Internet’s first music festival to be launched by College Radio Network
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Sep 4, 2008 at 12:30pm
Over a dozen schools have agreed to participate in an experimental weekend of “peace, love and streamed music”— with live performances by hot, local bands on respective campuses—sharing content and broadcasting over multiple Internet stations on the Apple Mac-based IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone.
The event will be held Sept. 19-21 and will be available free on iTunes Radio. It’s the brainchild of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System’s IBS Student Radio Network. The web’s first live music festival is called IBS-Palooza.
IBS-Palooza is intended to break new ground in the areas of both entertainment technology and education, says IBS Chairman Len Mailloux. As the first live multi-venue music festival created for the Internet, it harnesses the technologies of both Apple and Backbone Networks to enable live syndication of streaming content among several stations simultaneously.
As an educational project, it opens up the student radio experience to a broader, more exciting arena of involvement. Together, the students and organizations hope to use this weekend to attract more support for their stations, hone their live event broadcasting skills and processes, and most importantly, have fun, says Mailloux.
The Festival also aims to help local, emerging artists gain wider exposure through student radio and the Internet, he adds. Most bands will be performing live at their host school’s campus while live on the air, and some schools will combine their efforts to create an even larger live concert event. During non-concert hours, stations will be able to air live music from other time zones or use their Mac-driven Backbone Radio automation software to run highlights of Palooza from their station or syndicated from any participating school.
In addition to Backbone Radio’s automation and management software, the IBS-SRN builds upon (Apple’s QuickTime™) MPEG-4 AAC, the worldwide streaming standard, as its streaming format. Conforming to this standard not only ensures universal acceptance across all listening platforms, but it also enables each school to partner with the Apple’s iTunes store in preparing material, including artist/album annotation and cover art images that display to listeners’ free QuickTime players, says says Mailloux. Select IBS-SRN stations are available on iTunes’ College Radio category.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
