Radio listeners who have been turning to the Net for commercial-free music and news might not have the same great audio escape for much longer.
MP3.com, which is looking to make elevator music more hip, is one of many Internet broadcasters planning to supplement their banner-ad bucks with income from audio ads that interrupt your favorite musical interlude.
MP3.com on Tuesday announced a new online service to supply retail outlets such as shopping malls, restaurants, and grocery stores with music surrounded by ads.
The company formed a new division to promote the service, which offers a library of 424,000 songs and 67,000 artists to be delivered over the Internet.
The service will make it possible for businesses to insert their own advertisements into the music mix piped into their stores.
The company did not say whether music from the five major record labels will be included in the service.
A month ago, a U.S. District Court ruled that the San Diego company infringed upon copyrights held by the major record labels by illegally copying more than 80,000 albums into a database.
MP3.com isn't the first to see the benefits to tying audio ads to audio content. Media management company Everstream recently created a service to help local news sites leverage their articles into an audio service that includes words from their sponsors.
The company will turn the text of articles and banner ads from regional publishers into customized broadcasts. Once an ad is created, it can be inserted in the specific local music stream where the ad was purchased.
"We look just like a radio station, we have a local sales force -- which is the local newspaper sales force -- and then we have a national sales force in our home office," said Stephen McHale, Everstream's president.
"About 80 percent of ads are bought and sold in local markets. But where people have been selling just banner ads, the sales force can now sell with banners and audio impressions and the graphic will be put on the tuner, and there will be a print ad that goes across the newspaper."
Over 200 newspapers have signed up with Everstream, including the Knight Ridder newspapers and The New York Times.
Everstream also offers a co-branded music player and genre-based streaming music content that can be accessed from the newspapers' homepages.
Lighteningcast, a firm specializing in audio advertising, wants to provide a service targeting Internet radio ads, similar to what DoubleClick has done for banner ads.
Lighteningcast CEO Tom Des Jardins said the company aggregates advertising impressions based on listener location, age, and gender across affiliate networks. Broadcasters determine what types of advertisements they want and his company goes to ad firms and sells those impressions.
"We're like DoubleClick, we put the targeted ad into the audio stream. Anywhere where there is an Internet addressable connection, we'll be there. We're dealing with repurposed ads from other audio campaigns."
The service is now available on cyberradio2000.com, and new affiliates are expected to be announced later this week.
But the fastest way to propagate an audio ad might be to post it on Napster.
Johnny Castleman created several and posted the MP3 files under the titles of popular songs -- but the files actually contained a parody ad for his Lowpass humor site.
The files were downloaded several thousand times in a short period of time. Most of the intrepid downloaders were not amused when they received an ad instead of an Eminem song.
"The actual vocal response has been almost entirely negative," Castleman wrote in an email.
"(Emails with) death threats, all capital letters, calling into question our sexuality, the works.... But for as much negative response as we received, our hit logs show there's an immense number of people who apparently got the joke and are sticking around for more.
"We kind of dodged the bullet by being a humor site -- if we had been selling cars or shoe polish or something I don't think it would have been nearly as successful."
Castleman isn't sure he wants to continue posting advertisements on Napster, but he has discovered something that music lovers on the Web are beginning to realize -– audio ads are definitely on the way.
*Reuters contributed to this report. *
