MSN Radio rip-offs
p2pnet.net News:- Microsoft has a lot in common with the members of the Big Four record label cartel and the major movies studios.
Their financial and political clout is so enormous and so powerful that no matter how low they may sink or how despicable their actions may be, they get away with it.
One of the latest stunts pulled by Bill and the Boyz is to lift content from Net broadcasters without permission or without credit to the stations concerned.
Microsoft uses playlists from more than 900 US radio stations for its own soundalike Net stations stripped of local DJ chatter, traffic, weather and commercials, writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Benny Evangelista here, going on to quote Bill Conway, program director and station manager for San Francisco’s KOIT-FM, as saying:
“I’m surprised they would co-opt the brand names of every radio station in America without permission.”
Conway was surprised when he learned from a reporter that Microsoft was using his station’s call letters and well-known slogan, ‘Lite Rock, Less Talk,’ to promote a mimicked version of KOIT, says Evangelista.
Microsoft has just launched MSN Music with Windows Media Player 10.
Like iTunes, MSN Radio has Net radio streams with different music genres but the key difference, is a ‘Local Stations’ section, “which provides Internet radio programmed by computer to duplicate the songs found on local stations in major markets,” says the Chronicle piece.
“Microsoft buys its lists of radio songs, called playlists, from Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, a division of the Nielsen ratings service, which monitors more than 1,200 radio stations in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. It is one of two services used by station managers and program directors to track what’s being played by competitors and in other markets.
“Microsoft, however, feeds the playlists into computers, which automatically generate playlists to create the soundalike MSN station. The song lists are changed to adhere to rules that are different for Web radio casts and to exclude songs that Microsoft does not have rights to distribute on the Internet.”
Evangalista concludes with a quote from Robert Unmacht, a founder of Nashville’s In3 Partners.
“I think we’re headed toward broadband radio,” he said, with Microsoft “five or 10 years ahead of where they need to be, which is smart because broadcasters are thinking just 13 weeks ahead.”
