Yggdrasil Radio Discussion

Listenership has dropped off since the early days of the station, so I've been wondering why, and how we could improve.

So today as an experiment, I found the highest rated anime-themed station in the Shoutcast directory and checked them out.

"AnimeNfo Radio" is their name, and they have 694 listeners as I write this. How are they different, and what can we learn from them?

Well, quite a lot, of course. The first thing I notice is that they're streaming 192Kbps MP3, which sounds a lot nicer than my 56kbps AAC+ stream, and is compatible with more players. I'd love to have a better bitrate and more listener slots, but I just can't afford it.

That being said, I am exploring what it would take to move to a higher bitrate. ($20/month would get me 125Gb/month traffic, but 192Kbps mp3 would eat 60G/month per listener. so more than 3 listeners and i'm over? am i missing something here?)

They actively ask for donations, and give people who donate special privileges, at various levels such as VIP and UVIP.

I've always been very low key about asking for donations, and egalitarian about it... people who donate don't get anything special over anyone else; you don't even have to register to request. That also means I don't have much money, of course. But asking for money embarrasses me.

I noticed that every song that played while I was listening was a request, and I listened in for around ten songs or so. We used to be inundated with requests, but that seems to have died down. I could probably loosen up my request policy a bit.

I didn't hear any drops or promos during this time, so they either don't do them at all, or very infrequently. I wonder if I schedule drops/promos too often?

Their webpage shows the album art for songs that play.

Their song tags weren't as clean and consistent as mine, but that's about the only area where I'd say we're better than they are. They really do have quite a nice station, and I enjoyed listening to it.

What are your thoughts? What are the station's strong points, and what are its weak points? How could we take this station to the next level?

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Hi, this is my first post, but I listen to the radio for a while...

I don't know why they're more popular, I prefer Yggdrasil

I got to know Yggdrasil when I first tested the webradios feature of my PSP. The ones that I remember listening the most to were Yggdrasil, Kawaii Radio and AnimeNfo. Nowadays I listen mostly to Yggdrasil, one of the factors that makes me prefer it is that you have lots of I've songs, some idolm@ster songs, lots of my favorite artists, update with recent songs and the request system is easy to use. Only complaint is that the site doesn't work well on my mobile devices (PSP and N85) on N85 I can make it work using opera mobile but it's very slow. Maybe a mobile version of the site would be nice? I don't know it there's a lot of people that'd use it to justify the work though.

For me the lower bitrate and AAC+ is a big advantage, I don't notice the quality diference that much, AAC+ is very optimized for low bitrates and it saves a lot of bandwidht for me too, my provider has monthly download limits too so... AnimeNfo also have a 48kbps AAC+ stream.

The compatibility can be a issue, yes, my nokia phone's internet radio player has a weird bug that it can't play any AAC streams even though the codec is supported by my phone, I play normal AAC+ files just fine. But I still prefer them to save my bandwidht, or at least have the option.
I think they are also more famous because they are associated to AnimeNfo.com database that gets the name more known.

And, I like the promos, it makes the radio more unique are more traditional radio like

Sorry for the big post
You guys keep up the good work!

Thanks for your feedback. Yes, we're rather fond of I'ves Sound, aren't we?

Here's a curious thing: on a hunch, I changed the "drops" between songs from every 5 songs to every 8 songs, and listenership has gone from around an average of 10 people to 28. Apparently people tune out if they hear too many interruptions to the music. Interesting!

I'd love to have a mobile version of the site. Maybe someday!

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Hello, this is also my first post here, I just registered to the forum.

IMHO, bitrate isn't such big an issue... Lower bitrate means lower phone bill when I listen from my iPhone outside home, that is most of the time while I'm working..

However, I can understand lots of people really want 192 or even 320 like Animenfo offers to the highest rank of users.

Also, they appear as default anime station on various iPhone radio Apps..
This may prevent Yggdrasil to ever be found, because most people stick with the default one..

I don't really like how that all works..
Basically having to rate songs to earn a rank in order to be able to request songs everytime, even when normal users can't..
Also, judging from their FAQ, the process is not automatic and requires being nice to the admins and all.. A wrong word and you're out.
I already have bosses in real life to whom I must behave, I don't really need other ones.. Don't you think?

Probably, the only thing I envy them is their really huge database. For many song they have lots of versions such as remixes, etc..
(but then, it's useless if you can't request them at will..)

Everything else, I like it better here, you don't have to register in order to request, you can rate but don't have to, and most importantly no ranks..
Keep up the great work!

A lot changed since that first message got posted. We have a mobile app now, for one thing, although it's not very good... I know how to do way better mobile apps now. Someday I will redo that.

Yeah, I don't think I'd like ranks either. People like to vote yes/no on songs, you don't need to force them to do it. I didn't realize they had a ranking system like that. Here you are a full citizen from day one, and that's how I like it.

We COULD have remixes, but I tend to not want multiple versions of the same song, for fear that a number of users could line up 15 remixes of the same song all in a row. That might get old after a while.

Right, you don't have to kiss up to the moderators here. If you act like a total butthead, sure, I can imagine banning someone... I have the tools to do that, but I've never had to, because all of my listeners have always been super nice. I've never had to even think about it, and I'm quite thankful for that.

It's the other way around. If you're helpful, I'll find some way to put you to work. I have people who help me find music, people who help edit song tags, people who find album art, people who make website banners... there's a small but growing army working behind the scenes.

Those other guys have way more songs, it's true, but I like to think I have the really good ones. And if there are songs you think ought to be in there, let me know and I'll do my best to find them and put them in.

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If your automatic request processing software can ensure that there is no word in common between a new song's title (and maybe artist) and the last ten songs scheduled by it, that will prevent multiple versions of the same song.

That test should be done within the request processing, because manually scheduled shows often have themes -- or if you tell your automatic scheduler to create a "princess hour", it should allow umpteen songs with princess names. But none of those would be affected by a uniqueness test which is over in the separate request processing module.

Of course, if requests flow through some other scheduling module, then you have to be concerned that the other processing might rearrange things in an undesirable way.

Have you considered putting the non-streaming servers on Cloudflare.com? That could reduce some of your bandwidth use, even if it's a small amount. If your embeddable RSS feeds are popular, that might help.

For Cloudflare, you'd probably want to modify your logging to deal with the different IP behavior of the CF servers. Or else your logs will tend to show that the only visitors are the CF servers.

I checked for peer-to-peer streaming, but there doesn't seem to be anything which I would recommend.

I also prefer lower bit rates, because I'm usually listening through the small speaker of my smartphone, or a one-ear low quality earpiece (a Bluetooth phone headset which also handles music audio mode).

One solution for higher bit rates and cost would be to only offer those to paying customers (if that is technically feasible). Simply charge more than enough to offset the costs. The risk is in the first few subscribers -- as you've mentioned, you have to buy bandwidth in steps. If have enough profit from the first few steps to pay for an additional step, then after that point the subscriptions become self-sustaining without risking costing you more. So it's a matter of doing the math to see what monthly/biannual/annual fees will work for your expenses.

It looks like one possible way to implement subscription services would be an Android premium app. In May, apps became able to handle subscriptions.
http://developer.android.com/guide/goog ... index.html

EDIT: Looks like Google takes a 30% fee from those payments. Well, everyone has to charge a fee. You mentioned mobile apps, so it's something to consider.