Beyond the Office [The Playlist: Net Radio Made Easy -
06/28/2005]
June 28th, 2005
The Playlist: Net Radio Made Easy
Sr. Assoc. Ed. Eric Dahl
Innovation: You just can't stop it. Sure, the record industry can kick
and scream and drag its feet, but eventually it will have to come
around on this Internet thing.
Thankfully, the technology industry is all about innovation. Napster
gets shut down?
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/972721/0/
Fine, let's try MP3.com:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/972722/0/
That won't work, either? Okay, how about a distributed peer-to-peer
network?
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/971056/0/
Oh. Wow, you really didn't like that one. Hmm... how about... well,
how about Mercora?
Legal Music Sharing
Mercora IMRadio lets you share your music with friends and other
people on the network by Webcasting a stream of music. The service
boasts 25,000 to 30,000 channels of streaming music at any given time,
hosted by Mercora users. Here's the Web site:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/972723/0/
You can use Mercora in a number of interesting ways. The easiest is to
add a few friends (in the same way you'd add friends in an instant
messaging client) and browse through their music collections. A
"Similar" button can help you find new friends by comparing your music
library to those of other Mercora users.
I'm "edahl" on Mercora, by the way. Feel free to add me to your list
if you decide to try it out.
Alternatively, you can search the Mercora network for songs currently
being Webcast. That's a cool feature, but it's far from perfect. With
fewer than 30,000 users logged on at any given time, you're obviously
going to get better results searching for The Beatles or U2 than any
of the random indie stuff I often listen to. Still, you can usually
find something interesting playing at any moment.
If you find a collection or a Webcast you particularly like, you can
record it and play it back later. You can't save those recordings
indefinitely, but you can use the record function to time-shift good
Webcasts much as you would use a TiVo to record your favorite TV
shows. In the free 30-day trial of Mercora, you get a small amount of
storage for time-shifting. Bump up to the Premier subscription ($47.88
per year, or $5 per month for a month-to-month subscription), and
you'll have 20 hours of space.
Premium subscribers also get access to Mercora's IMDJ, which gives you
a lot more control over which songs you're Webcasting. Normally,
Mercora starts streaming something from your collection the moment you
log on. (As I write this, it's decided to play a Radiohead track.) But
with IMDJ, you can queue up as many songs as you want and program up
to five channels in any way you like.
Getting Artists Paid
So yeah, Mercora seems pretty cool--which, if you're like me, makes
you wonder why the Recording Industry Association of America hasn't
shut the service down already. But, as it turns out, Mercora is
perfectly legal. Part of your user subscription fee goes to pay
artists the royalties they're entitled to for noninteractive Webcasts
of their songs. And however you feel about record labels, I think we
can all agree that getting artists paid is a good thing.
I alluded to some of Mercora's limitations earlier. Even with the IMDJ
feature, you can't simply set up a playlist that just repeats one
album or one song over and over. In fact, there are limits placed on
how many songs from one artist you can play in a certain time period.
Those limits are defined by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's
restrictions on noninteractive Webcasts, and Mercora enforces those
rules. Queue up songs that would violate them and Mercora will simply
fill in other tracks until the time limit passes.
BTW, here's the text of the DMCA:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/972724/0/
In Heavy Rotation
Chi City Hip Hop: Kanye West single-handedly made last year a good one
for Chicago hip hop, and this year Common is taking things to the next
level. Common's new disc Be is already being anointed a classic. It's
more than worth a look; check it out on Common's site:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/972725/0/
Visit PC World's Info Center to keep up with the world of digital
entertainment:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/971448/0/
Have a question or comment? Write to Eric Dahl:
playlist*pcworld.com
Read Eric Dahl's regularly published "The Playlist" columns:
http://pcwnl.pcworld.com/t/510468/15377831/364758/0/
===
"I don't feel the need to be famous. It's all bullshit anyway....Having people around me just because I'm famous makes me feel really bad about myself. So I give 10% to my agent to do the fame thing, and I go focus on whatever I love."
-- Jessica Alba
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