Internet radio Day 1: First meeting, research and brainstorm

We thought we had a killer idea for our music site. But after talking it over, we realised there was less mileage in it than we thought. It felt like we'd fallen at the first hurdle, but we were soon back up and running...

We started with a blank slate. All we knew was that we had to create a site about music and follow our own guidelines if it was going to be any good. We had a quick meeting to kick things off and picked someone to lead the team. Rich volunteered and everyone else breathed sighs of relief. Then we went off to do some initial research and gather ideas for our brainstorm.

When we sat down again later we soon got scribbling on the whiteboard. It

seemed as though the more we scribbled, the more the ideas kept coming.

We discussed things such as online music-making machines, or music learning sites; all the new music technology: digital guitars, wireless internet radio players, DVDs hooked up to PCs, online music communities...

Rich suggested the Shazam music identification service (external link), which had everyone interested. We dug up some info on it - there have been several stories in the press recently, so it was obviously newsworthy. Plus it's a simple idea that has lots of appeal and is easy to grasp. But we had some reservations too, after all, we don't just want to make an advert for Shazam.

So we stepped back for a moment, and looked at all the other ideas we'd thought up. We put them into groups and tried to see which ones 'had legs', and which ones we could ditch. This is when the Internet radio theme came to the fore. Like Shazam, it seemed to fulfill the criteria for a good Big Idea site - it's newsworthy, controversial (what with all the fuss about online music, piracy, and greedy music corporations), it has appeal for a 13 to 14 year old audience, it's easy to grasp, it's contemporary, and crucially, the subject is ideally suited to the Internet medium. We could do a site about Internet radio, but also we could set up an Internet radio station to test it out. Do it, don't just talk about it. That sealed the deal, and we decided to run with it. Now we've got to do some serious research and think about all the different angles we can take with the idea.