The Streema Blog

As mentioned in a previous post on the Streema blog, Virgin Radio was acquired a couple of months ago and was going to be rebranded. Well, it finally happened: Virgin Radio has now changed its name to Absolute Radio. This rebranding includes the three stations they have nowadays: Virgin Radio, Virgin Radio Classic Rock and Virgin Radio Xtreme - they are now called Absolute Radio, Absolute Classic Rock and Absolute Xtreme.

Meanwhile, you’ll find them in our directory as:

• Absolute Radio - Virgin
• Absolute Classic Rock - Virgin
• Absolute Xtreme - Virgin

We’ve been listening to Absolute Classic Rock and… what can we say? It’s not the same! The presenters speak in the same way, but the music is already changing. Well, we’re total old schoolers, but it’s true that maybe this will make it a better station in the future… we’re not sure and we’d love to hear your opinion!

Stay tuned for the new design that’s coming to town… ;)

The Streema Team

Hello Streema users!

We’re back with our Radio News update and, like it or not, again it’s all about the UK stations. The radio industry over there definitely has many movers and shakers!

First of all, our dear Virgin Radio has been acquired by an Indian media group, and it looks like it might undergo a name change. What do you think about this, should they keep the Virgin name or not? We ran a poll within the team and this was the unanimous result: we’d like it to stay the same!

Secondly, we wanted to let you know that Planet Rock “has been saved“! In our previous Radio News post we mentioned that is was near closing, but thankfully enough, it didn’t. : )

And last but not least, in case you’ve missed the Glastonbury Festival, you should listen to BBC Radio 1 and Q Radio during the next few days, as both stations are broadcasting the best of this year’s edition.

That’s all for now, hope you’ve enjoyed our latest bits of Radio News. Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Once again, thanks Cymon Humphries for providing us with the key industry information!

We have great news to share with you: we finally launched Radio Spots on Streema.com!! What you will read about below is a really important step in the development of a better community experience at our site. Hope you enjoy it!

Each radio station will have their own individual Radio Spot. These pages will not only display additional information about a station but also the following: a You May Also Like section, for potentially interesting and related radio stations; a Wall to write your thoughts or comments about the radio station (for this you need to register / log in); and a Now Listening box to show the users within the Streema community who are enjoying that same radio (check out the mockup below). By the way, if you’re thinking that we should also allow users to “review” a radio and give it a “rating”, you’re spot on: that’s in the works and soon to be released. : )

How do you get to a Radio Spot? Just click on the name of the radio in our Radio Directory, the Charts, or any other place where the name appears. The only exception happens if you’re trying to get to a Radio Spot from your Favorites list - from there, you’ll need to place the mouse pointer on the name of the radio, wait for a second, and then click on the text that says “Radio Spot”.

By the way, here are the spots of four Streema Team favorite stations:

• Virgin Radio Classic Rock
• 977 The Mix
• Radio Swiss Jazz
• Ministry of Sound

So, what do you think? How could we improve these Radio Spots? Send us your feedback and thoughts to info at streema dot com or just leave your comment below. We want to hear from you!! : )

Ok, that’s all for now. Come back to our blog soon, as we’ll be posting recent Radio News.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Starting today, we’ll periodically blog Radio News with station information that we think is important and relevant to our users.

This information will range from recently added radio stations to Streema’s Radio Directory to broader industry events like mergers or acquisitions which cause stations to change names and others to even cease to exist! After all, listening to great radio stations is one of the main reasons Streema was created and we want to make sure our users are up to date with the latest info!

This time around, we bring news about radio stations that have closed and wanted to let you know what we’ve done about it in our Radio Directory:

• Core radio has closed (see more info here), so it will be erased from our directory and from the any Favorite Lists that included them.

• Capital Life and theJazz have closed too (see more info here and here). Since Capital Life’s old website, owned by Gcap Media, offers a link to Gold (listen via Streema), we’ll recommend that previous Capital Life listeners try it out. Similarly, theJazz offers a link to Classic FM (listen via Streema) as an option, so give it a shot if you’re a previous listener of theJazz!

• Planet Rock is near closing, but a campaign to save it that is supported by Brian May (yes, you read well!) has just started.

Although most of this is hardly news in the media industry, we still wanted to inform the Streema community since we did make those changes to our directory. If anyone has any concerns, feel free to contact us.

Finally, we’ll like to thank one of our Streema Facebook App users, Cymon Humphries, for bringing up this information.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned!

The Streema Team