5 Things That Takes Some Fun Out of Internet Radio!
If you have ever listened to the No Cure for Cancer CD or seen his act, then you’ve probably heard Denis Leary rant about his idea for an all Rolling Stones, all the time music playlist. Actually, there is an all Rolling Stones radio station at Live365.com. The problem is you need to be a paid member of a private club, so to speak, to listen.
However, under normal broadcasting circumstances, for the general public and Joe Average Listener, this isn’t possible. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act 17 USC 114 has seen to that. Here are four buzzkills that we little internet radio broadcasters must deal with.
1. No “interactive service”. This means there is no “internet request line” to which we can respond immediately. No plays are allowed within one hour of the request or at a designated time. So much for that spontaneous request to make certain “their playing our song” at a given, romantic moment.
This makes you wonder how Wolfman Jack could ever have passed Curt’s message along to the blond in the T-Bird in American Grafitti, doesn’t it?
2. No more than 3 songs in a 3 hour period or 2 in a row from the same CD. No chance to debut a new CD from start to finish or simulate a Friday night concert by running, say, 3 live CDs back to back to back.
3. No more than 4 songs in a 3 hour period or 3 in a row from the same artist. Zero chance for an uninterrupted hour of Dick Dale music or a St. Patrick’s Day dedicated wholly and appropriately to Rory Gallagher!
4. Continuous loops of music must be at least three hours long. See the 3 songs in a 3 hour period rule.
5. No advance guides to preannounce when a song will be played. This is plain silly. You get guides and advertisements ad nauseam as to what time any TV show is going to be broadcast. Why not a particular piece of music? Of course, if your favorite internet radio station (that would be MutantSurfing.com, right?) says it has its music on a 36 hour loop, and you hear Slacktone’s Tiki Bar Crawl being played at 9:30am on Monday, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ll hear it again at 9:30pm on Tuesday, etc., barring any shuffling of that playlist.
So, constrained as we are by the politicians, regulators and law makers, we all do the very best we can. After all, they’re here to help. They know better than we do what we would like to we broadcast, how we should broadcast, what the public wants to hear and what is reasonable, right?
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