OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty

via Torrent Freak: OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty: "the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty"

I love this quote:

“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

One of the most important things about Oink was that it indexed a huge number of rare, out of print vinyl releases. Oink was full of music that was impossible to find through any other ways.

I look forward to the future when the big record labels learn to embrace services like this, entering into licensing deals which will make more music available to more people, rather than trying to shut down a service that facilitates the distribution of otherwise impossible to find music.

Hello dear radio station!

We get email messages like this, all similarly worded, all asking for free promotional items or photos or stickers, etc.

Hello dear radio station!
I like listening to your transmission!
For many years I'm your fan, your transmission is very interesting!
I would like to know more about your radio station.
I'd like to get your photo with your autograph DJ.

And then an address in Russia.

The funny thing is we get several of these a week, to various email addresses at SomaFM, all from different addresses and cities in Russia.

Some are more demanding, asking for caps and t-shirts for them and their friends; or asking for CDs and other free giveaways.

By now, we've probably received over 100 letters like this. At first, it was fun thinking that we had fans all over Russia. But then I noticed that all the messages were generic and none of them actually referenced our programming. Some say things like "I love Black Metal music!"... obviously they don't actually listen to our station.

Is it some fad in Russia to have overseas radio promo items?

Phasing out 24-56kb MP3 streams

We're going to be phasing out our lower bitrate MP3 streams in 2010, and replace them with aacPlus feeds. 24-32k MP3 streams will become 32k aacPlus streams, which sound so much better than the existing 32k streams. 56k MP3 streams will become 64k aacPlus streams.

Eventually, we'll offer 32k and 64k aacPlus streams for all our channels, 128k MP3 streams for compatibility, and 32kb Windows Media streams.

iTunes 9 now has full support for aacPlus (AAC-HE) streams, and this was the main player that didn't support it. Since 1/3-1/2 of all our traffic is people listening in iTunes, this was something that held us back from making more of a switch to aacPlus before now.

We will also be adding Flash-based streaming this year, which will work well for many people in office settings where they can't install a media player.

The listener numbers for the low bitrate MP3s has drastically fallen over the last year, and I can't think of any reason to keep the low-bitrate MP3 streams running. If you think we should for some reason, leave a comment and let me know.

I'm hoping that we'll get more adoption of the 64kb aacPlus streams which frankly sound as good or better than the 128k MP3 streams.

Happy 2010!