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Media
Kiss turn off now playing feed to avoid being comparedmyradio.com
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009
Talking of cross-industry websites for the radio sector, Bauer’s Kiss 100 has stopped posting song information online in a bid to stop that previously reported beta service from rival Absolute from using the data to compare the youth station’s musical output with that of its rivals.
As previously reported, Absolute’s digital development team recently launched a new website called CompareMyRadio.com, which taps into online playlist information from numerous radio stations in order to compare the sort of music rival services play. The idea is that it gives music fans the chance to work out which radio stations may be playing music to their taste.
The Kiss team are concerned that the new service will misrepresent their output. Why? Well, they have a good point actually. Radio stations that tell you what is ‘now playing’ on their website do so by taking a feed from the computer in the studio that actually plays the music you hear on air. Which is all fine for day-time radio shows that are centrally playlisted and which take all their music from said studio computer.
But specialist show presenters, who have a free reign on what they play, normally by-pass the computer and use these weird things called CDs and records instead. That music often doesn’t get displayed in the ‘now playing’ box on the website, and would therefore not factor into CompareMyRadio.com’s analysis of the sort of music a station plays.
Which means stations who pride themselves on having great, credible, on-the-ball specialist shows in the evenings would be exclusively assessed based on their (possibly shit) daytime playlists.
Kiss chief Steve Parkinson told Radio Today: “Our concern is that this doesn’t look as if it’s a like-for-like comparison. From a Kiss point of view the system doesn’t seem to track the full range of Kiss programming. Unlike most other radio stations much of our output is not on a computer due to our specialist mix that champions new music upfront, so doesn’t seem to have captured the actual variety that we are proud of”.
With all that in mind Kiss have chosen to withdraw from comparemyradio.com, though the only way they can do so is by turning off the data feed on their website that the Absolute-owned service taps into, which is a shame because it means Kiss listeners lose that service also.
Other solutions would include having specialist show presenters input their ‘now playing’ data manually, though given most specialist shows in commercial radio are one man (or woman) operations, that probably isn’t a viable solution. That said, most specialist show presenters do publish their playlists after their show, so perhaps CompareMyRadio.com – despite being all about this clever little bit of feed amalgamation software – needs to have a human being typing in those playlists once a week to give a more accurate representation of what music stations with specialist shows actually play.
Or perhaps Kiss could just live with being misrepresented. Hey, they’re a youth station, surely being misrepresented by the establishment comes with the territory?
