“How much would you pay for a piano lesson with Chopin? His fee in 1832 was 20 francs. Highway robbery if you’re an ordinary piano teacher – but the instructor in question was The Genius in Vogue, and the price was considered a bargain…..” Our Radio Chopin series has caught the ear of the public radio business show Marketplace, which today aired around the nation Jennifer Foster’s piece on “Chopinomics.” Hear the piece for yourself!
public radio
Radio Chopin: The Journey Begins
We’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of Fryderyk Chopin’s birth this year at WDAV with an ambitious new series: Radio Chopin. No fewer than 200 two-minute stories about the music, the people, the events, and the stories surrounding the “poet of the piano.” Our midday host Jennifer Foster is at the helm, and I imagine you’ll be hearing from all of the WDAV voices between now and Dec. 31. Heck, we’re even building an entire website for the project. What an adventure! Stay tuned, and enjoy Episode 1 by our multimedia producer Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr, concerning a famous, if mispronounced, little Waltz…
http://www.radiochopin.org/images/players/episodes/episodes.php?id=450
A Tale of Two Sites
…both in the “music discovery” category (sometimes called “Music 2.0”) are worth investigating:
First is a site called MOG “a music asylum run by its inmates,” (with a tip o’the’cyberpen to UTunes Advisory Boardster Andrew Dell’Antonio for pointing it out). MOG uses an impressive amount of social-networking tools and techniques to build a site to (in their words:)
Share
…your songs, music library, videos and thoughts on music with friends and mogger
Participate
…in the Web’s most raging music community.
…both in the “music discovery” category (sometimes called “Music 2.0”) are worth investigating:
First is a site called MOG “a music asylum run by its inmates,” (with a tip o’the’cyberpen to UTunes Advisory Boardster Andrew Dell’Antonio for pointing it out). MOG uses an impressive amount of social-networking tools and techniques to build a site to (in their words:)
Share
…your songs, music library, videos and thoughts on music with friends and mogger
Participate
…in the Web’s most raging music community.
Discover
Get instant recommendations and personalized content at the click of a button.
Most impressive are the pages for artists, which are almost entirely generated by MOG users or wikipedia.
Besides on-demand song, video, and album listings, there are bios, photos, discographies, RSS feeds, commerce links, and links to fan sites and newsgroups. At the heart are easy-to-manipulate tools to contribute all of the above to the site, or to embed them in off-site blogs, etc. Veryy interesting.
And a bit buggy….one of the major drawbacks to MOG is that the audio files don’t necessarily appear in a separate player, so you can’t navigate and browse with a song playing in the background, which would tend to defeat a lot of the purpose. And, as is the case with almost all online music destinations, it’s heavily weightd towards rock/pop/singer-songwriters. For example, a search for violinist Julia Fischer (just named Gramophone Magazine’s Artist of the Year) comes up empty.
(with a tip o’the’cyberpen to UTunes Advisory Boardster Andrew Dell’Antonio for pointing it out.
It’s almost the reverse case with the launch on Nov. 5 of the NPR Music site.
Full disclosure: A lot of this was Co-Project Director Ben Roe‘s blueprint while he was at NPR. So best to leave the prose to one of the participating stations: WFUV in New York.
NPR and 12 NPR member stations, including WFUV, have launched NPR Music, a new, free, comprehensive multimedia music discovery web site. There are five specific genre sections (Pop/Rock/Folk, Classical, Jazz & Blues, World and Urban) to explore, where you can hear songs and concerts, read reviews and interviews, scan the music news we’ve pulled together and find blogs from all over the country.
There are already 3,000 new and archived features, with 200 more getting added monthly. Some of the content will come from NPR and some from the member stations (like our interviews with Patty Scialfa and Gil Scott-Heron).
“WFUV and NPR each have great music resources, and together we can share that love with listeners,” says WFUV New Media Director Laura Fedele. “We’ve had some amazing music moments here in our studios, true personal conversations with artists, and now NPR Music can bring it all to music fans across the country who might not be FUV listeners… yet!” You can access the NPR Music site through our home page at wfuv.org.
Searchable Artist pages are also a hallmark of this site (plenty on Julia Fischer, though the archived content is thus far only scratching the surface of what exists at NPR and across public radio), which, if developed, could be a real boon to researchers and educators interested in editorial commentary, live concert performances, reviews, and first-person interviews with the likes of Terry Gross, Fred Child, Scott Simon, John Schaefer, et al.
The Empire Strikes Back
The latest positioning tag line from The Globe (the new “Green” radio format in DC I wrote about a while back) is a little closer to the mark: “Corporately Owned, Listener Monkeyed-Around With.” Bad grammar aside, I’d argue that at least half that statement is factual – and it’s the corporate owners who have been doing the messing around recently – with three big news items in the last three days that suggest that the Old Order is not going to gently into the good night.
First was, the $12.5 million – in the words of FCC Commish Ken Adelstein “The largest collective fine in the history of American Broadcasting” that the Globe’s “good guy” owners CBS Radio (along with their friends Entercom, Clear Channel and Citadel Broadcasting) ponied up to the FCC to make the payola charges go away. Not that they actually admitted to it or anything. Sample grab from the Washington Post story:
Andy Levin, Clear Channel’s executive vice president, said in a statement that his company has “devoted tremendous resources” to preventing payola at its stations. “While no violations were found,” he said, “we are pleased to announce that Clear Channel has agreed to settle this longstanding payola investigation with the FCC. We believe it is time to close the door on this ongoing inquiry and move forward.”
The other three companies declined comment or did not respond to requests for interviews.
Aside from paying the fines to the FCC, the four companies have agreed to give about 4,000 hours of air time to small record companies and local artists. “This is a new opportunity for fresher, newer artists to be heard on the radio,” Adelstein said.
Right. Clear Channel pays $3.5 million to the Feds because they are doing their part to ease the budget deficit. And just where do you suppose those 4,000 hours of air time are going to fall? Sometime between midnight and six, do you suppose?
So, taking Mr. Levin’s advice, let’s “move forward:” Second was the Copyright Royalty Board ruling on Internet radio, which is similarly mind-boggling. Today’s Wall Street Journal has the most comprehensive story in the mainstream press about what this obscure Congressionally-charted agency has wrought: nothing less than a protectionist nod to those “good guys” in the above paragraph. You can read the entire report here. And it whacks public radio’s Internet music activities as well, which previously had been negotiated under a separate deal. Great. Take one of the few areas of growth and innovation in the broadcasting biz and make sure you suffocate ’em. THAT’ll show ’em! THAT’ll keep people tuned to my Clear Channel station! You need to be a subscriber to read beyond the opening grafs; here are a couple of key lines from the rest (hey, I bought my copy in the newsstand!)
…The board’s new rates appear to be those sought by the largest industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America. But the Internet radio broadcasters say the rates hit one of the few bright spots in the moribund music busienss and thus end up shooting the labels in the foot.
The new schedule highlights an inequality that has rankled many online entrepreneurs for years. Regular radio stations don’t pay any royalities to song performers for their over-the-airwaves broadcasts, although they do pay royalities to composers and songwriters. “It’s flat out unfair,” says Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Washington-based Digital Media Association.
How unfair? Under the old system, most Internet broadcasters could be a percentage of revenue – about 12% – to a copyright collection agency called SoundExchange. But no more. In it place: a new system where each station pays .0762 per listener, per song (retroactive to 2006) – a rate that will double in the next three years. Kurt Hanson’s Radio and Internet Newsletter has become sort of the “Central Command” for the Internet broadcasters up in arms about the ruling – and he says the new royalty schedule will mean his payments for his Accuradio service will balloon from $50,000 per year to about $600,000. Check out Bill Goldsmith’s blog at Radio Paradise for a reasoned, if impassioned view of what this means for the immediate future of his excellent service. Sample Grab:
The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others…
Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners – indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working – knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.
Just to underscore Goldsmith’s point, there are 50 million listeners in the US to online radio services (WSJ figures); 14 million to satellite radio. And is this happening because the publishing industry is broke? That brings us to news item number three: ASCAP Reports Record Revenue, Royalties in 2006. Yes, that’s right – record revenues. Highlights:
Overall revenue: $785 million – up 5 percent
Overall royalty payments: $680 milllion – up 5.3 percent
Payments by radio: $22 million – up 11 percent
And the kicker, courtesy of Digital Music News:
Meanwhile, ASCAP also gained $13.8 million from internet-based and wireless licensing agreements, a gain of 70 percent. The group is planning aggressive moves ahead, including a recent push to extract performance royalties from paid downloads. Predictably, that has drawn the ire of online music providers, represented by trade body DiMA.
Remember, that 70 per cent gain from internet and wireless providers came before the new Copyright rates were announced. Clearly the old system wasn’t working, eh?
Last word (for today at least) that wraps all three of these subjects together goes to Jerry Del Colliano’s Inside Music Media:
Hypocrisy #5 :
If everyone was so concerned with fresh music, new artists and the health of indie labels, they’d be fighting the new Internet royalty rates that threaten to impede the growth of Internet radio by charging small operators more money than they can afford to play the music.
Who is kidding whom? 8,400 half-hours when no listeners are listening to terrestrial radio or building Internet radio as the lifeline for music diversity.
Does anyone question the pervasiveness of the Internet?
Is it that hard to believe the Internet will be on everyone’s mobile devices once WiFi becomes universal?
If you’re with me so far, can you see the hypocrisy of letting four serial offenders of music diversity off the hook for chump change and a kiss on the backside while the big crybabies in the music industry try to get blood out of the one stone that will outlive them — Internet radio.
The Globe, By George!
Cruising around the DC radio dial after a few days away to discover another shakeup on the radio dial…WARW, the longtime “classic rock” station has become The Globe, a station blending “world class rock” with an environmental message. The format flip happened on Friday (2/2) at noon, same day, of course, as the U.N. Report on Climate Change was released. Since then, the station has played a slightly tweaked version (read: more stuff from the 90’s) of its classic-rock format, and ditched the deejays in favor of left-leaning eco-and-call-to-action messages (soundbites of Al Gore, bromides to save energy, and even an anti-focus group rant!). The deeejays are supposed to be back within a few days, as well as presumably a better-developed website – right now, all you get on their site is the option to listen to their stream, IM or E-mail “the studio,” and a read of The Globe’s 12-Point Mission Statement [Number 10: “WE WON’T INSULT YOUR INTELLIGENCE – The Globe will have commercials (got bills of our own to pay) but we will try to keep them to a minimum and present them in a way that respects our listeners and our advertisers.”]. There’s even talk that the station will bring back the call letters WHFS, recalling the glory years of the once-legendary “alternative” station in the DC – Baltimore area. (Corporate parent CBS radio still owns those call letters.)
The RoeDeo Reaction? Fascinating, but preposterous. Very nice of them to tell us that flourescents save 70% more energy that incandescents, that we all can make a difference, and that they are now “partially operating on alternative fuels.” (Where? Are they lighting candles in the control room?). And the playlist is at least veering more towards the sound of excellent non-commercial stations like WXPN in Philly or WTMD in Towson (Baltimore), MD. But this is a station, as noted above, that’s owned by CBS. It’s all thoroughly unconvincing, and to my mind, creepily artificial. Maybe it’ll be better once the live air staffers return, and the sound becomes less canned and calculated. We’ll see.
The DC market has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting for us radio junkies, however…I’ve mentioned Dave Hughes’ DCRTV blog (stands for DC Radio and Television) before, and if you like this sort of stuff it makes for pretty entertaining reading. Sample:
OK, maybe The Globe is not real “adult alternative” like what’s heard in other markets and on some non-comm stations. Maybe it’s a bit “harder” and a bit more “commercial.” And, OK, yeah, maybe the “green” sloganeering will grow tiring. Still, it’s a great mix of powerful music that can (and should) only get better. CBS and Michael Hughes have planted the seed for a powerful force in Washington area radio. It’s energizing and thought provoking. Not moldy oldie and turgid, like some some area rockers have become.
Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher had a lengthy take-out in the Sunday Arts section on George 104, the new oldies-plus format adopted by the formerly-classical WGMS:
George is a 44-year-old white guy who lives in the suburbs and likes Foreigner, Journey, Billy Idol, and David Bowie. When George was in high school, he loathed disco and the soft soul sounds of the ’70s”…..
Fisher’s blog on washingtonpost.com also has more background on the the Globe, including some more reactions about eco-awareness become a trend in the radio biz, including this observation from my friend Steve Yasko at WTMD:
“Public radio is the authentic green radio network and not the corporate hacks at CBS.”
As I said, radio in DC has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting….
HD RADIO: still awaiting liftoff
WIRED checks in today with the latest State of HD Radio story. What’s that, you say? Precisely. The comments are more revealing than the story, methinks, which is essentially an apples-oranges comparison of the HD system in Britain (a consortium of public-private stations with heavy Government backing) versus that of the USA (“HD? Yeah, we’ve got both XM *and* Sirius radios here at Best Buy.”) If only they’d called it “Digital Radio” instead….
NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ in HD would be like “Meet the Press” in technicolor …
Roedeo Productions 