Tag Radio Songs for Later Purchase While You Drive

I thought this was interesting and well written. Many times I've started listening to a radio show, and wanted to catch the rest of it later, but had no method for doing that. That might change, if…

Glenn is a great writer.

 

Jeff

Tag Radio Songs for Later Purchase While You Drive

by Glenn Fleishman

iTunes Tagging seemed like the ultimate in awkward technology to me when it was announced in September 2007 by Apple and iBiquity, the firm responsible for HD Radio, the only legal standard for digital AM and FM transmission in the United States. (Satellite radio is controlled by Sirius.)

I finally used the technology yesterday, and I was surprisingly impressed by it. You need the background first to understand why my mind was changed, and what the future symbiosis for broadcast radio and Internet radio might be.

Tag, You're Buying It -- The idea behind iTunes Tagging was to add tag button to radios with iPod and iPhone docks that would let you later decide to buy a song you heard. If you were listening to a radio station that was broadcasting a special tag number that uniquely identified the song, and you pressed the tag button while your device was docked, the radio would send that information over the dock. Some radios could store tags and load them on a device when it was docked subsequently, too.

Later, when you synced your iPod or iPhone with iTunes, the tagging information would be transferred into iTunes, where it shows up under a special entry in the Store section of the sidebar.

Awkward, huh? You need a radio with a dock, you have to listen to a station broadcasting tags, you must move the iPhone or iPod back and forth, and then you have to use iTunes to buy the tagged songs.

The first tabletop and portable radios came out with this feature in early 2008, and while I would occasionally see it written up, it seemed merely like a marketing idea with little impact. The list of capable devices (missing at least a few) is quite slim at hdradio.com, a site run by radio stations promoting the technology.

HD Radio, meanwhile, has been floundering. There are about 12,000 radio stations in the United States and only about 15 percent - largely public radio stations and parts of radio empires - have turned on digital broadcasts. That number hasn't grown much over the last two years, after an initial flurry of interest by stations in what is a relatively cheap upgrade, but which also requires recurring royalty fees to iBiquity. Only some percentage of those 1,500 stations use iTunes Tagging, too.

HD Radio has a lot of compromises, but when it works well and you're within the coverage area, the sound quality of AM improves from hideous to very nice, and for FM it offers a sound similar to a well-compressed MP3 or AAC file. FM also gains multiple sub-stations which have unique programming.

I won't go into the many reasons that this form of digital radio - as distinct from satellite radio in the United States and from incom...

 

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Jeff Belden