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 across the country.
Last month, we shared our plan. You can read the full post HERE.
What’s new this month
We’re building and building and building our library! Hooray!
This is proving to be a time-consuming process (no surprise there), though it’s also a lot of fun. As you know, it takes a good amount of time to manually enter all of the metadata for each movement of each piece of music (this is one of the reasons we thought this programming tool might be helpful to you–save time on ingesting all of this music). But it’s also fun to review all of the new albums that have come out this winter and spring.
Right now, our library is about 50% of existing recordings (made between 1995 - today) of works that we felt must be in any classical music library; and 50% releases from new albums. We’re especially excited about recent recordings from Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, Ofra Harnoy and Mike Herriot, and the Bach Aria Soloists and are looking forward to including them in our radio playlists.
What’s challenging us this month
Surprise!
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 and 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.
However, we did not set out to create a music distribution business.
Our business is creating interesting and relevant classical music playlists for public radio stations. But we want to make the integration of these playlists as easy as possible. The goal is to save you time, after all!
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.
Here’s how we’re doing this:
*I Like Music
This is a UK-based music service that already has a built-in integration for MusicMaster. If you don’t see a piece you’re looking for in your MusicMaster library, open the I Like Music store within MusicMaster, search for the piece, instantly add the metadata to your database and then upload the high-res audio file to your play to air system.
All files in the I Like Music database are commercially licensed for broadcast.
On the one hand, we’ve found this service offers a pretty elegant solution to add new music to both your library and your play to air system. On the other hand, we’ve found that I Like Music’s library, while large, is missing the compositions we want to include and that you still have to manually enter quite a bit of metadata.
*Work with labels for WSRM to get distribution rights for new recordings
If WSRM was able to negotiate to get the limited distribution rights for any recording we wanted, we could build the music library of our dreams!
However, as you can probably imagine, this is a pretty difficult challenge. We would need to negotiate the terms for every single album (not a blanket agreement with each label) and that would take years of work. WSRM has decided to try a modified approach: we’re trying to negotiate with labels for the albums we really want.
We’re also having many meetings with publicists and operations directors of record labels to start making new albums available on these industry-facing services, such as I Like Music and Play MPE.
We've been hearing more and more about Play MPE and are currently in the process of trying to connect with someone there to share our plans and to see whether or not this might be a tool we can use. We know some of YOU use Play MPE; can you share some information with us or a contact name? If so, get in touch HERE.
*The Orchard and Naxos Distribution
We've just learned a little bit more about these two distribution channels and are in the process of making connections there. Do you have contacts or knowledge around these distribution channels? If so, please share HERE.
What’s next
Well, we’re continuing to build our music library, piece by piece, and we’re also researching the industry to see if there are other music distributors we could work with to source high-quality classical music albums.
We’re also re-examining our workflow, which is where we value your feedback.
Our original business model was to create daily playlists which would be available for import directly into your MusicMaster schedule. Then we would also have a secure FTP site where a station could download the corresponding audio files. The metadata would already be linked to these audio files so it would just be a matter of importing the playlist then ingesting the audio. As a bonus, the audio files would be a new permanent addition to a station’s library to program in any other daypart if they chose to.
Here are our questions this month:
If WSRM offered JUST a playlist of 8 hours of classical music, which a station could import to their MusicMaster schedule, but the station had to find the recordings themselves, would you use this?
If WSRM offered a playlist (including metadata for each piece) of 8 hours of classical music with a link to where a station manager could acquire the audio file, would you use this?
Share your thoughts HERE.
