Music stats for October 2009

October showed a lot of gains for KONA Radio in listenership levels. After a deep drop in August we’ve rebounded from 11,000 to over 15,000 Total Listener Hours. Those late summer doldrums are far behind us now and it looks like the numbers will keep up for the foreseeable future. Below are the latest stats from the Shoutcast.com stats page. I’ve included other SL stations for comparison. Not all are represented here as they choose not to be listed, use Icecast, or otherwise I’ve never heard about.

SHOUTCAST TTSL REPORT
Report Date: Sun Nov  1 04:00:01 2009

30 day rolling total, taken from 30 days of data

TOTAL      39294.25
HOURS

I would imagine the stations I could not find would easily total another 10-15,000 hours a month.

Now contrast this to the EVE-ONLINE community which has an active community of 300,000 accounts and a typical concurrency of 40,000 players. EVE-ONLINE is the premiere radio station for the community boasting over 2 dozen DJs and a primary music stream.

EVE-ONLINE community station
#1148      45,763            44,176            14,829            EVE-Radio.com: EVE Radio Jukebox
#3643      8,945.5           12,402            5,946             EVE-Radio.com: Wiggles on EvE-Radio
#5368      4,722.75          7,222             2,586             EVE-Radio.com: Helix
#5381      4,708.5           15,979            5,317             EVE-Radio.com: Miss Emopants
#5597      4,400.75          8,742             2,859             EVE-Radio.com: DJ Anarkros
#6467      3,455.75          4,425             1,847             EVE-Radio.com: Whitey Towers
#6777      3,167.75          6,856             2,382             EVE-Radio.com: EVE-Radio: DJ Moz
#6884      3,059.25          5,782             2,121             EVE-Radio.com: GRN – Eve-Radio LIVE 2
#6928      3,031             8,713             3,062             EVE-Radio.com: WorldEater
#7398      2,681.25          11,237            3,595             EVE-Radio.com: DJ Sam
#7782      2,431.75          6,937             2,342             EVE-Radio.com: DJ LMP zwntana! (live 1)
#8793      1,914.75          4,010             1,433             EVE-Radio.com: eve-radio | Live 2
#8817      1,906.5           3,697             1,318             EVE-Radio.com: DJ WarMaster
#9005      1,823.25          3,538             1,200             EVE-Radio.com: EVE Radio
#9122      1,784.5           9,208             3,055             EVE-Radio.com: DJ Erkenfresh Live on EVE Radio
#9141      1,776.5           3,419             1,216             EVE-Radio.com: DJ Dunewolf
#9184      1,762             3,191             1,114             EVE-Radio.com: EvE Radio LIVE 1:
#9234      1,745.25          3,844             1,184             EVE-Radio.com: The Adragon Technochrist Show
#9599      1,615.25          6,550             1,985             EVE-Radio.com: EVE-Radio.com
#10136     1,453.25          3,372             1,118             EVE-Radio.com: DJ Kraven’s Uplink
#10324     1,395.75          3,757             1,716             EVE-Radio.com: Minerdave-a-saur on Eve-Radio
#10383     1,382             2,626             1,025             EVE-Radio.com: EVE-Radio Live 1: DJ Spuffy
#10426     1,374             3,042             1,014             EVE-Radio.com: Forty-Two
#10863     1,274             0                 0                 EVE-Radio.com: DJ MrNix
#10947     1,249.25          0                 0                 EVE-Radio.com: Eve Radio 2 – DJ Hemlock
#11399     1,155             7,804             2,662             EVE-Radio.com: LamsterBunny
#11763     1,092.5 0                 0                 EVE-Radio.com: JusJ4ck

TOTAL HOURS =   111,071

Perhaps it’s the fact the Eve community is closer knit and pursuing the same goals and interest that allows this one station to do so well in a smaller population than SL? Similar attempts at a Grid wide music service has failed (Phreak, Cyrscomm) as they simply failed to gain traction and could not support themselves. My station gets the majority of it’s listeners from iTunes. While SL’s population is very diverse you’d think the stations here would do much better. I think it’s a matter of exposure or a lack there of. Getting the word out about your station isn’t easy as the media in SL doesn’t reach masses, only select portions of the population. I can’t really complain much as my station does support itself but I’ll take listeners where I can get them

DJ Ravishal Bentham at the Nantucket Barn Halloween Party

Join us for two great hours of spooky, scary and fun music as I rock the barn in Nantucket from 6-8pm SLT on 29 October 2009. Wear a costume and please, no scripted weapons or nudity.

For a larger pic: http://www.zooomr.com/z/photos/zoom/8421623/size-16/

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nantucket/26/178/22

If you can’t make it in world then please tune us in via the website at http://www.konastream.com or via iTunes in the Retro 70s category in Radio.

I don’t know how this commercial ever slipped passed by me.

It’s so great seeing the most popular, accomplished golfer have a bit of fun with the sport and a classic comedy. Way to go Tiger Woods!

On an unrelated note an FYI for you KONA Radio fans. iTunes has reshuffled its stations listings with the new 9.0 client. In the new client you can find KONA Radio in the Retro 70s section.

In response to The Guild’s avatar video SL’s very own Pooky Amsterdam of The First Question & The Dating Casino has starred in her own video reply. First is the Guild’s video for those who have not seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU

And this is Pooky’s response. She can sing too!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S6gMw0X4gg

Sunday Listener Party at the KONA Radio Studios

Where? : KONA Radio Studios SLURL http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nowhereville/125/56/23

When? : Every Sunday night from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM SLT

We have a FULL PLATE tonight on KONA Radio’s Sunday Listener party. I’ll be playing a full weeks worth of programming from The Onion and Time Warp Radio. That, along with the 100 Word Stories, 3 episodes of Today in Music History, and several new tunes from artist like Van Halen, the Four Tops and Status Quo will mean the program will run for about 90 or so minutes tonight.  No worries about running late as we have a LOT of content!

Come by and see the famous Italian leg lamp too!

Listening to KONA Radio on the iPhone

I’ve recently acquired an iPhone 3GS and all I can say is “WOW”. It is an awesome piece of technology that can handle multimedia just fine thank you! Naturally I got the unlimited data plan and began taking it through it’s paces with streaming music. There are several fine choices for the right price of “Free”.

FStream: Supports a wide range of formats such as MP3, Ogg, AAC, & WMA. It also can search a few directories for music such as Shoutcast and iTunes. You can find KONA Radio under the Golden Oldies section. FStream is especially good for mobile listening as you can increase the buffer size and number of attempted reconnects if the connection drops. Go here for more details APPSAFARI.com.

FREE

Shoutcast: An app from AOL/Shoutcast that allows you to search the shoutcast listings. Very basic. Download it from here: SHOUTCAST on iPhone

FREE

WWW.MOODIO.FM : A rather innovative solution to a common problem. Many stations broadcast in a format that your media player cannot receive or the bit rate is too high. This is a website that will receive the station for you and trans code it to a lower bit rate AAC formatted stream. The stream is then played over your Safari browser on the iPhone so you can collapse the browser and run other non audio based apps. If the station you want is not listed you can add it your self or request that it be added for you. To add KONA to your mobile page list just search for KONA Radio.

to quote their FAQ:

FREE

If you’re on Windows Mobile or Palm OS you can listen in via a wide variety of  media players such as Pocket Tunes. The Palm Pre will stream MP3 shoutcast with it’s native media player.

For your parcel in SL use this URL:     http://gold.slserver.com:8030

JUNE Ratings for selected Second Life based* radio stations.

SHOUTCAST TTSL REPORT
Report Date: Wed Jul  1 04:00:02 2009
** Top stations by TTSL
30 day rolling total, taken from 30 days of data
POS            TTSL              TUNE-INS    5-MIN-TUNE-INS    STATION
=======================================================================
#2634      14,044            31,426            7,527            KONA Radio – Qlty Music 60s 70s & 80s
#3408      9,372.75          36,420       10,247           SLR2 – Second Life Radio
#6042      3,659.5           18,198            5,915             Live Radio SL
#8164      2,035.25          7,361             2,990             K-TOX Toxian City Radio Second Life – Industrial and More!
#11332     1,077.5           4,244             1,548             K-TOX Toxian City Radio Second Life  – Industrial And more!
#7214      2,587.5           6,330              2,569             BZoO WorldWide Radio
#7985      2,127.25          15,268           5,807            Reggae Romance….100% Vibes, Soca, Dancehall, Roots, Second Life
#10805     1,176.75          8,225             1,799             **T1 Radio **

* Stations that maintain a nominal presence and exhibit some degree of social interaction in the virtual world of Second Life.

Kicking ass and taking names! KONA is sitting on top with the nearest station being the German SLR2 station. A very distant 3rd is the Live Radio SL featuring SL artist exclusively. Closely following is K-TOX based in the Midian sims and favored by many post apocalypse RPers. Next is BzoO Radio described as “HOT RoCK DaNCe Radio ~ DOiN da House Blues Rock Funk Club Dance!!”  Filling out the bottom is Reggae Romance and **T1 Radio**.

So, as a child of the 70s I had to have a cool Cylon Centurion avatar. Add to that a memory of a song by Lipps Inc. circa 1980. You get this :

Shadows, a first look for me

Having recently acquired a new video card I decided to check out the unsupported shadows feature that’s appeared in the latest releases of the SL Viewer. The results weren’t too bad. The resulting frame rate for me was 8 FPS, somewhat usable for general SL use. The below video is the results I got.

youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Hd6rX8SnI

You’ll notice that alpha textured items tend to flicker in and out and that the avatar shadow tends to degrade into point shadows.  Below are a few screen captures. The built in picture utility doesn’t work and fails to capture the shadows. A Print Screen or external utility will capture them though.

In the above pic notice how dark it is at noon below Crap’s Clock Tree. Also notice how the eyes tend to glow/shine a bit too.

The Palm trees cast a shadow over the plane in the late afternoon. The shadows look weird at high noon as the prims used for the palm leaves  are vertically oriented and cast almost no shadow when the sun is overhead.

Midnight is really dark now, even with the moonshine. GoSpeed’s fedora shades her face making it hard to distinguish her features.

I can imagine that many improvements and tweaks will occur before the shadow features are officially incorporated into the SL viewer.

Wow, what can I say. Snow Globe works really, really fast. I’ve used it for a week now and it is my default viewer now. A lot of other bloggers have written about it, notably Gwyneth Llewelyn. I’m not sure if she’ll bring this up in a future post but it occurred to me that the potential implementation of private/personal asset servers opens up a whole new world for moving assets between grids. The biggest issue with going to an opengrid is that you have to start fresh with basically no inventory and very few options to outfit your avatar. Imagine of you will that your avatar’s shape, skin, prim hair, Animation Overriders and clothing were hosted on a server outside of the SL main grid. You could teleport between the Main grid, OSgrid, Hypergrid, OpenLife grid, and essentially be the same avatar in appearance in all of them.

Of course this presents a wide range of issues and challenges. Being able to protect the intellectual rights of the creators would be a problem to tackle. Perhaps some sort of encryption or watermarking would be called for. I can also imagine a whole new class of merchant that sells their products outside of SL. If such a scheme were to take off I can also imagine SL avatars imported into other virtual worlds. Just so long as the game/world engine could faithfully render the correct amount of polygons and animate it in a decent manner I can see it taking off. Picture this: Hamlet Au conducting an interview with his trademarked white suit in World of Warcraft or Crap Mariner terrorizing the peaceful resorts of Blue Mars.

I’ve just scratched the surface here and I am sure others can take these ideas further. The Metaverse will potentially get much bigger if it goes in this direction. Perhaps our avatars will not have to die if our current worlds fade away.

http://gospeedracer.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/virtually-forever/

I saw something today that literally tore my heart to pieces and made me cry out loud. Like many of you I am following the events in Iran closely. A revolution 30 years ago toppled a despised ruler who tried to force secularism down the throats of the Iranians. Fast forward to today and another revolution is trying to build up speed to topple an oppressive regime using fear and religion to keep people in line and obedient. Whereas the previous regime used secret police to do their dirty work the current rulers use plain clothes militia (Basiji) that are really no better than armed thugs. With the power granted to them by their weapons and tacit approval by the government they terrorize and intimidate anyone that stands out and presents a threat.  On 20 June a 26 year old Iranian woman named Neda Agha Soltan was on the street with her music teacher watching the demonstrations when  a sniper shot her in the chest with a high power weapon. In less than 2 minutes she died from her traumatic injuries, nothing could have saved her. This is a video of her last moments. Watch it. This is what the enemy of freedom does to it’s enemies. If you turn your back it will come for you and your loved ones. This lovely woman was some body’s daughter. She could represent anyone’s daughter, sister, or wife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlehNLfk90c

If you can do something, do it! If not, then talk about it, share it. Tell your president this should not stand.

When you look at this video her eyes look at the camera phone at first. She is looking at all of us.