A script for automatically lowering the volume during radio advertisements and DJ announcements and turns the volume back up when songs are playing. It controls a Sonos speaker using the Soco-cli Python library when Tunein is being used.
If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
I'm not trying to be controversial, but if you remove profit how can the business continue to exist? And if terminating the business is your goal, why? People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
It's my livelihood. I'm not seeking sympathy, but I am curious.
(Also used to work as a DJ, but not since the nineties…)
It's a social issue and you should petition for the change you'd like to see.
For example in the UK, advertisers must comply with the Advertising Standards Authority code [1], and section 4 includes:
> Radio only – Advertisements must not include sounds that are likely to create a safety hazard, for example, to those listening to the radio while driving.
Which while open to interpretation, this would likely include any sirens likely to be confused with a genuine siren.
Or:
> Television only – Advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident.
( That one might raise an eyebrow to anyone familiar with the long running "Go Compare" campaign! )
Of course these codes are always written in a way that's woolly and often adverts are only banned after complaints have been made.
But the framework is there for standards to be written and upheld. It relies however on people being willing to put in time and effort to complain when standards are broken, and there needs to be effort made to tighten those standards in some areas to stop standards slipping, although in general standards have been tightened rather than loosened over the years.
If your experience is very different, consider that it may be worth spending time organising a campaign group to lobby the FTC (or FCC?) to tighten their rules, or organise a group to put in complaints to organisations which have similar "voluntary" codes such as the BBB and also pressure the BBB to tighten their rules to have guidelines prohibiting such noises.
Change doesn't happen for change sake, it requires organisation and action, but even a handful of people can effect huge change with a concerted effort.
[1] https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/advertising-codes/b...
And then I skip it. Unless the presentation is compelling and interesting for it's own sake.
He makes his own (creative) original content for his sponsorships.
Corridor Crew on YouTube does this very well.
They are a lovely gang of VFX people. Highly recommend watching some of their videos to anyone who hasn’t.
Unless the broadcaster cares about their show and wants people to hear it. If enough people care enough, someone (perhaps the broadcaster themself) will fund the cost of broadcasting.
There are broadcasters that don't have adverts and apply this model successfully. Crucially, the definition of “success” is that the audience and broadcaster can continue to enjoy the show, not that the broadcaster makes a huge profit.
To invert a Rule of Acquisition: “Anything worth doing is worth doing at cost”.
My real hope is that there is a movement back to "sponsored content" and more subtle ads... with less ads overall.... i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>, check them out on <insert text>". This is probably never going to happen as there is now a constant need to sell and more expensive ads does push out smaller businesses.
Not sure there is really an answer here but I think moderation can help here
Commercial station KRKQ in Telluride, CO, does this, and it sounds amazing.
WDRE (now WPTY), WLIR-FM and WBON on Long Island, NY, tried it in 2005, and it did not generate the revenue they were expecting. But it's 17 years later-- I think they were trying an idea that was ahead of it's time.
Possibly too easy and crass for HN, but it's just so demonstrative:
But between the actual psychological tricks that often come across as trashy once you acquire a distaste/realization of them, and the general unenforcement of false advertising law, monopolistic conditions favoring ads campaigns/brand awareness over quality or reputation, refusal of companies to turn down lowest scamming denominator dollars, ads are effectively venom to any average consumer.
One of the major contributing factors to market inefficiency, I'd argue. Advertising shouldn't be such a blatantly untrustworthy, scammy method of extracting wealth from people for questionable valued services/products, but it usually turns out that way.
Good, bad, indifferent, adtech has become so hostile that users (myself included) have found ever more measures to excise it, because it feels compelled to show no restraint in its own appetites.
I'm old enough to remember when radio and TV adverts didn't comprise more than 15% of the total media stream, let alone online, where the visual real estate and the mid-stream extortion racket of context-daftness has gone mad (e.g. I want to watch a quiet modal jazz concert, but every 10 minutes a jarringly loud ad for Grammarly or Tide is injected at near earbleed volume) makes it that I pretty much download the media, put it up on my media server to play it, because the ads just make me want to (and actually do in 95%+ of cases) blacklist any brand annoying enough to go this route.
No one wants to moderate because the stakes to get more marketshare/eyeballs 'demand' it, just creates the incentive to avoid it. Google succeeded for years on less intrusive, more directed ads...then they decided to stop 'stop being evil' and took the DoubleClick/Taboola turdscape route along with everyone else. Now there is zero sympathy from listeners/viewers, because I would argue, the advertisers offer them no reason to.
Is that a rationalization? Maybe. But it's also a sincere observation.
I want to see ads that are entertaining or helpful. The mba is trying to get me to buy something I don’t want or need.
Advertising isn’t the problem, the problem is the marketing.
Puzzlingly, Google/YouTube should know way more about me than Meta, but most of the ads I get from them suck.
Radio (and TV) are uniquely obnoxious in their use of instinctive audio cues to demand attention by making us go on alert.
That sort of shit needs to shut down. I think only sirens played on radio ads might be worse.
"Radio (and TV) are uniquely obnoxious"
Ads are obnoxious. That's not unique to radio.
My point was that radio ads are uniquely obnoxious because of a combination of the way we process audio signals and radio stations’ apathy about intentionally irritating ads.
I’ll grant it’s not a moral failing on the part of sound waves. It’s 100% the broadcasters who see short term profit from “more effective” ads, who then have no right to complain when people are irritated enough to develop filters for the ads.
I'm an actual person, you know. I'm alive. I exit. My existence is not less important than yours... In my eyes.
1) The statement "you matter" (call it X) is not the same as "you deserve a job in radio." (Y)
2) I expect (but do not have proof) that the readers of Hacker News, or a sample of western society generally, would more strongly support X statement than Y.
I did not say, but I will say now: I agree with X and not Y. I also don't believe that you deserve not to have a job in radio.
I initially wrote that out because it seemed to me that you were equating X and Y. You contested someone's apathy towards a threat to your job with a statement that you exist. Because I think that (1) and (2) are distinct, I didn't find your reply convincing. I hoped I would convince you of the same, or that you would respond with some insight I had yet to consider, which might change my own perspective.
How is this any different than changing the tv channel (...or radio station) when an ad comes on, which has been the de facto consumer behavior for over half a century?
ASCAP = American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers%...
I used to game the system by playing little known/independent artists I had a personal connection with during each reporting window.
https://www.ascap.com/help/royalties-and-payment
> Each year, ASCAP processes trillions of performances of ASCAP music. Whenever it makes sense economically, we conduct a census survey, or complete count, of performances in a medium. For media that fall under our census surveys (for example, the large majority of network TV performances and over 2000 broadcast radio stations monitored by Luminate Data, LLC, formerly MRC Data, LLC), ASCAP seeks to pay on every surveyed performance.
> Where a census survey is impractical, we conduct a sample survey, meaning that we pay royalties based on a representative cross-section of the performances on that medium.
This suggests to me that for major radio stations, the strategy of "more talk, less music" will reduce royalties—and that your strategy might only work at a smaller station.
Also, ASCAP seems to govern only the rights to the composition. Most radio stations play from recordings. Do the record labels (or whoever collects for them) also utilize a similar sampling strategy?
If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money. You are not entitled to a job as a radio broadcaster supported by revenue from advertisements that people find obnoxious. If the market won't support your business model, it's on you to find another business model, it's not on the market to support your failed model.
Yup - This is a result of making the advertisers your true customer rather than me, the listener. In the meantime, that complete willingness to sell me as a product, and the lack of any existing contract, means that I am utterly entitled to remove any/all ads that you might embed in your product. I don't have to listen to the trash - you're yelling into the void, I can choose to cover my ears.
I understand that mass broadcast communication (radio, OTA tv) started going down that route because it's hard to limit the audience of a mass broadcast to charge a fee - but I'm not all that sympathetic to where the industry has ended up.
Frankly... I don't really know that I would mind if most of the commercial stations went out of business. It would be nice to make space for more content outside of the "top hits of [____]" and a blathering DJ. I'd like to see more stations act like NPR or college radio stations.
Do I love the NPR donation campaigns? Nope.
Do I donate? Yup. Because it means I'm still the customer.
Would I throw a couple bucks at a station to play curated playlists in different genres with no ads or interruptions? Probably. I used to throw donations at grooveshark DJs back in college for exactly that - I found a boatload of good music (mostly older titles) that way.
Looking at the script, it's just lowering the volume, possibly so it's at or below the average volume of the rest of the content (on a Sonos speaker using TuneIn).
One of the things wrong with our industry, inspired by legislation made by people with no technical background, is that the peak volume of a commercial can not be louder than the peak volume of the surrounding program.
So some in the industry processed the commercials into audio bricks, with the peak audio level at or below what's required. But the average audio of the commercial was much higher than the average audio of the programming. While it's legally lower volume, it's perceived as higher volume.
While this script is made for TuneIn via Sonos, I think the philosophy of louder average volume has migrated as a regular feature in streaming. I also think it's why many artists on ad-supported sales/streaming platforms process their tracks into bricks, so their track is not perceived as lower volume and less energy.
I can't speak for the person who coded this, but I think they are just correcting the legacy exploit, and not trying to outright remove the advertisements. (The example they give lowers the volume to "15", not "0")
I think marketing as awhile should be illegal. It produces unwanted needs, destroys our environment and makes us long-term unhappy.
They have no annoying ads (unless you count the fund drives) and high quality content.
Maybe fewer but higher quality listener supported radio stations would be better for everybody.
Receiving over the air.
It's bad habit.
Unless you get paid per decibel.
They do the same with TV, by the way. It's not just radio. I would love if governments would simply ban this practice. It's annoying as hell.
If your business model involves annoying us, we'll find a way around it. This is YOUR problem, not ours. Find a better business model or go out of business.
Of course, when a right wing government got in they halved the number of frequencies available to the community and sold our frequency to a for profit who was marketing to young women and teens.
Ads are social cancer. If a business is ad-based, its disappearance is a net social good.
People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
Can't speak for the radio in your area but in mine it's a total waste of spectrum. Terrible audio quality, eaten up with ads or utterly inane bumpers, and playing the same garbage every single day. My choices are rap that sounds the same as it did twenty years ago, rock songs that are literally the same as twenty years ago, the morning show with the two stupidest people I've ever heard, or NPR where I get to learn for an hour about how the new constitution of Nowheristan now has a section on water usage rights vis-a-vis goats vs sheep.
I wonder if radio stations can become much cheaper to run if all the expensive hosts become podcasters and music gets played on Spotify or Apple instead.
Love you Three D!
I actively dislike commercial radio, it just pushes junk music, junk lifestyles, superficial bullshit life distraction. It's worthless and if advertising money dried up and they died it would be a net gain to society. I'm sure, however, some are less gutter trash than what I've described, and I certainly hope yours is too.
It wouldn't be as bad if half the ads didn't have all the obnoxious hyperactive qualities of a toddler with a recorder but 'irritate your audience until the fact your ads are irritating becomes a meme among the general public' seems to be the go-to strategy with a lot of radio advertising in my neck of the woods.
Not removed. The volume is turned down. In any case, if I'm figuring this out correctly, the broadcaster is paid to run the ads, which they are doing.
It’s actually measured in LUFS, and it’s normalized worldwide for radio, podcasts, TV, movies, and commercials, so that commercials are louder.
LUFS measures the loudness, which is not exactly the same as volume - it makes quiet moments louder so that everything can be heard while the car engine runs, but the drawback is limited dynamic range, which is not important on podcasts but a little more important in music.
It’s double-funny that we can normalize LUFS and we’re still stuck with movie dialogs inaudible and the sound effects earth-shattering. I wish VLC had a better loudness processor, I don’t succeed to configure it to keep the whole movie at the same volume, whether they’re speaking or using automatic guns.
Probably won’t help you if you’re using VLC, but most of the streaming services now have multiple audio tracks in the same menu that would switch to another language called “<Language> - Reduce loud noises” which is pretty much that. I just find it inconvenient as an apartment dweller that the default is to blast the volume during any action sequence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AudioPost/comments/y2m1u0/comment/i...
This has actually be regulated against by the FCC. While the FCC is pretty much a feckless shell of an org, there are rules and ways to make complaints for their violations[0]
In the US, the loudness rule was made by politicians who had no technical background.
What they came up with was that the loudest part of the commercial can not be louder than the loudest part of the program surrounding it.
Broadcasters were quick to compress and limit the commercial audio into a brick, and normalize it just below the "100%" of the programming. The end result was a much, much louder commercial, that was technically a lower peak volume (but much higher average volume).
The law to lower the peak volume permits a higher average volume, and that has been exploited.
edit: maybe this "Reduced Loud Noises" language option https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991712, and also apparently changing from 5.1 to stereo
Or maybe Overcast is fixing that for me among its many audio tweaks?
I should see what is available now.... hmmm