From a Jan. 19, 1998 issue of Wired: "In a closet-sized office jammed with posters, CDs, and audio equipment, Chris Anderson, founder of Imagine Media, boots up some Imagine Radio sound bites. Guitars shriek behind the manly-man voice-overs...

"'It's imaging. It gives you the sense that you're listening to something cool,' Anderson gushes about what in conventional radio would probably sound like standard station-ID fare.

"But the people behind Imagine Radio, which began a public beta today, believe they're coming up with fresh ideas for a fresh medium: online broadcasting. Programmers such as AudioNet, Pseudo, and TheDJ [now Spinner a.k.a. Radio@Netscape / Radio@AOL] see themselves at the leading edge of a revolution. But while they're already streaming countless hours of music, entertainment, talk, sports, and news to audiences tuning in via PC, questions persist: When will large-scale audiences emerge? How will programmers serve them when they appear?..

"'We think we can take the best of the radio experience and use the Net to make it more powerful,' Anderson says...

TheDJ claims hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. But vice president of marketing Scott Epstein believes that its biggest hurdle is still credibility with advertisers and record companies... Like other online radio stations, TheDJ believes its audience comes because it offers an alternative to whitewashed mainstream radio fare...

"'One drives the other -- if you get a big audience the advertisers will follow,' says Todd Wagner, CEO of AudioNet. 'Audiences need to at least rival cable TV stations' simultaneous listeners [which range from 20,000 to 100,000]. When that happens, then the advertising community will view this as a viable medium.'

"One aspect of advertising that the online broadcasters are homing in on is the ability to reach listeners at work... In the interim, broadcasters are focusing on ecommerce (hear the song, buy the album through a link to CDNow) and sponsorships for revenues. And to draw bigger audiences, broadcasters are pushing for better distribution via exposure on search engines, news services, WebTV, and other traffic-heavy areas.

"But even if the audiences and advertisers do come, the technological overhead for 50,000 simultaneous listeners is steep. Most server set-ups are incapable of handling tens of thousands of simultaneous streams...

"IP multicasting is one promising solution for large-scale audiences. The long-hyped but little-used technology lets listeners tap into one large-group audio stream (a la broadcasting), instead of creating a one-to-one connection with the server...

"The list of online broadcasters is very, very long, and audiences soon might be faced with a 50,000-channel choice. Profitability and mass audiences -- not to mention the technology needed to support the imagined Net-listening throngs -- are several years away."

Read this Wired story online here.

From The Wall Street Journal: "A brewing battle over how Nielsen Media Research measures television audiences highlights a big problem for marketers: Getting a reliable picture of consumer behavior remains a fuzzy process even as data collecting grows more sophisticated.

"Ending weeks of double-checking its data and fighting with the television networks, Nielsen Tuesday notified TV executives in a letter that men age 18 to 34, a demographic group coveted by advertisers, are watching between 8% and 12% less prime-time TV than they did last year, a sharp decline...

"Nielsen says it noticed that viewers age 18 to 34 were watching less TV in July during broadcasts of pre-season NFL games. The TV networks started complaining in September when their new shows launched and many didn't get the ratings numbers among young viewers that the networks expected. While TV viewing among 18- to 34-year-olds has fallen during the past decade, typical yearly declines are about 2%. Nielsen says the group instead is watching DVDs, playing videogames and surfing the Web."

This entire story is available in the Wall Street Journal online here (subscription required).

From BBC News: "Research in the U.S. has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a 'brain itch' that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.

"In Germany, this type of song is known as an 'ohrwurm' -- an earworm -- and typically has a high, upbeat melody and repetitive lyrics that verge between catchy and annoying.

"Songs such as the Village People's 'YMCA,' Los Del Rio's 'Macarena,' and the Baha Men's 'Who Let The Dogs Out' owe their success to their ability to create a 'cognitive itch,' according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration...

"'Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch. The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds.'"

Read this entire BBC story online here.