The Streema Blog

At Streema, we’re a community that celebrates a spectacular medium called radio.

We’re not the only ones, though, since thousands of musicians and artists, ranging from rock to pop, metal to folk and even jazz have also celebrated radio.  There is no doubt this medium has influenced music, people, culture… and pretty much our entire society in the past decades.

So, today, we bring you some of the most popular songs in history that bands such as Queen, Autograph and Rush have dedicated to radio.  Hope you enjoy them!

Radio Ga Ga – Queen

Radio Waves – Roger Waters

Radio – Robbie Williams

Video Killed the Radio Star – Buggles

Turn Up The Radio – Autograph

Radio – The Corrs

The Spirit Of Radio – Rush

Which one is your favorite?  Are we missing any great songs?  If so, please let us know – we’d love to add them too!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Streema is all about radio. Stations are the main medium where people listen to music, talk or sport shows… without these, Streema wouldn’t have a reason to exist.

So, daily, we receive large amounts of requests through our Radio Request Form for stations that we don’t yet have in our directory. The work required to add each one is very time consuming and hard to scale, so every once in a while we improve the process we use internally to do this work.  Today is a big step forward in that direction.

Starting now, the Radio Request Form will require more station-related data in comparison to how it was before.  Even though this might mean a little more work for you – i.e. the person that requests the station – this way we all help create a more accurate, reliable and enjoyable Streema experience. We encourage you to continue requesting all the stations you don’t find in our Radio Directory.  Thanks!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Yes, we know we many of you have requested stations that haven’t been added yet; please, be patient, we’ll upload them all for sure.

Every once in a while, we have a “Before and After” moment in Streema’s development – and today, we’ve got one of those. From now on, when playing any station on the Streema.com website, our website’s player will open in a separate window, as it currently does on our popular Facebook application.  We understand that many of you are probably thinking “So what’s the big deal?”, but this is a change that will help us build a better Streema and we’ll explain how in the paragraphs below.

One of the features that we’ve traditionally been very proud of was our embedded player, since it allowed users to navigate Streema without the stream getting cut off.  But this meant that there were tradeoffs to be made in terms of loading time, usability, search engine crawleability, availability of station information, etc.  At this point, it made sense for us to not make those tradeoffs anymore, and while it’s difficult to explain all the pros and cons in a single blog post, here’s a quick summary of how users will benefit:

• A site that is more in line with what’s usually experienced on the web – for example, players usually open in a different window on most media sites and the URL of the page you are visiting usually appears on the browser’s address bar!

• Station stream won’t stop if you happen to click on an ad on our website – this was important because many ad networks will not open up in a separate window.

• Much faster site, in particular for first time users.  Many people will be reeeeally happy about this.

• Better and more complete radio station information at your finger tips, specifically located in our website’s player, and allowing for more interactivity in the future – at least that’s what the plan is!  :)

We know there will be some of you that will miss our embedded player, but we do hope you understand this big change and maybe eventually you will come to enjoy it.  We worked hard in the past with our embedded player (you can read more here and here), but we think it’s time to take Streema to another level, and we believe this will help us build the foundation to get there.

Do note that if anything is not working as you expected, please let us know, as your feedback is really important for us.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

So, we just rolled out a new version of our player this week and wanted to make a quick announcement about it!

Before we let you in on the details, we wanted to say that rather than “seeing” the change, you’ll actually experience the difference.

Essentially, when tuning in to a radio on Streema…

• No matter which Operating System you have: Windows, OS X, Ubuntu (or any Linux related)…
• No matter which Browser you are using: Internet Explorer 7.0/8.0, Firefox 2 or above, Safari, Chrome, Opera…
• And no matter which players and plug-ins you’ve installed: Windows Media Player, Real Audio, Flash, etc…

… our new player will find the best player / plug-in combination for your computer.  And our new algorithm is much better than our previous one!

What does this mean for you?  Simply put, you’ll be able to tune in to a greater number of stations than before.  That makes us very happy.  :)

Anyway, hope you continue enjoying your favorite radio stations, and more than ever, your feedback with this new player will be welcomed.  Please, if you find anything not working properly, let us know!

For those Facebook users out there, this new player will be rolled out on our Facebook application (Streema Radio Tuner) over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

This time, instead of writing about Streema, we’ll ask:  what would you like to have on Streema?

We are opening this to anyone who has any idea, and we mean: ANY idea, feature, whatever that you would like to have on Streema.  So far, we’ve heard that it would be great to access Streema in your car; to know the name, band, discography of every played song in any station; to interact with a radio DJ just from our application… we think the possibilities are infinite, so we encourage you to think about anything.  Maybe, one day we may satisfy all of them… you never know.  For now, just let us know about them!  :)

As for the question in the title…  “It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.” -Marilyn Monroe

Stay tuned!

We just posted about radio-related news recently, but what happened last week was so important for the online radio industry that we wanted to share it with you.

So, the news is that SoundExchange, the digital music fee collection agency owned by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and the “pureplay” webcasters announced that they reached royalty agreement until 2015.  After a few long years of negotiations, it finally happened!  Basically, this new deal involves a discount on the rates for large webcasters, and offers smaller webcasters percentage-based payment options.  By the way, by “pureplay” we mean webcasters such as Digitally Imported and RadioIO, although companies such as Pandora Media, Inc. were also involved.

We’re bringing you this piece of news because this represents a very positive change in the industry moving forward, enabling small webcasters to stay in business and continue bringing you, the radio listener, the best music out there. And that’s a great reason to celebrate.  : )

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

As most of you already know, Michael Jackson passed away yesterday.  It’s a very sad time.

Since we don’t want to repeat what has already written everywhere else about arguably one of the greatest all time performers in music history, we decided to look around the web for radio stations that only play Michael Jackson.  We uploaded one to share with you, called MJTunes – Michael Jackson Radio, where you’ll find his music – songs, remixes, concerts… everything about him.  If there are any other MJ radios we should have, please let us know.  We’ll make that a priority.

Goodbye, King of Pop.

The Streema Team

So, we have some more good news: today we released a new application for Facebook called “Streema Radio Tuner for Pages“. If you have a Facebook Page, this application is for you!

“Streema Radio Tuner for Pages” allows you to add a radio station to your Page, so that visitors can listen to radio directly from there. Clearly, we weren’t satisfied with only one application, so we created another one! :P

Jokes aside, what happened was that many Radio Owners, DJs, and Producers wanted to include our classic application “Streema Radio Tuner” on their Pages, so we figured we’d give them a way to do that.

With this new application, we hope to approach many Radio Page owners or any Page administrators who want to improve their visitors’ experience. This is something really new, so we look forward to receive your feedback!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: If you have a radio, band, or any other music-related product or service, we highly recommend creating a Page on Facebook by following a few easy steps. For more information, click here.