KaJaMi - GR1 - Analysis

Group members

• Ian Jacobi (pipian)
• Dominic Kao (dkao)
• Daniela Miao (dmiao)

Problem statement

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:

1. They receive and record incoming music and file it in the “new” section of the library.
2. They act as a point of contact with the recording industry by submitting information about top played tracks to CMJ (the College Music Journal) and the record companies.
3. They decide whether to file received music in the library or “flush it” from the library.

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.

Observations & Interviews.

Note: Names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Music Directors

1. Don:

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:

• The entire playback library is physical
• Space constraints force a lot of "flushing" of CDs
• May be helpful to keep non-critical parts of albums (e.g. album art, digital liner notes)
• Music that ends up in multiple categories has to be physically duplicated
• A logbook which he writes in is the safeguard against filing the same CD twice
• Remote access is a plus

2. Bram (Folk):

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:

• Some directors completely ignore incoming digital music
• Learnability is a particular focus for some genre music directors

3. Judy (World):

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:

• CMJ reporting involves looking at each physical album and counting the plays on the label
• Efficiency is key to handling digital media, as the current system is extremely inefficient
• Finding album art and inputting track list is tedious
• Music directors want DJs to be aware of which tracks are new

4. Jocelyn (Loud Rock):

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:

• Some music directors are unlikely to do anything that requires substantial manual work
• Music directors don't like to deal with e-mails
• Music directors wants to be aware of new music while delegating input to system/others

5. Lana (Electronica):

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:

• Some music directors receive a lot of great music digitally, but the overhead of getting it into the library is too high
• Wants to control what music makes it into the system, but wants an assistant to do the rest
• The process of getting digital music into the physical library is error-prone

6. Calvin (Lead Music Director):

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:

• On a high-level, maintaining the relationship with record companies via showing the play counts for music tracks is crucial
• Transitioning gracefully from the now all-physical-disks process to all-digital-media (don't want to double the amount of work for music directors)
• An efficient way is needed to download digital media (or zip file) directly into the library
• The download channel must be secured from potential abusers that may cause copyright issues
• Trusted volunteers should be allowed to come into the system, rip CDs for 2-3 hours, then automatically log that the CDs have been ripped

Elves

1. Ken (Assistant to the Lead Music Director):

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:

1. WMBR currently receives music through 2 channels: CDs (mail) and digital media (email). Every week Ken manually sorts through all the mail and places CDs into different genres by placing color-coded stickers on them. At the same time, he places a label on the disk cover for DJs to mark down what track they have played on air, and the date they played that track. 
2. All new CDs filed are entered into a log book manually or through an Excel spreadsheet. Many music directors use this log book to check what the new releases are.
3. Not all DJs track their plays regularly on the CD label, so as a secondary source Ken uses Track Blaster (another system for logging the playlist for every show), but even that is not enough sometimes, as not all DJs are methodical about using Track Blaster.
4. Every 2 weeks, Ken will take all the new release CDs and tally all the play counts into a huge Excel spreadsheet. This is a time-consuming and tedious process.
5. This spreadsheet is then sent to all music directors, where they will use the count to report to CMJ.
6. After 3 months, Ken cleans the CDs under "new releases", permanently filing the ones with frequent plays and flushing the unpopular ones.

Lessons Learned:

• The system must keep track of the play counts accurately (DJs playing tracks on their own time versus playing tracks on air - Ken only cares about the air plays, e.g. if at least 95% of the song is played)
• There should be an automatic way to extract the play counts with dates played, track name, album name, and artist name into a spreadsheet
• New releases should be tagged and displayed prominently, but the tag should be removed after 3 months
• A search system is needed with multiple condition specifications (e.g. "Show me all the new release tracks that have been played in the past week")
• The dates tracks were filed should be logged, and tracks can fit into multiple genres
• The system should be able to prevent duplicate albums from being filed

User Classes

From the above interviews, we were able to determine the existence of two distinct user classes:

Music Directors:

• Record incoming digital and physical music and file it in the library
  • Have a wide-range of throughput (anywhere from 5 CDs and a dozen digital downloads a week to well over 70 CDs per week)
• Solely responsible for determining whether digital media should be "kept"/burned
• May burn noteworthy digital media to CD to file it in the library
• Generally responsible for reporting plays to CMJ and the record companies (as primary point of contact for the latter)
• Sometimes responsible for counting plays on their own and selecting discs to be "flushed"
• Vary in which of the above tasks they do
  • Some delegate burning, filing, counting to "elves"
  • Some don't burn digital media
  • Some don't report to CMJ
• Have a wide range of technical competence
  • Relative novices
  • Tech-savvy users of Google Spreadsheets and Excel to assist the current workflow

Elves:

• Generally deal with a subset of delegated tasks from music directors, such as:
  • Counting tracks
  • Burning digital media and preparing information on burned discs
  • Filing physical CDs

Task Analysis

From the above descriptions, we identified several key tasks which should be supported by our system:

1. Importing Incoming Digital Media

Subtasks:

• Download digital media
  • E-mails
  • Amazon links
  • Other online sources (e.g. Soundcloud)
• Preview incoming digital media
  • Delete it if it is unwanted
• Send digital media to the server
• Verify relevant information from digital media
  • Required:
    • Artist
    • Album
    • Track Names
    • Label
    • Release Date/Import Date
    • Genre (flexibly)
  • Optionally:
    • Cover art
    • Liner notes
    • Extra comments
• Tag new media as "new"
• Optionally, during digital transition:
  • Burn CDs of digital music
  • Print out
    • Cover art
    • Liner notes/Track listing

Preconditions:

• New digital media received in e-mail

Time constraints:

• Primarily determined by rate of new digital media received
• More generally: Should feel like completion can be done in a reasonable amount of time, depending on the user (e.g. no more than 30-45 minutes per e-mail of new releases, no more than 90 minutes per day regardless of e-mails)
• May be able to loosen time constraints based on delegation of subtasks (e.g. previewing digital media, verifying information) and ease of remote access

Frequency of use:

• Between several times a week and once a day, depending on the user

2. Counting Tracks and CMJ Reporting

Subtasks:

• Look up number of plays per period
  • NOTE: Actually recording plays is partly outside scope (as it is partly the responsibility of the playback system not covered here)
• Group/sort number of plays per album
  • May also highlight trends over time (e.g. based on when the album was released)
• Highlight relevant subgenres
• Add extra plays from outside of digital playback (e.g. CDs, Track Blaster)
• Search for specific releases in a list (for subjective ranking of ties)
• Distribute to genre music directors

Preconditions:

• CMJ lists to be sent that week

Time constraints:

• Generally no more than one or two hours duration including addition of extra plays

Frequency of use:

• Weekly to bi-weekly, depending on user

3. Flushing New Music

Subtasks:

• Look up number of plays of albums older than three months
  • NOTE: Actually recording plays is partly outside scope (as it is partly the responsibility of the playback system not covered here)
• Delete album if there are fewer plays than a subjective threshold
• Delete "new" tag from album if it is kept

Preconditions:

• Physical copies exist in the library
  • Digital copies are less likely to need flushing due to lack of physical space constraints

Time constraints:

• Should be relatively short per album such that all albums to be flushed may be determined in about 1 hour for even the heaviest workload

Frequency of use:

• Weekly to less than once a month, depending on user