There’s a couple of places that will “construct a radio station around your preferences”.
They ask you to name a few songs or artists and then try to guess other songs you want to hear. You can tell them you like or don’t like what they pick, but you cannot get them to play what you want.
So if you say “Beatles” they will guess you like the Rolling Stones and the Turtles and Barry Malalow. You try adding and dropping names and they play a lot of stuff but no Beatles.
What’s up with that?
I can understand they pay fees based on something or other, but wouldn’t they end up paying the same fees for all those songs I don’t like?
My guess for the Beatles is the Beatles specifically disallow their songs to be played by that method. After all for a long time (or even currently?) they did not make their songs available to buy online, much less listen to.
But I too wonder why the algorithms seem so brain dead. But for me it’s more of an opposite problem. In all the ones I’ve encountered if you enter 5 bands around 50% of the content is from those bands. And it only plays songs from the genres of those individual bands, not taking into account fusion potential between the bands. (For instance if I said Black Sabbath and Pantera, I’d probably like heavy metal, but if I said Black Sabbath and Grateful Dead, I’d be more interested in 1970’s stoner bands.)
My understanding is that there is a difference in the liscencing for an on-line radio station and an on-demand music streaming service. The recording indusrty generally does not charge for radio stations to play their music–in fact, they send them promotional copies of new CDs to play and occasionally make illegal payments to radio stations to get additional airplay. I believe the same policy applies to on-line broadcasting. The logic, obviously, is that they want you to hear the music for free so that you will then decide to pay for the ability to hear it whenever you want (by downloading it or buying the CD). They especially want you to hear new music that you might not have been aware of (though most radio stations want to play old music you already know you’ll like, so they can sell advertising).
If they allowed you to listen to any streaming music you want whenever you want without paying for it, their whole bussiness plan would fall apart, so they specifically disallow internet radio stations from doing this. Real stations that have on-air playlists and archives can’t even link the two. You can look up what was played yesterday at 9am and set the archive to stream whatever that was, but you can’t search automatically for a specific song or artist and play that.
Ah, no. There’s been a bit of a brouhaha about this.
was one of the focal points of the opposition to a plan by the Copyright Royalties Board who wanted to levy very high fees on internet broadcasters. Congress got involved and the situation is still unclear.
These online radio stations don’t have access to the entire catalog of all music ever made. So even if you keep telling them you like the Beatles, if they don’t have the rights to Beatles songs, you’re not gonna hear the Beatles.
And you can’t just type in a song and ask to hear it, because then you wouldn’t have to buy it. Even though you can hear the song over on YouTube just by searching for it. I know it makes no sense. Just be comforted than it a decade or two, you’re going to be able to listen to anything ever recorded in any format on any player at any time, and all for no additional charge.
If you tell a station to play songs based on your preferences for Black Sabbath and Grateful Dead, the only thing they can do that doesn’t require way too much computational power is to mix together songs that are popular among Black Sabbath fans and songs that are popular with Grateful Dead fans. Anything else can require some pretty serious CPU time to handle reasonably.
The way around this to use user-submitted metadata to mark bands/albums/songs as similar. But if your notion of similar doesn’t match up with everybody else’s, there’s not much they can do.
With regards to the OP, the Beatles songs are not available through most (if not all) legal online services.
Last.fm is dipping their toes in the on-demand waters. At the moment you can request an individual track, but only listen to it three times. Once they have the back catalogs fully uploaded they will offer a subscription model to listen unlimited times. They’ve signed contracts with all the major record labels and thousands of indie ones, so I guess the industry has finally twigged what is happening.
Bad comparison. YouTube would likely happily pull those videos if they were flagged, and the people who do upload them are breaking the site’s TOS. Online radio, on the other hand, is trying to do things ‘by the books’ so to speak, and have to stick with whatever rules their license sets for them. Pandora covers this in their FAQ.
Right. Finetune runs the same sort of way–you create a “playlist” of 45+ songs, and can’t include more than 3 from any one artist. Likewise, you can’t rewind, and you can only “skip” to the next song once or twice before a little notice pops up saying, “you’re going to have to listen to SOME of them…” and disallows skipping. All of this is to try to demonstrate that they are, indeed, internet radio, and not an on-demand service (which has entirely different licensing costs).
Could you tell me, then, how Dizzler works? They’re based in Arizona, and in my experience, you just go to the site, type in the song you want, and it plays. Sure, they ask you to sign up and such to create playlists, but for casual listening it seems to work fine.
I was fairly sure this isn’t right. When I worked at a very small university radio station, I think we sent in our playlists so that BMI and such could distribute payments to the correct right holders.
Don’t radio stations sign up with BMI and ASCAP, giving them the right to play any music covered by these two companies? (Which is basically everything, who has the time and contacts to follow up with the entire radio industry to exact payment from the stations?)
Heck, I remember that a local coffeehouse had to start selling the CDs they were playing. The musicians pointed out that any public playing of the CD constituted a broadcast, and the business would have to pay broadcast fees. The management then declared all CDs to be for sale, and all playing of them was advertisement for the sales.
Anyone out there in the business?
I have no answer for the OP but I want to say thanks for pointing out this site. It seems that most online places play crap from the artists that you asked for.