Record keeping is now a requirement for radio stations who are web streaming. The basics of the rules are spelled out at the CBI website. Recent discussions on the CBI-General listsrv [no archive available that I can find] are talking about the record keeping which stations need to now comply with SoundExchange. While not many are happy with the requirement, I would like to suggest that this might be a place to start forming the necessary tools to meet this requirement. While there are tools out there such as RadioActivity.fm, I feel it's in our station's best interest to aggregate this information on our own.
Any code which addresses these issues in the public interest is also going to be a good starting point to converge the ideas pertaining to catalog, on-line playlists and such. Compliance is a priority for us. As a radio station with well over 100 hosts in any given week, I think the toughest challenge is to obtain the information on the front end. What will be the source? Live hosts? An automation system? Satellite source or Winamp? There will certainly be a nexus here which deserves some discussion.
The next piece would be what to collect? If human input is going to be a major factor, then as little information as possible. The minimum requirement will likely be determined by licensing requirements. Collection of the needed information would be a perfect match to the Drupal environment. Drupal is also likely to provide the means to coax many of the suggested other sources to play via xml-rpc. The combination of the logged in user with the schedule module will provide the show information which could be used as a minimal compliance for hosts to title non-music shows and stop-sets.
It has also taken some research to discover any information about the metadata field on webstreams. While there doesn't seem to be solid documentation at this point, it would seem that an insertion tool for shoutcast2 streaming servers would serve the purpose of many users. The most common pattern for using the metadata field seems to be Artist - Item Title. In our implementation, this would also become a parallel datastream to an RDS encoder.
Station.module has been a very welcome tool in the arsenal to bring low-budget radio into the 21st century. With tools like Drupal, station.module, icecast, Rivendell, we can get there, still service our community and pay the transmitter electric bill.
Comments
interesting reading, not
interesting reading, not sure i've got much to add at this point. i think that radioactive.fm is a pretty good example of what i'd like to do with the station_catalog and station_playlist modules. the big thing that needs to be working is the reports.
one unrelated thing i did want to mention, you need to separate the tags with commas.
Followup
At the 2006 National College Media Convention, Mr. Joel Willer, Assistant Professor of Mass Communications University of Louisiana at Monroe provided this handout on the current requirements for filing reports on streaming activity.
We are currently using Cacti to track our web listener counts. Cacti uses RRDTool to aggregate the stream counts from an XSL translation straight from the icecast2 server.