last.fm makes it to proper FM radio
Posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 3:00pm. #
The recent news that last.fm is becoming a proper radio station – carried in four markets by parent CBS Radio – is interesting.
Back in 2002, when I was working at Virgin Radio, we launched a service on the Isle of Man, called Manx Choice. This service would let you choose your favourite songs on your 3G phone, or on the web, and the station would simply play the most popular in the next hour.
Last.fm’s new services appear to do a similar job, but rather better – they’ll “feature a mix of music aggregated and influenced by the service’s user-generated weekly charts”, i.e. all the millions of users of last.fm, not the five people with a 3G phone at the time (!) – and points to a radio station being run, for the first time, entirely democratically. And, as a format, simply playing “the most popular songs being played right now” is probably not a bad punt. (Of course, it might end up being so completely untargeted, it might be unlistenable; last.fm don’t offer this type of music mix on their website.)
I have long argued that radio stations should use DAB (and the american HD equivalent) to experiment and push boundaries. I wanted to run an 80’s station for a few months, then a Christmas station, then a station just containing summer music. (Virgin Summer, anyone? I’d tune in. For a few months.) What last.fm and CBS are doing is very interesting – since this could be a station which slowly changes format as the audience changes taste – a station which effortlessly keeps up with musical tastes using nothing more than a mathematical algorithm based on real audience listening habits. It’s certainly one to watch.
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Incidentally – back to Manx Choice. The station was, um, differently engineered. Run on the shoeyest of all shoe-strings, it ran on simply one PC. It used my registered copy of OtsJuke, playout software which does a good job of playing music back-to-back and inserting jingles, with a rudimentary macroing system allowing the system to reload its own playlist (and fill where necessary). Since we couldn’t afford any audio processing, we used the (quite satisfactory) in-built software processing from OtsJuke. The output of the PC went to the DAB multiplexer; but it also ran a Windows Media Encoder instance, sending that to the server (meaning that we could hear the station in the office). And every hour, a script on the machine would simply connect to the Manx Choice website and pull the next hour’s music log off it (using a clever script written by then-software-engineer now musician Paul Reeves). An entire station, run completely off one PC? Try telling that to the BBC’s engineering department!
