Added value or extra cash?

A lot of people listen to BBC Radio stations on the internet and even more listen to on demand show – both music and speech based ones.

Until the move to the combined Radio & TV version of the iPlayer you used to be able to see which track was currently being played on the music based radio stations live stream.

Under the old pop-up style player you could click Listen Live on say – 6music – and it would tell you what track has just played and what track will be coming next.

At the moment the new version doesn’t have this option available – although apparently it is coming soon and it would certainly be a welcome addition – plus there’s a lot of extra space available in the new design.

But to the point of the post and what could make the current track thing that extra bit useful.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people, and in fact have done this myself – who, while listening to the radio online and hear a song they love – look at the track info that used to be in the iPlayer Radio and then go to iTunes and buy it.

If the BBC wasn’t the commercial free public service gem that it is (and I wouldn’t want to change that) it would be able to add an iTunes icon (or even Amazon mp3 icon) next to the title of the track.

This would 1) make it easier for people to buy the track and 2) provide the BBC with probably a considerable amount of affiliate money if it wanted to.

But it’s that affiliate money, or at least the perception that there would be affiliate money, that stops the BBC from actually being able to provide links to buy the tracks it plays.

There’s also the product bias thing as well. There’s only so much room for adding icons or links so if the BBC decides on the two biggest players (iTunes and Amazon) it will be heavily criticized by the smaller players for showing bias and giving increased exposure to the big players.

One alternative could be to create some kind of algorithm that could be added to all the /music pages – that way when you click on the title of the track it takes you to the band page and on that band page there are links to everywhere selling the track as a digital copy.

I don’t know how the music pages are created – they are basically a collection of links and images – much like /topics but I’m not sure they’re as automated as that – but they could be.

Anyway – there’s no reason why the BBC couldn’t have an automated system that creates a page for every band played and then include links to places to buy each of the tracks played.

The question is whether it is something the BBC ’should’ be doing. It’s certainly something I would find incredibly useful – although would make things a bit more expensive as I’m a little over impulsive with iTunes.

Maybe there should be a decent third party site that automatically creates a page for every band – drawing content from across the web and includes a ‘best price’ first directory of digital music links to buy the tracks of that band.

Or maybe there already is and I’ve missed it?