Around 18,000 songs in our SAM DB, all of them grab JR generated pages (that is, the currently playing artist's JR page and associated data) in real time from our station players.
I don't think you could comeup with a better backend for commerce etc for SAM broadcasts than a guy can just sort of put out there with JR.
Good fit. Slick, FAST
And for sure it works... some custom coding to do in the SAM php templates or your own custom builds, but not really hard stuff if you have a good grip on SAM.
We own 15 SAMs and all those are ready to start broadcasting the most popular musical genres as soon as I find a platform able to carry artist information, pictures, music charts, song lyrics and all-music related.
So, what we need to know is what type of Jamroom should we purchase.
Although our site is basically made up toward independent artists, am sure most guys at myspace.com, friendster.com, shoutage.com, facebook.com may want to add a player able to broadcast label-sponsored mainstream artists over any indie for now. So our plan is to start broadcasting the typical tunes and provide the opportunity to hear independent music as well in a song-by-song basis such as at purevolume.com.
Any version of Jamroom will do this. Grab the "full" license of course... you will want unlimited artist accounts for sure.
All instances of SAM can grab any pages from a single JR setup. We run four full time installs of SAM for four broadcasts, and they all call artist data from a single JR install.
The trick with SAM is to manually code the database info for any tracks away from the default, and instead place in there, a JR search string. Then when a song is playing in your custom player or SAM page, the buy cd (etc.) link goes and grabs the JR page for that artist. JR pages can of course be anything you like by building a custom theme.
For these SAM to JR track "buy links" all tracks can use the exact same data..... so you build the link once, and apply it to all tracks in you system with one swoop!
A link like this....http://www.mysite.com/jamroom/$song.artist$ for each song in the song table. SAM will decode the "song.artist$" part from the currently playing track and add it to the seach string that it writes to your SAM or custom player pages.
You can build a PAL script to edit all songs at once to use a search string like that. WAY helpful if you have many thousands of tracks.
All this is ideal... and why we use JR as the backend for all our radio stuff. With multiple themes that you might make for JR.... your independent artists can of course manage their own pages and have sales directed to anyplace they like.... but the major label stuff... you might have a single major artists theme... that directs sales of all that product to Amazon or whatever. And since you're using JR themes, you can instantly change buy links for major label stuff.. to say... Barnes and Nobel or whatever by a simple hyperlink edit of the theme.
Jamroom rocks, make our life FAR simpler and the work we do (when we actually do work) VERY fast!
So yup, give it a go!
If you want to see how we married these tings together, spin over to www.audiocandy.com and follow the radio links and fire up one of those channels. Requires a signup... but easy, and we won't annoy you with crap... a bit easier to visualize by actually seeing it work than listening to me yack on about it!
You will be able to see the "buy" links inside our players... clicking any of those or any artist album cover and viola, your in a JR page for that artist.
