Tagging Songs On The Radio

Digital media always beats analog media.

HD Radio (digital radio) receivers will soon support iTunes tagging. When you hear a song you like on your HD radio, you tag it. And when you synch your iPod with your HD reciever and iTunes, you will be offered the option to purchase the songs you tagged.

I want that feature on every web 2.0 music service I use. But not only iTunes, I want the service to offer me the opportunity to buy it wherever I want to buy it. Because I don’t buy music on iTunes and never will until they get rid of every drm song on the service.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. davidporter

    Some friends from my b-school class started a service in London in 2000 called Shazam – you can get it on your AT&T service today as a sub feature, I believe. It allows you to tag music pretty much anywhere (noisy club or bar, radio, whatever). I was a skeptic but it actually works much of the time, as their DB has grown.

  2. terrycojones

    Nice. Lots of food for thought here…..How would your machine figure out which application is playing music? You probably wouldn’t want to tell it each time, and multiple applications (or one application with multiple threads – like a web browser playing 2 youtube clips) could be producing sound at the same time.Or do you imagine granting the tagging application the right to turn on your microphone for a couple of seconds to grab a clip for identification? At some point, there were claims that Google was going to do this, and, surprise, offer you ads based on what it heard… maybe you should just wait for them to do it 🙂

    1. T.A. McCann

      I work for Jump2go and we do this using RDS, the text that the station spits out when a song plays. This is much more reliable and works for all kinds of music.

  3. Michael St. Hilaire

    Pandora is my favorite web radio station, you can tag stuff with that too. I’m sure you have seen it, but if you haven’t check it out!I think itunes has DRM free music now (itunes plus), but it costs more and not all the songs you want are on there. There’s actually a huge DRM-free push going on right now with the music e-tailers, i’ve seen several announcements recently. A bunch of them are here:http://www.allofmp3.ru/pres…The problem is, allofmp3.com (operating under alltunes.com at the moment) is MUCH cheaper and DRM free and offers a number of high bitrate options. They just won their court battle, so there should be some interesting stuff happening very soon.I’d use itunes too if it were DRM free, at least half it’s current price, offered most major labels/songs, and made available higher (320kb) bitrates. Till then it’s ituneski for me.-M

  4. T.A. McCann

    Thanks for picking this up. I am a one of the founders of Jump2Go (www.jump2go.com) and we are working with Apple and iBiquity to make this happen (we did most of the coding actually). We generally sell solutions to radio stations that deliver RDS steams from their songs to RDS radios, web, mobile text…(example here at http://www.kfog.com/).We will soon have a feature that will let you “earmark” songs from your favorite stations. You could tag from the web (if you were listening to a stream) or from your phone (call a special number) and the song will be saved and sent to you via all the best methods (SMS, web profile, RSS stream…)Once you have your list, there are many things you can do with this (like Last.fm) in terms of discovery, purchasing (in a variety of formats and from a variety of providers), social networking…but the key here is hearing great stuff on the radio, making it personal (saving) and then sharing after the fact.The best thing is that value is added all the way around. The station gets a better connection to the users, gains an understanding of what people like and the users can cherry-pick on the stuff they want from the overall stream.We are excited about the future.