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Subject: Digital radio playlists are prohibited?!
From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 01:19:59 -0700

Anyone heard of this law before?

> Q. Can I get a playlist?
> A. We are unable to offer a playlist. The Digital Performance Right in 
> Sound Recordings Act of 1995 passed by Congress prevents us from 
> disclosing such information. The Digital Law states that if one is 
> transmitting a digital signal, song information cannot be 
> pre-announced. It is a Music Choice policy not to release a playlist of 
> upcoming or previously played songs.

Recently, MusicChoice upgraded their website with a very important 
service, as far as I'm concerned: real-time song info from their 
website. My DirecTV receiver is up on a shelf (and its display scrolls 
intermittently); and I'm surely not going to fire up my projector while 
listening to the "radio", so I'm quite happy that I can retrieve r/t 
song info with URLs like:

http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/soundsoftheseasons.asp
http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/rap.asp
http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/opera.asp
etc...

Now, if I were a more eager hacker, I'd write up little WSDL stubs for 
these event streams (they're clearly not worried about load, since their 
own web pages specify 15 sec meta-refresh) and then feed 'em through a 
content router to alert me to cool songs. Heck, cross-reference the 
service to CDDB and... :-)

RK


