Today we officially launched two of our first station-based iTunes Music Stores! Very exciting stuff – we’ve been working on this for a really long time, and were able to debut it today on two stations: Hot97 (WQHT) in New York and Power 106 (KPWR) in LA.
On top of that, the launch was timed out so that we got some pretty big names to do a few audio spots for us. Busta Rhymes lends his voice to the Power iTunes Music Store, and Jay-Z lends his for the Hot97 version.
There’s a massive amount of complexity behind the scenes (lots of admin screens, and I worked on a lot of custom Flash apps to help manage some of the data). Justin’s been the primary on this one, and has worked with the other dev guys to pull in a massive amount of data from Apple – allowing each station to create their own lists of artists, albums and songs.
Considering that we have some twenty plus radio stations, and each one of them will have their own library… that’s a lot of data to keep track and manage.
Today was a pretty awesome day, to see this thing get kicked off. There’s lots left to do yet, and a ton of small tweaks left to be made before we can officially roll this thing out to all the other stations. But this was a big step.
I think this is a first for any radio station in the country. Our two stations are the first to partner up with iTunes, and to link up their libraries to the iTunes store. And on top of that – Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z talked about something that I helped to create. How cool is that?
Power106 iTunes Store (Busta Rhymes audio spot)
Hot97 iTunes Store (Jay-Z audio spot)
