do radio stations play CDs anymore?

[eclectica]

You know it never occurred to me that radio stations might get their material straight from the record companies by way of the internet. Do they even play CDs anymore? It seems like it would be so much easier for a radio station to queue up its playlist on a computer and have it play all the songs straight from a computer's hard drive. I suppose if the radio station were to get its music in a CD format then it would still rip it into a digital file to play on the hard drive so as to avoid having to actually use the CD player. I've seen FM radio quality described on a few different websites as 96 kbps. So a radio station can play mp3s of 128 kbps and provide enough quality. That means one computer can easily hold enough songs to take care of all the songs a radio station plays. It would make the DJ's job easier than having to use a CD player, and also there would be fewer errors.

Movie studios would like to distribute their movies in digital format because it would be cheaper than having to ship costly film. But many movie theaters still use film, and to get expensive digital projectors would shift the cost from the studios to the theaters. As always such a digital distribution method would lower the costs of distribution but would bring about a new risk that the entire digital file could be acquired by an unauthorized person. Movie studios don't want their stuff available to the public until after some months have passed where at that point they then release it to DVD.

The actual digital distribution method from the studios may involve either a type of filesharing method or the downloading of the files from a central server. The BitTorrent protocol has been shown to be the best way to distribute large popular files that are in demand by several parties, and would save the bandwidth of the studios.

Ray Beckerman and Ty Rogers of Recording Industry vs The People (http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/) have submitted a request to the public seeking more information in regards to the process by which the record companies use p2p technology to transmit their files to radio stations. Their appeal can be read here (http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/07/urgent-appeal-for-information-from-all.html) and is the following:

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Urgent Appeal for Information from All People in the Radio Business!!!!

Urgent appeal for help from our friends in the radio business...

For one of our litigations we are collecting information on the use by the major record labels of peer-to-peer file sharing technology to make song files available to radio stations.

Please circulate this to anyone you know who is in, or may know people who are in, the radio business.

Anyone who has information is urgently asked to communicate it to

Ray Beckerman
212-763-6809
rbeckerman@vanfeliu.com

or

Ty Rogers
212-763-6838
mtrogers@vanfeliu.com

Thank you.


Posted by Ray Beckerman @ 7/25/2006 06:26:00 PM

[eclectica]

Here is a followup of the original query that Beckerman put out seeking information from the public regarding how the RIAA record companies transmit the songs to radio stations. You can read an article about it at Ars Technica which explains it well:
Record labels evasive about in-house use of file sharing apps (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060911-7708.html)

The response (http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_lindor_060908RBtoMagisAttachDocReqResp) dated 2006-08-24 from RIAA lawyer Gabriel had in the last sentence:

"Plaintiffs state that they have not used file-sharing programs such as Kazaa to provide music to radio stations, and, thus have no documents in their possession, custody, or control that are Responsive to this request."

Now my question is whether a program like BitTorrent would be considered to be a file-sharing program such as Kazaa. Or would eMule? You see, the definition of filesharing and p2p is in itself blurry. An email program or an ftp server is a filesharing application. The nature of TCP/IP transmission means that traffic flows both ways between computers on the internet. And the very notion of p2p really just means computer to computer, which happens whenever you visit a webpage.

Therefore the RIAA lawyer may have answered the question in a limited sense when defining a "filesharing program such as Kazaa", so that nothing else besides Kazaa would be included in that definition. Even if the RIAA lawyer Gabriel just happened to be telling the truth in his response, it does not indicate much of anything.