Many of us take advantage of these sites and services. Now it’s time to show our support to keep the music on.
Grab your own widget, show your support and spread the word…
The music industry is at it again. On Friday March 2nd, the U.S. government (specifically, the Copyright Royalty Board, or “CRB”) announced the new royalty rates Internet radio webcasters must pay to license the music they play for the years 2006-2010 (the fees are retroactive). The issue is the disproportionate royalty structure that is well over the revenue generated for even the largest and most profitable internet radio sites.
Sites like Digitally Imported (di.fm) and Pandora (pandora.com) could not even begin to cover the fees that they would incur based on the new royalty rates. For an explanation and examples of how the royalties will work, check out the FAQ at SaveTheStreams.org.
TechCrunch has a pretty good round up of social music sites and services (more than just internet radio). If you like music or like discovering music, you should definitely check out the post. While it’s a good write up, it’s difficult to cover everything so don’t skip the comments. TechCrunch readers have contributed more music sites and services and you don’t want to miss those.
While not a social music site or service, don’t forget we have our own little WordPress sidebar widget for di.fm/sky.fm. The sidebar widget allows you to configure the widget to either display a specific di.fm or sky.fm channel or randomly rotate through the available channels.
We had some free time during lunch so we decided to whip up a quick feature for the Digitally Imported Widget. Version 3 is ready for download and includes the new “Randomize” feature. When selected, it will override the normal channel selection and randomly display a channel on each page load. Previously you could only select one channel to display at a time. This will give you and your visitors a way to explore all that DI has to offer and experience new music. The channel list was also updated. 4 new channels were added for a total of 31 DI and Sky Channels. On the list of things to do, add the ability to select a list of channels that will be used to randomize on. See the DI Widget page for details and the download.
The Digitally Imported and Stickam WordPress Sidebar Widgets have been updated. Both were updated with slight edits to the html output. Some unnecessary div blocks were removed. For the Stickam widget, additional output was added if rooms were empty or there were no active rooms. These 2 updates are completely optional and do not have any bug fixes. See the widget pages for change logs.
As you can tell, the entire site underwent a complete redesign. We felt the old design was a bit stale and the navigation was not user friendly. While the new design is still pretty plain, we like it more than the old one. The navigation has been improved significantly. Site navigation has been consolidated and moved to the top. External navigation has been moved to the bottom. And, widget demos are now also on the bottom. This should make the overall site navigation easier and put the more relevant information towards the top so there is less scrolling.
Also, we have cut down on the advertisements. Unfortunately, they are still a necessary part of supporting this site.
