Funferal

German radio station with innovative approach

Interesting piece in Wired about a German radio station that’s planning on integrating music downloads and streaming over mobile phones into its business plan:

The first step has seen MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, abandon on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message.

This is a commercial – if niche – offering, so funding the station from downloads etc. makes sense. For non-commercial stations, however, this would obviously not be an appropriate model. However, they do touch on one sensitive topic which affects both, which is the issue of music licensing and gaining the approval of copyright holders for various types of provision. It would be difficult, for instance, to get a license for the provision of music over bittorrent unless some form of DRM was included.