Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

Preface to the Preface: this blog is confusing.  The “cloud” concept brings up two, independent complains from yours truly.  The first one, about how KLIK is considered to be similar to Pandora or GrooveShark (when we’re as dissimilar from these services as you can get) is addressed as “Complaint #1: KLIK is not Pandora.”  The other one, about how cloud music is streamed at a lower-than-acceptable-quality-for-broadcast, is addressed as “Complaint #2: Cloud music sounds awful.”  I should probably also expressly state that these opinions are mine and mine alone and do not reflect on the organization.  At all.  However, these issues affect the day-to-day life of the organization, both as a DJ/volunteer and as us in the “management” sector that are trying to keep KLIK sounding halfway decent…hence why I am posting it here to begin with.

Preface: “The Cloud” is just a marketing ploy.  Read on for an anger-infused rant. Anyone who’s anyone has heard of “the cloud.”  Oh, look, you can put your music in the “cloud” (Amazon), or OMG cloud storage (yes, I’m looking at you again, Amazon).  I’m going to give up all hope on technology the day someone like Gmail promotes putting mail in the cloud.  (Ugh.)  Even worse would be “host your web site in the cloud!”   Point being, if you were any of my 3 roommates last semester, you know how stupid I believe people to be.  The cloud is nothing new…it’s the Internet and everything on it.  Period.  E-mail?  It’s already in the cloud!  Your music?  It was in the cloud, and then you downloaded it from the cloud.  This web site?  Also in the cloud! And if your small business has ever tried hosting your web site on your DSL connection — please speak with us immediately.

That was a bit of an anger-infused rant on the Internet and how people don’t understand it.  Which brings us to my next point: what does this have to do with KLIK and why is this post titled “KLIK vs The Cloud?”  Readers who have learned anything from my last post should now understand that KLIK is, in fact, in the cloud.  We even posted a joking tweet about how we were going to change our slogan to “KLIK Radio: it’s radio for the cloud.”

Complaint #1: KLIK is not Pandora. Put briefly, my gripe is not with cloud storage, cloud mail, cloud web hosting, or anything like that.  It’s with something that barely exists — cloud music services.  Many people try to lump fundamentally different businesses, like Pandora and Grooveshark, under one umbrella label: “Internet music services” or something of the sort.  I’m almost positive the record labels are notorious for doing this.  Truth be told, Pandora and Grooveshark are very, very different technologies that serve very different purposes.

Pandora is excellent for listening to music that you want to hear based on your preferences.  This music might be old, new, or anywhere in between — but let’s face it – Pandora controls the music.  Not you.  Should Pandora’s source code break, who knows what you’d start hearing.

GrooveShark, on the other hand, lets you search for songs and play them.  Period.  It’s like Google for music.  It plays what you want, when you want.  Very unlike Pandora.

Then there are things like KLIK.  Sure, listeners can call in, make requests, etc., but we’re more like a regular AM/FM radio station put on Internet radio.  We have DJ’s, we have a phone number, we have lot’s of things that other, smaller Internet radio station’s don’t have.  We’re not like GrooveShark or Pandora.  Yet we’re still clumped in with them, and are expected to compete with them.  How can something like us compete with something like GrooveShark, where you can choose whatever you want to hear, whenever you want to hear it?

The solution: GrooveShark doesn’t have hilarious people running the music! That’s where KLIK is special.  We actually have DJ’s (local ones) that actually take the time and effort to produce shows for people to hear.  Some of them revolve around their style of music and attract small audiences, but many of them are just people talking about what’s happening in their lives, and those shows have tons of listeners.  So…you tell us…what are we, really?  An Internet music service?  Or something more?  Or less?  Comment about it or tweet at us.

Complaint #2: YouTube isn’t a music provider. But our volunteers seem to think it is.  DJ’s at KLIK are notorious for playing YouTube videos on their shows instead of using higher quality music they’ve purchased from iTunes or Amazon MP3.  YOUTUBE VIDEOS SOUND AWFUL, PEOPLE! (Sorry, that was for the volunteers to see).  Anyways, when you do the math, you see that the audio quality in a non-HD YouTube video has to sacrifice something, whether it’s bitrate, channel count, or frequency/depth, something is going to get lost.  Furthermore, many YouTube “song videos” are uploaded by idiots who try to record the song from their sound card and upload it to YouTube.  This creates all kinds of artifacts and issues with lossy compression, so it sounds even worse than the originally compressed version.  (Confused?  See the Wikipedia concept of “Garbage in, garbage out.”)

To tie complaint #1 to #2, shouldn’t YouTube and GrooveShark be considered similar services?  You can play whatever song you want on YouTube (with a few exceptions), just like GrooveShark.  The only difference is YouTube adds video to it.  And, of course, YouTube contains many, many videos that have nothing to do with music.  (Kind of like Pandora: can I get some music with those advertisements, Pandora?)

To the point — free services like YouTube and GrooveShark are great for personal listening, but sound terrible for broadcasting on KLIK or audiophiles for a myriad of reasons.  (Again, see “garbage in, garbage out.”)  We’re still trying to figure out a way to combat this, without blocking YouTube, without much success.  Comments or suggestions?  Comment or tweet at us.

In conclusion – the cloud is both a beautiful and awful thing.  We wouldn’t exist without it, but our non-existent station would sound a lot better without it.  Also, it’s just a marketing ploy, no need to bring that up again.