Radio visualisation - now playing info

Hi, Sigurður (that was a nice test of our extended-character database setup)

Music Story sent me a press release about their service the other day. I’ve not used it, but it appears to have some interesting data within it. Looks like images might cost, though.

MusicBrainz is an excellent service – and you could use it to discover an artist’s Twitter avatar and use that. This is one artist picked entirely at random and you’ll notice her Twitter account is programmatically available. As far as I understand Twitter’s licensing, that should enable artist imagery for you without cost. It does, of course, add a ton of additional content for your now-playing service, and you ought to be using it in any case to tidy up your music databases.

I’m unaware of other similar services, but I suspect others might be over in a little while to help further.

Last.fm typically cut you off unless you are willing to sign a commercial agreement (money changing hands) with them for the use of their curated content and bandwidth etc., which is understandable. For the same reason most other artist image services have the same restrictions, they want paying. There are solutions like AMG too, which come with license fees.

As James suggests MusicBrainz is a great way of discovering all the other places artists live on the web, though I’d be careful using Twitter profile images as artists do have a tendency to occasional swap a press image for something a bit more… creative.

Essentially, you can hack together free stuff – but your results may be unpredictable. Or you can use a curated service, but you will have to pay for it.

The free last.fm service isn’t very curated either – I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen last.fm branded images going out on DAB/Radioplayer/RadioVIS now-playing graphics!

What interests me is the legalities of using images with your “now playing” information.

A while back, I can’t recall where, I was asked a question when showing someone how the Myriad playout system can pull the “CDDB” data for a disc you are “ripping”. The question being “does it get the cover art as well” (given the previous highlighting that you can attach pictures to ‘carts’ in the Myriad) – not an unreasonable question to someone used to ripping discs in something like iTunes.

The answer of course is “no it doesn’t get the artwork” – and my logical answer was that as the main reason for attaching a picture to a piece of audio in a radio playout system would be for display on a website, or similar, then this would be in effect the radio station “publishing” the picture. Therefore a deliberate decision of manually adding the picture was needed, as the station would need own the rights, or have a licence to use the picture. I assume that Apple for instance have an agreement to use album artwork in iTunes as part of their deal with record companies.

I had a bit of a look round some radio stations using album art work. I notice many stations do have “now playing” or “playlist” information with cover artwork – but these link to music stores such as iTunes or Amazon to buy the music. A brief look at the “affiliate” agreements of these companies seem to have some provisions for using cover artwork as part of the link to the store.

What I’ve not found, admittedly in a non exhaustive search, is a way to include artist art work without such a agreement with a music store. The closest I can think is pulling images from Wikipedia, but then many of them are “fair use” which only covers use on Wikipedia, not elsewhere.

I would appreciate any feedback on this topic.

To do it properly you need to clear images with copyright owners. From experience, most record co’s will provide cleared images for stated purposes.

The next best is iTunes/Amazon (who provide mp3 clips and image artwork) in exchange for linking through to their stores.