p2p radio standard

[jbuckman]

I'm launching an artist-oriented Internet record label at http://www.magnatune.com. The goal of the site is to sign bands and promote their music through the free exchange of Mp3s and (especially) Mp3 radio. Basically, the idea is like spinner.com, but with a 50/50 split of the sale price of the music (sold at $5) to the artist, and we only play artists on our label. There's a lot more philosophy behind the idea, that you can read at www.magnatune.com

I think a lot of people would want to listen to genre-specific MP3 radio stations of the Magnatune artists, but the problem is bandwidth costs. 10 mbits will support about 100 128k radio listeners, and that's not a lot, and that's pricey.

So... I'm thinking about using p2p technology. Specifically, clicking on (say) "Trance Radio" at www.magnatune.com would give you a playlist file with 24h worth of random programming of Magnatune's Trance artists. The MP3s on the playlist would be downloaded via something like Gnutella - with www.magnatune.com always having all the files, but if a peer (ie, another radio listener) has the Mp3s, they could be downloaded from there instead. Note that this is *not* a single stream of a single mp3, but rather a playlist of individual mp3s.

In this way, the site should be able to support an unlimited number of Mp3 radio listeners. Also key, is that people would be building up an Mp3 collection as they listened to the radio, and could easily replay any songs they liked (or skip those they didn't). All this is possible *only* because we're signing artists to our own record label -- all other labels would prohibit this kind of sharing. My initial focus is on music genres that are not well represented by radio (ie, most Electronic music genres, Heavy Metal, Early Classical, World music, New Age)

So.. does anyone know if there is a player, or technology, that could be used to do this?

I've looked, but haven't see a p2p client that can take a playlist file (like a winamp file) and play the files as they download. Most p2p clients require a search/download/play workflow, and I think this needs to be a lot simpler.

I'm a competent C++ programmer, and could write something myself, or modify one of the sourceforge gnutella clients to do it.

However, this "p2p playlist" concept seems like a worthy one, that should be discussed among other programmers, so that a standard could be established that many players could enable. I'd much prefer a standard that was then applied to (at least) one p2p client per OS platform.

-john

[chipperrox]

sounds like a great idea man, good luck

[DigitalJunkie]

Have you checked out PeerCast?

http://www.peercast.org/features.php

[endersgame21]

Welcome to Zeropaid and goodluck with your site. When your site is done and ready post it on Zeropaid and I along with a few others will probably try it out.

[dr. damn]

Best of luck with the record company.

Peercast and Streamer are the only two P2P radio networks I know of at the moment. Most stations use OGG rather than MP3, as it requires less bandwidth.

[PatientSaint]

I think it's a great idea man...i've always liked webradio and i think it can bea great adveritising tool for a band or small label.

[begoodbebad]

*bump*

I've been using foobar for a while but recently tried the latest winamp and started listening to the internet radio stations. Magnatune stations are excellent, the website is great, the philosophy of the label is beyond criticism, the music is good and today I actually paid for some music! This is not something I often do, in fact it may be my first music purchase this year (though I download many CDs from ed2k). I believe this is my first ever legal and paid for music download and it's also one of the few CDs I burn that I won't be releasing on p2p. This is a label that gives the artist 50% of the revenue and only asks $8 US for a complete CD in wav or flac or aac or ogg or pretty much any way you like to get it. For the price of $8 I can download the CD/individual tracks in any of the formats as many times as I like for the next 60 days. I felt so impressed by the whole approach of this label I wanted to share the experience with people here. I know Magnatunes is familiar to quite a lot of people here and has been featured in a small way once or twice but it will be also news to others. It's nice to know that there are business people out there who want to do things the ethical way and are also succeeding.

[MushroomheadXIII]

Yeh, webradio rules, i no longer download music!~