WMBR, MIT's community radio station, regularly receives promotional music from record companies to play and promote on the air, but due to the size of the music library and the large amount of incoming music, not all of this music will either get played or be able to be kept at the station. To deal with the incoming music, WMBR has a number of music directors whose job is threefold:
These tasks can be particularly time-consuming, especially for pop/rock directors who receive the most incoming music. Further complicating matters, record companies have begun to switch to digital downloads as a way to distribute promotional music. As WMBR currently does not have a digital music playback system, there is no easy way to get these promotional tracks played at all without burning the tracks onto a CD and then filing the burned CD, which is a time-consuming process. Although WMBR has strong enough relationships with record companies to be able to obtain physical copies of releases that some stations do not, it is unlikely that this arrangement will last.
Note: Names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Don is a genre music director at WMBR responsible for Americana/Roots music. He receives about 5-20 CDs every week from various record companies and handles filing them in the "new" racks. Don also receives a lot of digital media, but most of it gets thrown out; he only ever burns digital media to CD if it especially high priority. In these cases, he previews the music before burning it. Don also regularly "flushes" albums that receive less airplay (relegating them to a final last-ditch shelf for station member review), due to physical space constraints in the record library. About 10% of the flushed CDs come back to the regular shelves the rest get thrown out.
When Don burns a CD of digital media, he has to manually insert the liner sheet (e.g. track listing). Sometimes the music files will come named generically "Track 1, Track 2, etc." and so he has to hunt down track names. When asked what he would want to see from a digital system, Don mentioned that it might be useful to preserve some of the aesthetic and non-critical parts of the media (e.g. album cover, album background). He also noted that, at the moment, multiple physical copies need to be made for an album that fits into multiple categories, with each copy filed into their respective genre shelves.
The decision on how to categorize an album is decided upon by the genre music director. The process of getting digital music into physical format involves downloading the music, burning it to disc, printing out the track list, and putting it on the new release rack. For Don in particular, he also writes an entry into the new music logbook to prevent duplicate CDs from being filed. CDs are often flagged with physical stickers (e.g. a flush sticker denoting this CD should get flushed soon). Don likes to play music from his home computer, so remote access is a plus for him. Don would also like to store the highest quality music possible, preferably lossless format like FLAC.
Lessons Learned:
Bram, the genre music director for Folk music, is the only genre music director we talked to that completely ignores digital submissions (he deletes everything). Bram feels if there's a system that he could learn easily, he might use incoming digital music. Bram is low-tech and uncomfortable with technology. Bram was part of a group interview and often did not respond to the questions we asked the group.
Lessons Learned:
Because digital music currently needs to first be burned to CDs before being added to the playback library, Judy, the world music genre director finds it a hassle and rarely does so in practice. Because of the reports she submits to the College Media Journal (CMJ), a national reporting system which reports the top albums, record labels will often send free music to the station (both physical CDs and digitally through e-mail). CMJ reporting involves going through the physical library and counting the marks made on the labels of each album.
Judy either deletes e-mailed music or forwards them to station volunteers who are willing to burn them ("elves"), but she generally believes that dealing with digital media is time-consuming and frustrating. She receives music from an eclectic range of record labels, and often times the smaller independent ones can't afford the costs of sending physical albums. Like the other genre music directors, Judy noted that the labels on each album show the dates the album was played on, as well as the specific track and DJ that played it. However, Judy feels it's often a "hurricane" in the studio, and there is very little physical space for her to work with, so she wants ease and simplicity.
Sometimes Judy goes out and purchases music for the station herself. She wonders if the free MP3s that Amazon offers could be useful. Judy did express concern about the nature of the project, but mostly due to the fact that it might not be supported long term. Judy is concerned that with a system in place she'll still have to manually find the album art and track list, which is time consuming. She feels she could use an assistant to help her e-mails. Ultimately, however, her biggest concern, like other music directors, is letting the listeners of the radio station know what new music is being played.
Lessons Learned:
Jocelyn is loud rock music director at WMBR. She plays anything from punk rock to metal to garage rock. When she receives music in her e-mail, she'll only download it if she knows it will be something she likes. She's quite lazy in this respect, and often deletes the e-mails with music. She receives about 5-20 CDs per week, and wonders where all of the fun information (like cover art and backstory) will go following WMBR's transition to a digital playback system. Jocelyn thinks the essentials that music directors need to capture are album label, year, track list, artist. Like Judy, one of Jocelyn's duties is to perform the CMJ reporting for which albums were played most (on a bi-weekly basis).
Jocelyn feels that she receives simply too many e-mails and as a result ignores the majority of them. She wonders if a system which only skips the CD burning step will be of much use, since all of the other information (like track names) still needs to be input manually. Jocelyn feels that it would be great if she knew the music that was coming into a digital playback system, but didn't have to actually deal with it (e.g. the work of inputting information). She often gets triplicate e-mails since artists will send them to WMBR@wmbr.org, Loud@wmbr.org, and Jocelyn@wmbr.org. Jocelyn also uses the logbook when receiving physical CDs to avoid filing duplicate albums in the physical library. She receives approximately 15-20 e-mails with music per day.
Lessons Learned:
Lana is the electronica (also known as RPM) genre music director at WMBR. Unlike Jocelyn and Judy, Lana makes use of play counts tabulated by an assistant whom she referred to as "counting monkey" when reporting plays to CMJ. Lana noted that she sometimes make CDs out of music she receives digitally, in which case she has to do all the printing herself (e.g. album art, track list). In addition, when burning CDs, Lana needs to label them appropriately. She noted that labels are placed on the CD spine so they're visible at a glance (e.g. a black stripe for electronic music, a green dot for 60s oriented music, a yellow dot for heavy metal, a red dot for noise). Although Lana generally believes that nine out of ten digital downloads she receives are worth burning to CD and putting in the library, about one out of twenty times does she actually do so.
Lana noted that she receives a pretty even split between physical and digital music. She receives e-mails with a large number of albums from a record label, with some albums that say "digital-only". These are the ones Lana must manually download, Google the cover art for, and print out the various elements required in constructing the physical copy of the album. Lana would like to be able to "dropbox" the music she receives in her e-mail, at which point assistants ("elves") could come sift through and input the music into the system. The assistant that she has helps her with this occasionally and also helps with the station's digital additions.
When we observed her downloading an album, she ran into some issues, like unsuccessfully opening the zip file directly and downloading the file and not knowing how to navigate to the download location. She says that some assistants have made mistakes and forgotten things like writing down the release date or song titles sometimes when burning CDs.
Lessons Learned:
Calvin is the Lead Music Director of WMBR, and he has dealt with nearly all of the incoming music (physical CDs and digital media) at some point during his job. He receives an extremely large amount of digital media in his email inbox everyday (high throughput). He usually browses through the list of digital tracks, picks out the artists he knows for sure are popular at WMBR and burns the tracks onto CDs. However, currently this process is time-consuming and he only does this very rarely. Most of the time, for advance tracks, demos, and singles, he doesn't even bother looking at them and deletes them right away. Calvin notes that this is unfortunate because WMBR takes pride in the fact that it is unique in that there are no rules dictating what DJs should play. Furthermore, WMBR plays a lot of music from local bands and does not simply play everything that is on the CMJ list. However, Calvin noted that local music bands simply cannot afford to send out physical CDs. Calvin estimates that if there is a way to easily file digital media, there will be at least a 25% increase in the amount of music tracks they file for playback over the air.
In terms of importing digital media, Calvin is concerned about the time-sensitivity of this process because most of the downloadable tracks are only available for a temporary period of time, automatically expiring after a while. Calvin envisions that such a problem can only be mitigated if the importing process was straightforward and quick (Calvin gave an example of just sending the zip file to the database and the tracks get automatically filed). In addition, Calvin is worried about the security of such an import process. In order to keep up good relations with record companies and preventing copyright violations, Calvin believes that it will be necessary to prevent the links from being disseminated without his consent. With physical copies, it is not hard to track who has accessed the CDs, but with digital media there is no paper trail at all.
Finally, and most importantly, Calvin emphasizes the importance of keeping up the relationships between the station and record labels. He spends a lot of his time talking to and communicating with companies about how much their artists' songs are getting played, therefore play count information is crucial for him.
Lessons Learned:
Ken is a helper around WMBR station, and mainly acts as an assistant to the Lead Music Director, Calvin. In our interview, he emphasized the importance of "schmoozing" with the record companies and keeping them happy so that they will send more music to the station. He is currently in charge of "counting" the plays of music tracks for most Pop/Rock genres and several other less mainstream genres. He walked us through the entire process of his part of the job:
Lessons Learned:
From the above interviews, we were able to determine the existence of two distinct user classes:
Music Directors:
Elves:
From the above descriptions, we identified several key tasks which should be supported by our system:
Subtasks:
Preconditions:
Time constraints:
Frequency of use:
Subtasks:
Preconditions:
Time constraints:
Frequency of use:
Subtasks:
Preconditions:
Time constraints:
Frequency of use: