There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they’re certainly not sticking around through the commercials to listen to new music on a radio station. No, sir, that’s what the Internet is for, and that’s why your business has no future.

Some background information is needed here. For only one more day, 92.3 FM in New York City will be known as K-Rock, a typical rock station that you can find in any city in the U.S. If you can think of a rock song from the past 20 years, odds are, the station will play it. Twenty times per day. The latest ratings put the station at 21st place, one spot higher than a gospel station—there’s people who listen to gospel music in New York City?—and right behind a Univision-owned Latin Rhythm station. K-Rock, as a whole, isn’t doing too well. In fact, it’s doing so poorly that CBS Radio decided it was necessary to completely flip formats. Out with the Green Day and in with the Beyoncé! Opie and Anthony, a show I’ve enjoyed for several years now, was let go, according to Opie’s Twitter. It, apparently, doesn’t fit in with the station’s new direction. Fair enough, it’s for CBS Radio to decide if the show is relevant to the demographics it’s now targeting.

So CBS Radio in particular, and commercial radio in general, besieged by scary new technologies—your Imeems, Pandoras, iTunes(es?), YouTube, BitTorrents, iPhones, etc.—decides that rock doesn’t cut it anymore, and that a switch to CHR was in order. (There’s already another CHR station in New York, a fact CBS Radio decided to spin by saying that New Yorkers now, for the first time, have a choice of which frequency they wish to hear that Taylor Swift song. (As if people care what station they’re listening to a song on, provided they’re tuning in at all.) The thinking here, one can only assume, is that radio companies feel that station formats like rock, classic rock and whatever else—radio formats with large back catalogues—don’t work in an iPod world. Why pay a DJ to spin Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the millionth time when a good chunk of your potential audience already has the song on their iPhone (or other music-playing cellphone) or iPod (or other portable media player)? Better to program a music station with NEW! HIT! music. That way there’s less of a chance of your audience having the song on their iPod, and there’s less of a chance of your audience saying, “Good God, again they’re playing [this song]! Time to listen to something else!”

We now turn to Mr. Bouloukos’ comment, that young people—most of you guys are young people, I would guess!—are “using the radio to discover today’s most popular music.” First off, that wording is just wrong. If a song is already popular—remember, 92.3 Now will only only play “hit music”—then the odds are that people have already heard it before; in other words, hit music is already popular! A song becomes popular when a lot of people know it, and enjoy it. If a song is popular, then people aren’t, by definition, “discovering” it! (Amateur Hour at CBS Radio, apparently.) Even giving Mr. Bouloukos the benefit of the doubt, that what he meant to say is that people are using radio to discover new music… well, good luck bro. I’d like to find the last 17-year-old in America who is using commercial radio as his primary source of new music. I mean, it’s not like these kids are using THE INTERNET to find new music, right? MySpace Music, music blogs like Hype Machine, sites like Imeem and YouTube, etc. (Then these kids turn around and buy said music either directly from the band’s Web site, or use iTunes or, yes, download it “from BitTorrent.” (BitTorrent is an Internet protocol; you don’t download things “from it.”)

You wanna know how I “discovered” Buraka Som Sistema, this ridiculous electronic group from Portugal? (Yes, I readily admit that my tastes in music are a little on the unusual side, at least by American standards.) On What.cd, a popular BitTorrent site, I was reading the profile of M.I.A., the girl who sings all those songs in Slumdog Millionaire. There’s a little related artists diagram, and one link leads to Buraka Som Sistem. I grab their latest album and say to myself, “holy smokes this is amazing.” (My favorite song of theirs happens to be “Yah! (The Count and Sinden Remix)”.) These guys are coming to New York in May, so barring some sort of catastrophe, I will be there and I will enjoy every last minute of it.

Never mind that commercial radio in New York City will never play Buraka Som Sistem!

Let’s try another example of how people discover new music in the year 2009. Opie, from the aforementioned Opie and Anthony show, had tweeted—there’s this thing called Twitter, CBS Radio, that I’m sure you’ll try to use before the year is out—a picture of a couple of CDs he had in his car. One of them was MGMT, an indie rock band that I had never heard of till then. Before you know it, hey, I’m now a fan of MGMT. What introduced me to this band? Nope, not crusty old commercial radio, but Twitter, a largely rubbish Web 2.0 site that, for all its faults, lets people talk nonsense rather effectively. One Tweet later, I now have another band to see when they swing by New York City.

CBS Radio, that is how people are “discovering” new music in the year 2009. They’re not listening to the radio, sitting through commercials, waiting for the marble-mouthed DJ to say, “Hey, here’s [Cool New Band].” Yes, we know. We heard about [Cool New Band] two weeks ago via Twitter/Facebook/MySpace Music/whatever. Thanks for trying to remain relevant, though!

Now, I still think radio, as a medium, isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people listen to talk radio, whether it’s of the comedy variety à la Opie and Anthony, of the political variety à la Hannity or Rush, or of the sports variety. (My God does sports radio delve into minutia!) Radio is great for news, too: nothing wrong with listening to the headlines while you’re stuck in traffic on the BQE. But this idea that CBS Radio, and others, cling to, that commercial music radio has a future, that people still seek out commercial radio to listen to new music, is laughably outdated.

What.cd continues to show the decrepit recording industry how to promote music in the BitTorrent era. The site just released The What CD Volume 2, a compilation album of some of the artists that are featured there. (Bands, song writers, and so forth are encouraged to submit their material to the site—they’re added to a special subsection called the Vanity House, which is promoted differently than otherwise commercially released music.) It’s a 20-song album, and comes in at just around 1.4 hours long. A quick first listen while doing a million other things suggests that it’s a better album than the first volume, which was released during the summer.

To those of you on the site, make sure you grab it. The rest of you, well, make friends with someone on the site ;-)

One year ago today OiNK’s Pink Palace was shut down by police. It’s only appropriate to pour one out for it today.

OiNK had been in operation for a little over three years; I had joined exactly one year before it was shut down, invited to the party by CrunchGear alum Vince Veneziani, who’s now kicking about over at GearFuse. Be sure to say hi.

The thing about OiNK (and its primary successors, What.cd and Waffles.fm) is that it wasn’t really ever about getting music for free. To anyone with a job, paying $1 per song is more or less equivalent to paying $0 a song. Music is a commodity. What the labels don’t recognize, or consciously refuse to recognize, is that there was a very real community on OiNK. It was that community that made OiNK special, not being able to download some pop album a few days before it shipped to Wal-Mart.

I’m not old enough to remember the days of being able to walk into a dingy record store in the East Village and listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico for the first time, but that’s exactly what OiNK was like. At least that’s how I perceive it. You had there a group of music fans, both on the site itself and its IRC room, that would, fantastically, discuss music on a level that no amount of venture capital will be able to replicate. People genuinely and relentlessly into music—none of this Pro Tools-enhanced nonsense that passes for music on radio today—interacting, sharing their feelings and opinions on what makes that one album special to them. It was neat.

And for all the money and artificial, Techmeme-fueled buzz something like LaLa generates, it doesn’t really address that community aspect of music. Great, my music’s now in the cloud—how does that enhance my listening experience or my enjoyment of music? Compare that to What.cd, which, without millions of dollars from the latest Silicon Valley know-it-all, has developed its own codebase; launched an innovate Collage feature wherein related albums are grouped together, thereby ensuring you discover new music on a daily basis; and has an impressive collection of lossless albums that you won’t find on any of the cookie cutter online music stores.

Most importantly, What.cd has a community, and it’s one that comes very close to matching OiNK’s.

So while the record labels attempt to sue their way back into our hearts, or license their music to two-bit social media applications, the rest of us can, and should, sit back and remember OiNK today.

A new study says what we’ve been saying for God knows how long: [music] piracy is here to stay. It’s now up to the industry to figure out how to move forward.

The study, by the MCPS-PRS Alliance (the record companies) and Big Champagne (they measure stuff online!), looked at piracy through the lens of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, the album that was released last fall as a digital download, priced at whatever you wanted to pay. The numbers show that illegal downloads via torrent sites “far exceeded” legal downloads. Some 400,000 torrent downloads occurred the first day it was available.

The study also concludes that there’s a strong brand loyalty toward torrents sites, like OiNK back in the day, and What.cd and Waffles.fm now. It makes sense, seeing as though I can grab a FLAC copy of more or less every album I’d be looking for, complete with PDF/JPG liner notes, in a few minutes. Seconds if it’s a particularly popular album, like Viva la Vida.

In conclusion, the record companies are urged to add value to their music-buying experience if they want to remain relevant.

It’s not even about getting music for free anymore. It’s that the entire BitTorrent experience—I’m a What.cd fan—, from A to Z, is so unrivaled in its quality, why would I even bother with an iTunes or Rhapsody or whatever?

via Drudge

Hey. music pirates! You know that band “Coldplay”? Well proper rips of Viva La Vida (the Japanese retail) are now appearing on the private torrent sites likes What.cd and Waffles.fm; they should migrate over to the likes of the Pirate Bay soon enough. I just grabbed a V0 and and everything sounds fine.

Hop on the torrent early and watch your ratio balloon!

Also, good eye, Peter Ha! Don’t ever lose your smile!

There’s a bit of a scare going around the BitTorrent community today, with word that the Canadian Recording Industry Association has “ordered” the closure of several popular trackers, including What.cd. The CRIA has told Moxie Colo, which hosts the trackers in question, to take the offending sites down, issuing cease and desists like they’re going out of style. For its part, the hosting comapny says it has no plans to comply with the CRIA’s demands:

We will not be following the request and will be fighting for the rights of our clients as to date laws in Canada protect them.

A similar note was posted in the What.cd’s forum:

I doubt the sites in question are going to move off of moxie as we are standing here in public eye backing them up. If they want to leave then in end of day makes our life easier but by no means are we saying them or any other client needs to vacate. We will take this all the way to the courts before we would ever damage our relations with our clients.

Please everyone understand that we are not shutting down anyone anytime soon.

Hopefully What.cd doesn’t go the way of OiNK.

Rumors from la France point to a Samsung S5 firmware update that will enable FLAC playback. I know that a grand total of seven of you have so much as seen an S5, but I bring it up merely to point out that, you know, there are other portable players out there beyond the iPod family. And for some people, the lack of FLAC support—no, Apple lossless doesn’t cut it—makes the iPod an alotogether less attractive option.

As I twittered earlier, FLAC is so, so fine. What.cd is currently on FLAC freeleech; I should have more invites available later in the week, so one or two (I guess) lucky readers will get to join the party.

via DAPreview.net

BitTorrent tracker What.cd launched Gazelle last night (beta), effecting a complete re-launch of sorta. There’s a new site design (though still with the familiar wood theme) and some new features. One of them, Paranoia, lets users set how much info is available to other users of the site. Things like recently snatched torrents, current seeding/leeching and other stats can now be regulated. There’s tags, wikis, related artists, etc.

The site itself seems to be having some issues right now. Search is hit or miss, for example.

Overall, and keeping in mind that team is still working out the bugs—it’s still beta, after all—not a bad update. Right now, What.cd’s looking better than Waffles.

Again, I don’t have any invites. It’s very hard to seed on Time Warner, what with my 60KB/s max upload speed on BitTorrent. To think I’m paying for that.

Gazelle, the new back-end that What.cd has been hyping these past few months, now has a release date: April 17. Gazelle isn’t simply faster than TBsource, but it’ll bring with it several features found in the OinkPlus script for Firefox.

And no, I don’t have any invites to give out. I need to upload about 4GB more in order to become a power user. Then I’ll have invites.

OiNK pretender What.cd is getting closer to releasing Gazelle, its new “under-the-hood” code that’s set to replace the old TBSource. It was just released into alpha a few hours ago for VIP users; other user classes will have to wait a little while longer.

What.cd appears to be quite confident of Gazelle’s importance and success. The code adds several new features that, until now, have (in part) depended on external scripts. (Yes, I’m alluding to Greasemonkey and OiNKPlus.) If you’re even a casual BitTorrent user you’ll no doubt appreciate the improvements, which include built-into-what.cd artist profiles (above) and torrent grouping. Torrent grouping shows the many different file formats a particular album is available in—very handy if you’re in a hurry and just want to grab a V0 before heading off to do whatever it is you do all day.

Not gonna lie—I’m sorta looking forward to Gazelle. I’ve always felt more “loyal” to What.cd than Waffles.fm for whatever fanboy reason and the site’s been hyping it up like it’s the main event of WrestleMania. I don’t know, What.cd seems to know what it’s doing.

What.cd

Does the current invitation system used by so-called private BitTorrent sites need to be changed? TorrentFreak, a source of inspiration to nearly everyone on staff here, thinks out loud about this very subject in a recent column. At first, these private sites were largely under the radar of the average after school pirate. A small, trustworthy user base was more valued than 10,000+ ratio farming users. Invites, so the article contends, is partly to blame.

Invites were initially hard to come by, a sort of “I know someone who knows someone” scenario. Now you simply throw “torrent invites” into Google (or worse, eBay) and walk right into any number of sites. The community suffers, the “feeling” of community suffers and then law enforcement agencies shut you down. Not good.

If there’s a solution to this problem, other than entertainment companies getting their acts together and stopping piracy before it starts, then I certainly don’t know what it is. Accounts, and their invitees, are already banned if it’s discovered it’s selling invites.

Just something to mull over during the post-MacWorld haze.

Trading BitTorrent Tracker Invites – Commodity or Curse? [TorrentFreak]

Music pirates have a new tool to put artists in the poor house. The Web site BitLet.org lets users upload torrent files that contain MP3 or OGG files, which begin streaming right after. So if you’re browsing the many popular trackers out there like Pirate Bay or Mininova, you can preview all the songs included in the torrent. The Web site is essentially an embedded BitTorrent client, but one that doesn’t work with private torrents. I tried a couple torrents from What.cd and Waffles.fm and none of them worked, severely limiting the site’s usefulness, in my worthless opinion.

But hey, if you’ve got a couple minutes to kill at the office, it’s worth playing around for a little while. Until it works with What.cd and Waffles,fm, however, I can’t see myself using it too much. Neat idea, just not quite there yet.

BitLet Music Player [BitLet via TorrentFreak]

What.cd?, one of the two main OiNK successors, is developing an entirely new set of site code, promising to be faster and more secure than the old TBsource. (TBsource is used by several private BitTorrent trackers and is among the least efficient and horrifying code to look at. So I’m told. I don’t speak programmer language.) It’s going by the name of Project Gazelle, which not only implies speed, but also the inability to outrun big cats. Technical jargon aside, all it means for you, the average BitTorrent user, is the What.cd? will run smoother than ever and smoother than any private tacker out there. Your download speeds, however, won’t increase.

In related news, it seems What.cd? just opened its door to more users. First three folks to email me at nicholas at crunchgear dot com get an invite.

What.cd To Launch New BitTorrent Tracker Script [Torrentfreak]

First OiNK died, then came the replacements. Now one of those is gone, never having gotten of the ground. BOiNK, the Pirate Bay’s planned all-music BitTorrent tracker, has been cancelled. It seems TPB’s powers that be figured that there were enough OiNK replacements out there, so there was no real reason for yet another one.

This leaves Waffles.fm and What.cd?, the former, I feel, will be much harder to get into than the latter because invites aren’t given out too frequently. Better troll those invite exchange forums if you want in. (Or wait till the sites open up and I’ll give a few out here. Trust me, I won’t put you through any hoops to win.)

The Pirate Bay Cancels OiNK Replacement [Torrent Freak]

You know, in this post-OiNK world, music fans can’t be too careful when it comes to picking a new BitTorrent tracker. That’s why when I woke up this morning I was fully convinced that that RIAA had shut down What.cd?, one of the two biggest trackers comprised of former OiNK users (the other being Waffles). It seems someone is out to “get” What.cd? for whatever reason, subjecting the site and its users to SQL attacks, DDoS attacks, general mischief, etc.

Alas, the e-mail I got from the RIAA was just from some punk kid in the UK. Dork.

So here’s the e-mail in its entirety:

Dear registered user of the site What.cd,

We have recently been investigating the activities of the users of the
site http://www.what.cd/ and we have found that this site exists for the
sole purpose of music piracy.

Pirating music is a criminal offence and we believe it should be obvious
to you that the results outweigh the benefits – hard working artists
won’t be rewarded for their work and will stop producing music,
ultimately leading to a severely reduced selection of music both in the
shops and for download.

The RIAA had hoped that the disabling by the police of the large illegal
music site, Oink.cd, would stop a lot of people from engaging in piracy,
as they don’t want to be seen as criminals. However, this appears to
not be the case, as two large new sites have sprung up in its place.

This email is the final warning to all of you who were members of
Oink.cd and are current members of What.cd. If we find you to be
committing any more criminal acts of piracy then we will have to press
charges against you, as representatives of the major record companies of
America.

Yours Faithfully,

The RIAA

Then I logged into What.cd? to see what’s up and was greeted by some Watergate-like piece of investigative journalism. It turns out the kid responsible for the hacks and phony RIAA e-mails is a member of the site and is a total jerk. At 14-years-old, Peter Cole must have nothing better to do than to prove his “1227″ skills (”1227″ is the new “1337″) against some silly music site.

A whole lotta grief caused by one rogue user. For shame.

What.cd?

So I loved your comments in my original post so much, I decided to pick two of you for invites to the hot new torrent site. Unfortunately, What.CD? is really getting slammed (although not nearly as bad as Waffles is) and registration is currently closed to new users. When it opens again, I will do a post and send out an e-mail to those who I picked.

No worries. Your invites are coming soon enough.

UPDATE – Note, this post is from November, so there are no more invites to be had.