Ken Freedman of WFMU at Berkman Center
Ken Freedman of WFMU visited the Berkman Center today for a tuesday luncheon. Ken is General Manager of WFMU, which Berkman writes is “one of the earliest and most aggressive users of web-based radio and social technologies.”
Here are some of my notes from today’s talk, which as David Weinberger adds, “I’m typing quickly, summarizing, missing points, getting stuff wrong…But the podcast will be available on the Berkman media site.”
WFMU’s website is around 20,000 pages. The playlist has become a giant bank of metadata. Sometimes when you search for an artist the first page that comes up is a WMFU playlist. They have experimented with a number of web-based forums including discussion boars. Two and half years ago they started a blog and have learned a lot from the blog in relation to their work on the discussion boards.
WFMU is also working on an open media library project - an internal mp3 project with around 120,000 mp3 files. They do not allow DJs to access these files from home, they’re just meant for airplay. They do make the mp3 library available for browsing but not accessible by people outside the building.
They have 23 active podcasts on the site. They offer station-wide podcasts and/or individual podcasts. The “365 days project” is focusing on orphaned works.
In 2002, Ken participated in a national federation of community broadcasters meeting with industry execs to figure out what the non-commercial streaming rates would be. He realized that there was not a lot of meeting ground between SoundExchange and non-profit broadcasters.
They’ve been focusing on all of the stuff that the RIAA can not touch. They’ve asked artists to wave certain rights in order to gaurantee the streaming of their songs on the website. They immediately got 400 signed waivers within a week or two.
They worked to set-up an online library of free material called the free music archive. Thanks to payola, they got a grant from the NY State Music Fund to do a number of things including being able to record and document live recordings to put in the free music archive.
They want the free music archive to not only to be a free music library but also a growing social community around cleared materials licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike licenses. The purpose is so that it grows under derivative works, utilizing cleared works in the library.
The content would be available as streaming media as well as downloadable material. They want to have certain options available for different people. Users might be able to put together their own streams, either file by file or downloading them or by choosing among a number of different streaming options.
The public could use the site without having to register without having an account at all because they would like people to get involved in creating a community around the site.
Ethan Zuckerman asked Ken how the the recent pricing decision on streaming media would impact WFMU’s ability to provide streams to their audience. Ken said that the decision made it clear to WFMU they that might have to stop streaming beyond the cap.
Dean and I hope that the Open Media Library project might be able to serve as a platform for WFMU to publish and share the content on their free music archive. We just have to build it first.
Berkman Center, Community Media, Digital Libraries, Independent Music, Independent Radio, Open Access, Open Source
