivats Sampath, president and CEO of Mercora,...

"Mercora qualifies as social radio because it allows users to create playlists of songs from locally stored music and from songs streamed by other users, and then make those playlists available online for others. (Technically, Mercora's Internet streaming service is not radio, although extending the service to wireless phones makes the term 'radio' more apt.)

"Mercora M v2 makes Mercora's form of radio available on 3G mobile phones, such as EDGE, EV-DO, UMTS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and WiMAX...

"Given that not every mobile phone user in the U.S. has a flat-rate data plan, listeners may prefer the sound of silence to the jingle of change trickling from their pockets. But Sampath argues that sooner or later, the cell phone will replace the portable music player. 'We're seeing that happen in Europe and Asia,' he says."

Read this entire story at InformationWeek here.

...

... Mercora seems to be operating in a legal gray area. Although its website (here) says "We have obtained a statutory license for the non-interactive webcasting of digital audio as per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," one can go to their website, type in an artist name, and listen to specific songs on demand, which is functionality that would not be covered by that statutory license. --KH ...