Music downloads are now very cheap and easily obtainable. You could be working with the latest music immediately, it takes just a couple of minutes to download.
Downloading music from Amazon Music or from iTunes (Apple Music) is totally legal.
The best sources of music downloads for use in radio are these below. Click on any for details.
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Full details telling you what you need, how to assemble everything, how much should you pay and how to launch.
Where do you get the bandwidth to broadcast, which system should you use and how do you promote your radio station?
To get this information on a seminar or course would cost about $1,500. In a hard back book the cost is £48, or you can download it today, onto your computer, tablet or any iPhone and red all 77,000 words straight away.
When broadcasting began (a hundred years ago) musicians would assemble in the studios and all gather around one microphone. This eventually grew with small orchestras performing in the studio. Any recorded music was played in acousticaly, with the gramophones being wheeled (they were pretty large and trolley mounted) up to the microphone. Fidelity was not the most important consideration, and the situation was not improved until 1928 when the first electrical pickups were introduced. These too were of poor quality until the mid 1930s.
In recent decades high quality pickups were developed and many will maintain that vinyl grooves give the best quality.
For a few years in the eighties and nineties the manufacturers of MINI DISC tried to have their system become the chosen platform for playback.
Moving parts however were rapidly on the demise and the expansion of the HARD DISC market around the turn of the millenium saw larger and faster HD units become available offering first tens the hundreds of Gigabtytes storage spacve, and then Terabytes. These made it possible to store entire music libraries for radio stations on just one Hard Drive.
Over the last couple of years the Hard Drive has started to become replaced by SSD - Solid State Drives, or 'flash drives' as they are often called. This removes finally the mechanical movement aspect of music storage - instead of a rapidly spinning platter of magnetic discs as storage, the SSD is simply a network of chips which store the audio. Their expansion in size tgracked that of HD, but more paidly and the costs have also fallen.
A 2.5" SSD is the standard form factor for laptops though, with the addition of a bay adapter, they can also be used in desktop PCs. These are now available from a variety of suppliers at very cheap prices, under £100 for the ones that can also be used inside laptop computers. The really large ones are up to 50GB incapacity and cost around £7,000, but the cost is plummeting monthly.
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Launch and operate your own radio station
This books tells you
all you need to know
It's very important where radio stations source their music content. Simple MP3s are often poor quality, and once low -res MP3s hit processing, they are degraded even further. Apple's iTunes system and then iPods (both launched in 2001) have made good quality music downloads easy to accomplish and totally legal. Record companies initially resisted downloading and tried all sorts to prevent piracy. They soon realised that the genie was firmly 'out of the bottle' and, after misguided attempts to have ISPs report people for sharing audio, the record companies very soon began to sell downloads themselves for less than $1 a track. Most record companies now sell digital downloads of music as full albums or as single tracks.
There are many sources now for music downloads but these two are by far the best ones, giving the widest range of music and at the best quality; Amazon Prime and Apple iTunes
Radio stations should ALWAYS use the very best, pristine quality recordings. Many listeners notice every scratch, click and pop.
(Latest Albums & Singles)
Apple Music (iTunes) also has a vast library of music, including all the Beatles' catalogue and many items at very reduced prices. Its 100% legal to download any tracks for broadcast, and you get the very best quality.
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When broadcasting began (a hundred years ago) musicians would assemble in the studios and all gather around one microphone. This eventually grew with small orchestras performing in the studio. Any recorded music was played in acousticaly, with the gramophones being wheeled (they were pretty large and trolley mounted) up to the microphone. Fidelity was not the most important consideration, and the situation was not improved until 1928 when the first electrical pickups were introduced. These too were of poor quality until the mid 1930s.
Since high quality pickups were developed, vinyl grooves have offered the best quality.