Adding ‘Now Playing’ to your Website & Broadcast *

* and everywhere else

Bryan Hance – www.radioactivity.fm – info@radioactivity.fm

• www.radioactivity.fm• Based in Portland, OR • Came out of KAMP, UofA, Tucson, AZ• I work with college, community, LPFM’s• Systems administrator / IT / database

guy / server and web nerd *• Interested in: working with playlist data to

actually benefit the stations and artists

Who I am, why I am here

* Complete and total lack of any Powerpoint skills whatsoever

www.radioactivity.fm

Online service for playlist logging, reporting, and tracking

Started for royalty reporting, witha focus on giving stations ways to work with their data

Focused on doing interestingthings with playlists, streaming, and song data*

* not as boring as this sounds! Seriously!

So: what are we talking about?

Collecting playlist info, getting into a usable format for your website, (& Twitter, iPhone apps, etc)

From DJ’s and automation!

Usually means:

- Title, artist, album, label

- Time, DJ and show

- optional: Genre, comments

Think bigger - not just the web!

KALX iPhone app WTUL’s Twitter feed, 1000+ following

I had my doubts about Twitter, but people really took to it - artists are very attuned to searching Twitter for their plays.

Formatted data makes it easy for iPhone developers to bake your playlists into their iPhone apps.

Don’t forget stream metadata!Use the same methods to update your

stream metadata!

You can ‘talk’ to these and update using your manual entries with some light scripting

Shoutcast example: http://11.22.33.44:8000/admin.cgi?

pass=PASS&mode=updinfo&song=Pon%20De%20Floor%20-%20Major%20Lazer%20-%20Mad%20Decent

Icecast example:http://192.168.1.10:8000/admin/metadata?mount=/

mystream&mode=updinfo&song=ACDC+Back+In+Black

* Like www.streamserf.com – periodically hits, analyzes streams for song metadata

Did you know: there are services out there monitoring your streams for data?*Look at your logs, look for 1-second listener connections. These are metadata monitors.

Playlisting benefitsOnline playlists serve your audience! Drives listeners and viewers to your website for playlists.

Serves the artists you play!

Search engines pick up your playlists, which gives your artists a

way to see the airplay and the support you are give them. Opens

up great DJ-to-artist, station-to-artist communications.

Turn your playlists into an asset!

A little bit of work and you have a brand new asset – your data.

Royalty/industry reporting

CMJ / ASCAP/ SESAC / BMI / SoundExchange

So … how do you do this? Make a web form, put the data into a database.

(Yes, this means most of you are stuck typing this data in on a keyboard)

Pull this data out, display it with server-side code (PHP, ASP, Perl)

Recap:From DJ, to database, to webEntries flow from the DJ to database to web, mobile, etc

1) DJs type song info into web interfaceTake some of the pain out of this process - autocomplete

2) Put the info into a databaseTypically on the same system as the web application. (Me? LAMP: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP)

3) Distribute the info! XML then gets this onto your website(s)Straight HTTP gets this onto iPhone app (framing)APIs gets this to Twitter & beyond

Log your automation! Not so bad, actually.

Automation: MegaSeg, Direttore, Winamp*, RadioLogik, etc

Data can be messy - files must be well-tagged

Automation usually logs to textfile,- work with this textfile

Worst part? Parsing and ID’ing elements from textfiles – time, title, artist, album, label. This is bread-and-butter programming for C.S. & C.E. students. Find them.

** AMIP = http://amip.tools-for.net - remember this. Seriously. Great plugin.

* ITunes is kind of messy, but it can be done

Gotchas: things to watch out for Your DJ’s will hate you (for about a week)… but then they’ll see the benefits as the data reaches out.Long story short: make logging part of your policy. Enforce it.

Filtering out bad words - feed filtering

Incomplete and terrible, stupid data (I don’t know, S/R, none)

Update timing can be tricky – i.e. the time between a DJ entering Data and when it shows up on your website, iPhone app, Twitter

Live logging versus post (or pre) logging – convenience, sanity

Hard to always get the data you need from DJs, automation – i.e. ‘label’ field is always missing, DJ typing skills are rough

Questions? Drop me a line

Bryan Hance

info@radioactivity.fm