An unavoidable usability limitation of mobile phones is that you can’t create a small, multi-purpose user interface that is well-suited to all the tasks asked of it: text entry, information browsing, taking photographs, playing games and even making calls. That’s why a phone will never have the ease of use for music applications that the […]
Radio
Resonance FM — five more years
Congratulations to Resonance FM on being awarded a five-year licence to continue its broadcasts. Resonance is a ‘radio art’ station catering for minority interests (I like Peter Cusack’s environmental recordings series and my friend Eric Namour’s [no.signal] shows of ambient, improv and electronica music, for example), and it started broadcasting three and half years ago. […]
Will Internet music radio have no competition?
“When given a choice between listening to music over the Internet or traditional radio stations, 54% prefer the Internet while 30% prefer radio,” according to this research from Bridge Ratings. Is this a simple trade-off between the two, or, if it is that simple in the US, might it be different elsewhere? I was reading […]
Does music have a genome?
Alongside the Last.FM model of personalised online radio (which I covered at some length and have cited in several other posts), Pandora provides an alternative based on different technology and classifications: We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and use the Music Genome Project™ to create stations […]
The slow evolution of DAB digital radio devices
My excitement and predictions about the Bug — the digital radio that can pause, rewind, record and convert to MP3 (pictured right) — seem so far to have been overstated. Sixteen months ago, I said I’d trade my iPod for a Bug, and just over eleven months ago I recorded the prediction: “next year it […]
How niche radio combines broadcast and on-demand formats
A whole radio station dedicated exclusively to one artist? That’s what US satellite radio broadcaster Sirius is offering from next week in the shape of E Street Radio, promising “round-the-clock Springsteen music” — at least until the end of next January. As well as the standard album tracks, there will be musical exclusives and interviews. […]
Recording online radio vs. podcasts
In the last year or two, the concept of martini media — ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ access to whatever audio and video you feel like — has shifted from being a vision of a possible future to being an almost taken-for-granted inevitability. The speed with which it comes about will be slowed by the friction of […]
In-depth music documentary sources
While I was working through all the pages on this site I listened to the last six or seven episodes of The Story of Atlantic on the BBC Radio Player. They were broadcast on 6 Music Plays It Again, and you can still catch some episodes if you’re quick. This was a 14-hour series made […]
BBC 6 Music podcasts and learning
It’s almost exactly a year since I posted my review of BBC 6 Music as a learning resource on this site, and nearly eight months since I commented on the disappearance of some of the web resources from the 6 Music web site. Now 6 Music has begun a weekly podcast of speech highlights from […]
Creating legal independent music podcasts
The use of music in podcasts is a legal grey area, but there are an increasing number of tools and services that make it easier to source music legally, usually from ‘unsigned’ artists, creating a genuinely grassroots channel for independent music and musicians. The reason for the doubts over the legal status of music podcasting […]