CONCERT SIMULCAST DRIVES 93XRT.COM TO NEW PEAK: RBR.com reports (here) that WXRT/Chicago had a higher peak webcast audience for their simulcast of the band Wilco’s live concert Tuesday evening than what they normally hit during the workweek. “Page views on 93XRT.com tripled Tuesday night and gave them nearly 50,000 page views over the course of one day alone,” reports RBR, “by far, the highest single day online in terms of stats yet.” WXRT was one of CBS Radio’s first stations to be allowed to stream and is one of their most-listened-to online.

MUSICQ SERVICE LAUNCHED TO ANALYZE BROADCAST AND NET RADIO SONG AND ARTIST PLAY. A Pennsylvania tech company called QlikTech says its new service allows users to instantly track and analyze song and artist airplay on thousands of radio broadcasters across the country. For the underlying data, the company says its MusiQ Tracker uses ASCAP’s Mediaguide monitor reports, tracking nearly 2,600 AM
and FM stations and approximately 3,500 Internet-only stations. Try the demo here.

RAIN ANALYSIS OF MUSICQ: AMAZING DETAIL, BUT UNWEIGHTED. The MusicQ Tracker service described above offers amazing detail, complete with cool charts and graphs: Want to know the most-played Diana Krall songs? “The Look of Love” got 78 plays, “The Heart of Saturday Night” got 56 plays, “‘S Wonderful” got 53 plays. Want to know which stations played Diana Krall? That reveals a problem — MusicQ gives as much credit to KXTR/Springfield, MO (36 plays) or a Live365 station with a miniscule audience as it does to KKSF/San Francisco (14 plays) or XM Watercolors (7 plays).

CANADIAN SONGWRITERS WANT $5 MONTHLY ISP FEE FOR UNLIMITED LEGAL DOWNLOADS: The Songwriters Association of Canada has proposed that every Canadian’s monthly Internet bill increase by $5 in exchange for the ability to download an unlimited amount of copyrighted music. “That’s a very reasonable amount of money to legally, without fear of any legal repercussions, to be able to download that and share it with whoever you want to and as many times as you want,” Eddie Schwartz, president of the songwriters association, told the CanWest News Service. “On iTunes to download one album, it’s $10. This is half of that and this is pretty reasonable to have access to the entire repertoire of Western music.” The proposal would reported be worth $500 million to $900 million annually for Canadian composers and lyricists. Read more here. (RAIN ANALYSIS: Are these guys nuts? If the article is characterizing their position correctly, they seem to think that the songwriters should get all the money and the record labels and the performers should get bupkis!)

CHEAPER NETWORKED HOME SYSTEMS COULD BOOST NET RADIO AUDIENCES. A projected surge in network-enabled home entertainment systems would likely drive increased listening to online entertainment — including Internet radio. The research firm Park Associates has published a report which suggests technology will make these “high-end” home network systems more affordable to the average consumer. That could help Internet radio listening expand beyond its current 9A-5P at-work “prime time” into at-home hours. Read the press release here.

SWISS WEBCASTER CREATES STREAMS FOR STORES AND RESTAURANTS: Mostly foregoing the typical consumer-based business, the new Geneva-based itraxx is designing music streams it hopes retail businesses will find appealing enough to subscribe to. The service boasts a playlist of 20,000 songs over 13 channels. More coverage, including audio, from World Radio Switzerland is here.

MORE GREAT SONGS ON WAXQ DEEP TRACKS HD2 CHANNEL. Following up on our Wednesday story re: the possible illegality, under the DMCA, of Clear Channel’s streaming of its HD2 channels (because they don’t provide title/artist/album information in textual form on the player), I was listening more to this stream on Wednesday night. In doing so, I heard and enjoyed the long version of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” — maybe the first time I’ve ever heard the full 18-minute and 20-second version on any radio station, ever. On the other hand, are terrestrial radio’s classic rock playlists so tight nowadays that Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” is now considered a “deep track“?! (And it was immediately followed by Jackson Browne’s “That Girl Could Sing,” which is a classic rock “top track” in my book, and Chicago’s “Questions 67 & 68,” which was the band’s first boss hit-bound single.)

MUSIC TRIVIA FACT OF THE DAY. Speaking of Chicago hits with numbers in them, “25 or 6 to 4” composer Robert Lamm says, according to Wikipedia, that the title of the song “is just a reference to the time of day,” and that “the song is about writing a song.” The time of day in reference is 3:35 AM (or 3:34 AM), which would then be 25 (or 26) minutes to 4 AM. To quote Peter Griffin, I did not know that.

Comment

1. Didn’t know there was a “short version” of Alice’s Restaurant.. we played all 18+ minutes at least once every Thanksgiving since it was first released on stations I ran in NY, on WEBE108 CT and recently on Cape Cod. I beleive they still do. Always got a kick out of the e mail and phone responce from first timers. – Vince Cremona

   — Vince cremona · Feb 22, 10:14 AM · #

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