Son of Rip, Mix, Burn

Hear It, Buy It, Burn It - that's what i want from my radio stations. Radio is about discovery. Always has been. So in the world of MP3s, i want the discovery to happen in my medium. I want my MP3 player to have a radio in it, and i want to be able to buy a song when i hear it. If the radio industry doesn't get this going soon, it will happen around them, and they will loose their relevance in our lives (if they haven't already).

Thanks to Rafat Ali for the link to the FT story.

Comments

[Charlie Sierra]

So when my future cellphone has an embedded FM chip, coupled with the internal CPU, storage and color screen, who will be the gatekeeper that needs to be paid off to buy my new favorite (impulse!!!) song?

Will it be Verizon or ClearChannel?

Or, my best guess is it will be neither.

Since Radio stations already pay a royalty for each song broadcast, the "metadata" for this system is already captured.

All you need is minor piece of SW that records the station id, date, and time. The sync can happen later. This also provides very valuable feedback data for the music publishers, radio stations, etc.

[Niraj]

There was an article in a back-issue of Red Herring about how some technology that will enable their stations to transmit digitally.

Nevertheless, it is a doable concept.

[Derek]

Some internet radio stations work this way already. This last month I've found I've switched from my canned MP3 collection to internet radio for just this discovery process.

Sadly, they're still selling CDs as their primary format.