Group members
- Ian Jacobi (pipian)
- Dominic Kao (dkao)
- Daniela Miao (dmiao)
Problem statement
Briefly state the problem(s) that your project will seek to solve. Take the user's point of view. Consider what the user's goals are, and what obstacles lie in the way. Do not talk about any solutions here.
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:
- They receive incoming music and file it in the “new” section of the library.
- They act as a point of contact with the recording industry by submitting information about top played tracks to CMJ (the College Music Journal) from which lists are compiled.
- 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, short of burning the tracks onto a CD and then filing the burned CD, a time-consuming process.
Observations & Interviews.
Note: Names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Music Directors
Don (Americana/Roots):
The music library is completely made up of physical CDs. Don receives about 5-20 CDs every week. He also receives a lot of digital media, but most of it get's thrown away. Only if something received digitally is especially high priority (something they're expecting or know is good) will he burn it to CD and manually put it in the library. In these cases, he usually previews the music tracks by playing them before burning. The studio is running into physical space constraints, so they're often forced to "flush" the albums which receive less airplay. About 10% of the flushed CDs come back to the regular shelves, the rest get thrown out.
If Don burns a CD, he has to manually insert the liner sheet (with track listing and so forth). Sometimes the process is tedious, since the music files will come named as "Track 1, Track 2, etc." and so he has to hunt down the track names. Don thinks it might be useful to preserve some of the aesthetic and non-critical parts of the media (like image of the album, other album information) as well. The categorization of music can sometimes be problematic, since multiple physical copies need to be made for music that fits into multiple categories, and then filed into their respective genre locations on the shelves.
The decision on how to categorize an album is decided upon by the 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 his logbook to prevent duplicate CDs from being filed. CDs are often flagged with physical stickers, for example a sticker that says this CD should get flushed soon. Don likes to play music from his home computer, and would like to use the system from there, so remote access is a plus for him. Don would also like to store the highest quality music possible, preferably a lossless format like FLAC (MP3s are at the low-end of the quality scale).
Lessons Learned:
- The entire playback library is currently physical
- Space constraints force them to throw out a lot 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 for Don
Bram (Folk):
Bram is the only music director we talked to that completely ignores digital submissions (deletes them all). Bram feels if there's a system that he himself could learn easily, he might use incoming digital music more often. Bram is low-tech and feels uncomfortable with technology, therefore avoids it. Bram was part of a group interview and did not contribute extensively to the discussion or our questions.
Lessons Learned:
- Ignores incoming digital music completely
- Almost never uses computers
Judy (World):
Because digital music needs to currently first be burned to CDs before being added to the playback library, it is a hassle and is done rarely. Because of the College Media Journal (CMJ) reporting that she does, which is a national reporting system which reports the top albums being played, the record labels will often send free music. CMJ reporting involves going through physical CDs and seeing how many marks have been made on the labels to count the plays of each album.
Judy either deletes e-mailed music, or forwards them to station volunteers (elves), but everybody finds this time-consuming and frustrating. She receives music from an eclectic range of record labels, often times the smaller independent ones can't afford the costs of sending physical albums. The labels on each album show dates the album was played on, as well as the specific track and DJ that played it. Judy feels it's often a "hurricane" in the studio, and there is very little physical space for her to work with, so she needs ease and simplicity.
Sometimes music she wants she has to purchase it herself. She wonders if the free MP3s that Amazon sometimes offers could be useful. Judy feels a little discouraged that this is a one-shot deal project for us, but an inevitable artifact of the class project. 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 with the e-mails she gets to deal with the tedium. One of her concerns is letting the listeners know which new music is coming in.
Lessons Learned:
- CMJ reporting involves looking at each physical album and counting the plays on the label
- Doesn't use incoming digital music because of time constraints
- Finding album art and inputting track list is a concern
- Wants to make sure people are aware of which tracks are new and hot
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 if we transition to digital, where all the fun information (like cover art and backstory) will go. Jocelyn thinks the essentials are album label, year, track list, artist. One of her duties is to perform the CMJ reporting for which albums were played most (bi-weekly).
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. We asked her if she wanted to be receiving e-mails from record labels and artists at all. She said it would be great if she knew the music that was coming into the system, but didn't have to actually deal with it (e.g. the work of inputting information). She'll often get triplicate e-mails since artists will send them to WMBR@wmbr, Loud@wmbr, and Jocelyn@wmbr. 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:
- Unlikely to do anything that requires substantial manual work
- Doesn't like to deal with e-mails
- Wants to be aware of new music while delegating input to system/others
Lana (Electronica):
Lana does electronica (also known as RPM) at WMBR. Another music director, whom she referred to as "counting monkey", does all the play counts for her genre so she does not do the reporting. She'll 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, she needs to do the labeling depending on genre (these labels are placed on the CD spine so they're visible in the physical library at a glance, e.g. black stripe represents electronic elements, green dot represents 60s oriented, yellow dot is heavy metal, red dot is noisy). About nine times out of ten she thinks the music she receives digitally is worth burning to CD and putting in the library, about one out of twenty times does she actually do so.
Lana receives a pretty even split between physical and digital music. She'll receive e-mails with a large number of albums from a record label, with some albums that say "digital-only". These are the ones she'll have to 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 helpful assistants (elves) could come sift through and input the music into the system. The elf that she has helps her with this occasionally (but not often) and also helps with the station's digital ads.
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 feels that her assistant makes mistakes and forgets things like the release date or song titles sometimes when getting the digital music into physical format.
Lessons Learned:
- Receives 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 her assistant to do the rest
- Process of getting digital music into the physical library is currently error-prone
Elves
User Classes
Describe the user classes that you have identified, and their major characteristics.
Music Directors: Some variance in throughput levels (how many CDs and digital music they receive) and in competence with technology. Their job is to put the music they receive into the physical library, and do CMJ reporting.
Elves: Deal with hysical burning onto CDs and labeling.
Needs & Goals
Describe the goals that you have identified, with reference to the observations you made.
Easy and flexible way to categorize music by genre (sometimes one song belongs to multiple genre, and other times people make mistakes when assigning a genre)
New release tracks have to be conspicuous to everybody
Filing system to make reporting to CMJ easier
Quick way to preview and delete unwanted music
Direct method to import digital media into the database (through URL?)
Grab music from other digital sources easily (Amazon, SoundCloud)
Make sure the liner notes are attached to the album or individual songs
Local music artists have very unstructured music files
Remote access of the system