Meta-radio
October 2nd, 2007 by David Weinberger
James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, “unlick the Rock,:” which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump’in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it’ll play that. If there’s an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it’ll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.
Interesting. It’d at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it’d be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data….
I proposed something very like this a while back. Several others interested in the idea build XSPF out of it:
http://xspf.org/
+1 on what Kevin says … that is one of the goals of XSPF (pronounced ‘spiff’). I’ve written a rudimentary version of XspfResolver which will take a playlist in XSPF format, normalize the artists, albums and tracks using MusicBrainz (a wiki-like music metadata source), and then resolve the tracks against various music catalogs (Napster for instance).
You can check out the prototype at PlaylistResolver.com