[BC] question for the braintrust

[David Lawrence]

On 1/20/06 11:24 AM, one Bruce Campbell <bsc at cumulusfwb.com> wrote:

 > If you have not checked it out yet...check out www.yes.com.   Somehow, they
 > are pretty real time in the posting of the songs being played on FM stations
 > around the country....ours included...but we are not streaming any data
 > anywhere.  I was wondering if anyone knows anything about this and how it
 > works?  Very curious.

This is from the same people, Jellyvision, that did the video game You Don't
Know Jack (one of my all time favorites). They've worked out a deal with
stations, as well as with the data encoding services, to use real time data
for that map you see. It also works for television shows that feature music.

But that's just part of it. The service is all about you, in your car,
hearing a song - and you want to buy it. The national YES.com number
(888-YES-8888 notes what cell you're calling from and asks you what the
frequency of the station, the call letters, or the branding is (KISS,
whatever, and the KISS in LA will be different from the KISS in Boston), all
via voice recognition. It then routes your call to a station specific IVR
tree that has been voiced by one of the station's personalities. They walk
you through the process, and they all reference one central "music
librarian" character named Roxanne that actually plays a clip of the song
you want (playing, just played or played at a particular time), asks if
you'd keep it or drop it (a little call out research), tells you the title
of the song and the artist - and offers it to you for purchase. You spell to
the system your email address, like R - I - C - H - W - O - O - D - at - C -
O - M - M - S - P - E - C - dot - com, and when you next get your email,
there will be email waiting for you with a buy link for that album.

Very, very cool. They are based in Chicago, they have a Whisperroom set up
for the music librarian character to record all of her artists and titles
(they are up to 500,000 at this point), and the same graphic designers that
did You Don't Know Jack also did the interface for this. You can see the
Franklin Gothic Ultra Bold and the flash movements in both designs are very
similar, and the frivolity of the IVR programming is very reminiscent of the
game.

I don't know how successful it is (I've not heard it publicized much since I
saw it for the first time at Jellyvision's studios last June), but it's
wicked cool.

David
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