April Update: An Easier Way to Program Music
Every month, we’ll be sharing a brief update of our ongoing experiment to make programming classical music on the radio just a bit easier and more efficient for public radio stations.
You can read our first blog post HERE. And, you’ll find last month’s post HERE.
First, here’s a reminder of the goal
To save stations staff time by offering 8 hours of classical music programming Monday - Friday. Our goal is to also serve audiences better by making sure that every playlist includes a balanced mix of classical music favorites, performances by a diverse array of artists, and the best of the new and relevant classical recordings being released today.
What’s new this month
We’re continuing to build and build and build our library! Hooray!
You know, in the same way that Chat GPT makes content creation “easier,” an automatic music scheduler (like you find in Music Master or almost any other programming tool) is supposed to make scheduling music “easier.”
And yet …
The quality of the library you’re working with has a LOT to do with how effective your scheduling tool actually is. We’re deliberately taking our time in this phase of our project because we know exactly how time-consuming working with an overblown or out of date library is. We get the chance to start from scratch and we’re really trying to be intentional with how we’re building our base library.
What’s challenging us this month
Well, a couple of things!
First, we were lucky enough to meet with our beta testers and with Music Master and walk through the ingesting/playlist process. We’re figuring out, step by step, how it’ll all work. And the good news is – it DOES work! This is doable.
The slightly less than good news…it’s not as easy as we know it needs to be for YOU to get value out of it. So, as we continue to build our library and start testing our clocks, we’re also exploring some new ideas.
One of those new ideas? Welcoming a new partner to Whisper Speak Roar Media! We hope to introduce our new partner to you soon. This person will be invaluable in helping us create an efficient and streamlined onboarding process for new clients. More to come!
And, the other thing that’s challenging us this month?
The same thing that was challenging us last month!
Sourcing the recordings for this type of project is not easy.
Because Whisper Speak Roar Media is not a radio station, we cannot simply pass along the audio+metadata of any album that crosses our desk. That would make us a music distributor and we would both need permission from record labels to distribute the music.
With that in mind, we have cleared the broadcast and distribution rights for all of the music that we are including in our library. We also are only including high resolution .wav files so that stations will have the best-sounding recordings from WSRM.
One thing we HAVE figured out, however, is that working with a partner like Play MPE is really going to be valuable. We currently have accounts set up with Play MPE and are sourcing much of our database from their vast library. We’re also continuing our relationship with Crossover Media and have been able to ingest some of their tracks, too.
What’s next
Well, we’re doing a lot of behind the scenes work at the moment – and we anticipate that that’s going to continue for a while longer yet, too.
Our next step, which we anticipate will happen in early May, is to begin creating our playlists and sending them to our beta testers for their review.
We’ll be looking for their feedback on the music choices, the clock structures, and more! (And remember, anytime YOU want to share your programming thoughts with us, please do so HERE.)
Thanks for reading! And please get in touch if you have any comments or questions. We’d love to hear from you.
