Music-on-demand (MOD) is a music recording industry certified multi-billion dollar music distribution & subscriber-based industry model conceived with the growth of two-way computing and telecommunications in the early 1990s. Primarily, high-quality music is made available to purchase by way of title subscription license, access by search, and play back instantly using software on set-top boxes (6 MHz separated guard band channels), coaxial, fiber optics, cellular mobile devices, Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, from an available distribution point, such as a computer host or server located at a telephone, cable TV & wireless data center facility.
In 1992, computer modem speeds were limited to less than 28 thousand bits per second (28 kbit/s), compared with uncompressed, pulse code modulated (PCM), music on compact disc (CD) that required 150 thousand bytes per second. As a result, additional bandwidth is required to accommodate delivering real-time audio at CD quality standards: 16-bit frame, 44.1 kHz sampling rate, stereophonic (two channel audio). This prompted telephony, CATV, cellular and satellite providers (Virginia Tech DoD cooperative) to consider changing standards, in terms of building higher capacity for existing telecommunications infrastructures and considering business use cases to offer supplemental, U.S. based private, affordable monthly on-demand service subscription plans with revenue split for compensation to music artists representation, licensing groups, telecommunications provider and music-on-demand solutions technology provider.
Early design, long range planning, and development of music-on-demand technology, in accordance with Performance, Mechanical, & Songwriting Copyright laws of the United States, include Access Music Network (AMN) by inventor & technology owner Dale Schalow. Mr. Schalow, in the early 1990s, was an independent composer and audio engineer and programmer in Los Angeles, California, college educated in music industry with minor in keyboard, who helped record albums and music scores for David Bowie, Tin Machine, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, Beastie Boys, Interscope, Walt Disney, and Warner Brothers. A multiplexed music-on-demand model was deployed using PCM audio sampling devices, Apple IIci, the KERMIT, X-Modem, PCM CATV coax transmission standards for computer file and sound data transfer protocols, and SCSI storage systems by Schalow to validate processing 16-bit multi-channel audio from point-to-point in a professional recording studio environment, including his own independently operated music composition studio and 38 Fresh Recordings. The model conceived was introduced by Schalow to Apple Computer (after Steve Jobs departed) in 1992 after he submitted an entry into the "I Changed the World" contest, essentially describing how an Apple computer helped shape and change the world forever based upon its usage. Apple acknowledged the "Accessible Music Network" (AMN) by awarding Schalow Honorable Mention and sending him a simple gray T-shirt with the Apple logo on it. Dale’s T-shirt was later donated to the local metro-D.C. Goodwill store. Key features of the technology focused on song title searching (DirectHit), and sound caching (Knapsack) for optimal song playback performance. The technology, inspired after Schalow became frustrated at waiting for very slow digital mixes using a digital signal processor accelerated device (never ending progress bar), was also proposed to David Bowie in 1993, who a few years later, introduced his own network service, called David Bowie#Websites, to the world. Initial demonstrations in 1993 also included the executive audiences at Virgin Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, Bertelsmann Music Group located in New York City, New York, James Madison University (JMU) Executive & Telecommunications Administration, the Virginia Center of Innovative Technology (CIT), Mid-Atlantic University Cooperative Satellite groups, and America Online before Ted Leonsis developed and released its music download player software, $500 million outside vendor acquisition, and merger with Time-Warner, Inc. in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Stand-alone software created by AMN for consumer-based access, with demonstrated proof of concepts to numerous C-level executives & owners of Cable TV, Telco, and Cellular service providers in the United States, such as Denver TeleCommunications, Cox FiberNet (Blackwater region), Continental, Comcast/Adelphia, Vanguard (AT&T), Bell Atlantic, Telecable Corporation (Norfolk, Virginia). AMN was then developed for the Microsoft Windows computer operating system, as well as set-top box design architecture prototypes conceptualized with 3D prototypes that required a telephone connector located next to a coaxial cable TV connector to converge low speed data uplinking requests to a head-end file server with high speed downloading of audio frame sets by user (subscriber) controlled interactive communications. Cellular sound delivery packets, proposed to Craig McCaw of Cellular One and Vanguard Cellular, were devised by way of transmitted file bytes beginning with wireless connection initialization, file header, cyclic redundancy check (CRC), distributed sound data frames, "napsack" memory storage caching, and end of file transmit signaling before initiating embedded digital-to-analog playback technology.
Music-on-demand has steadily overcome controversy of illegal music distribution and the lag of legislation for rapidly changing technology in the music industry. The RIAA, representing U.S. artists, publishers and songwriters, officially reported in 2024, rapid growth in overall revenues of digital music & paid subscription sales that has surpassed 14.4 billion US dollars annually. Newer on-demand request technologies have also enhanced modalities & performance of music on demand content, such as speech-to-text search, and natural language processing. Every telecommunications device in the world currently includes music on demand commands & features to the consumer audience and marketplace.
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broadcast television, in which the television signal is transmitted over-the-air by radio waves and received by a television antenna, or satellite television, in which the television signal is transmitted over-the-air by radio waves from a communications satellite and received by a satellite dish on the roof. FM radio programming, high-speed Internet, telephone services, and similar non-television services may also be provided through these cables. Analog television was standard in the 20th century, but since the 2000s, cable systems have been upgraded to digital cable operation.
A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of data and sharing network devices, such as printers.
Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a stream of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains an entire media file before consuming the content. Streaming is more commonly used for video-on-demand, streaming television, and music streaming services over the Internet.
In telecommunications, a customer-premises equipment or customer-provided equipment (CPE) is any terminal and associated equipment located at a subscriber's premises and connected with a carrier's telecommunication circuit at the demarcation point ("demarc"). The demarc is a point established in a building or complex to separate customer equipment from the equipment located in either the distribution infrastructure or central office of the communications service provider.
A cable modem is a type of network bridge that provides bi-directional data communication via radio frequency channels on a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC), radio frequency over glass (RFoG) and coaxial cable infrastructure. Cable modems are primarily used to deliver broadband Internet access in the form of cable Internet, taking advantage of the high bandwidth of a HFC and RFoG network. They are commonly deployed in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samples are taken 44,100 times per second, each with 16-bit resolution. Digital audio is also the name for the entire technology of sound recording and reproduction using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of audio engineering, record production and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.
In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Internet access. The transmission medium can be coaxial cable, optical fiber, wireless Internet (radio), twisted pair cable, or satellite.
Loopback is the routing of electronic signals or digital data streams back to their source without intentional processing or modification. It is primarily a means of testing the communications infrastructure.
Hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) is a broadband telecommunications network that combines optical fiber and coaxial cable. It has been commonly employed globally by cable television operators since the early 1990s.
The digital sound revolution refers to the widespread adoption of digital audio technology in the computer industry beginning in the 1980s.
The Freebox is an ADSL-VDSL-FTTH modem and a set-top box that the French Internet service provider named Free provides to its DSL-FTTH subscribers.
Access Communications Co-operative Limited is a Canadian telecom cooperative based in Regina, Saskatchewan. The cooperative provides internet, cable television, telephone, smart home and security services to residential and business customers in 235 Saskatchewan communities. Its primary wireline competitor is the provincial crown corporation SaskTel; it is one of two cable providers in Saskatchewan, with Rogers Xfinity primarily serving areas such as Moose Jaw, Prince Albert, Saskatoon, and Swift Current.
In telecommunications, cable Internet access, shortened to cable Internet, is a form of broadband internet access which uses the same infrastructure as cable television. Like digital subscriber line (DSL) and fiber to the premises, cable Internet access provides network edge connectivity from the Internet service provider to an end user. It is integrated into the cable television infrastructure analogously to DSL, which uses the existing telephone network. Cable TV networks and telecommunications networks are the two predominant forms of residential Internet access. Recently, both have seen increased competition from fiber deployments, wireless, and satellite internet access.
Asynchronous Serial Interface, or ASI, is a method of carrying an MPEG Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) over 75-ohm copper coaxial cable or optical fiber. It is popular in the television industry as a means of transporting broadcast programs from the studio to the final transmission equipment before it reaches viewers sitting at home.
Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948. By 1989, 53 million U.S. households received cable television subscriptions, with 60 percent of all U.S. households doing so in 1992. Most cable viewers in the U.S. reside in the suburbs and tend to be middle class; cable television is less common in low income, urban, and rural areas.
Access Media Network (AMN) is a business automation and technology organization unifying speech, music, audio, images and movies with two-way communications. The core definition of the AMN, founded by Dale Burleigh Schalow in 1992, was a premise for consumer-based music access, originally called Accessible Music Network. A new music industry model encompassed three main tiers at its inception: 1) method of travel including cable TV, telephony, satellite and cellular; 2) hardware and software to play music after point-of-purchase; 3) business licensing model to levy single license issue, as well as monthly subscription plans of multiple licenses.
Addressability is the ability of a digital device to individually respond to a message sent to many similar devices. Examples include pagers, mobile phones and set-top boxes for pay TV. Computer networks are also addressable via the MAC address on Ethernet network cards, and similar networking protocols like Bluetooth. This allows data to be sent in cases where it is impractical to control exactly where or to which devices the message is physically sent.
A cable converter box or television converter box is an electronic tuning device that transposes/converts channels from a cable television service to an analog RF signal on a single channel, usually VHF channel 3 or 4, or to a different output for digital televisions such as HDMI.
A modulator-demodulator, commonly referred to as a modem, is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more carrier wave signals to encode digital information, while the receiver demodulates the signal to recreate the original digital information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded reliably. Modems can be used with almost any means of transmitting analog signals, from LEDs to radio.
Audio connectors and video connectors are electrical or optical connectors for carrying audio or video signals. Audio interfaces or video interfaces define physical parameters and interpretation of signals. Some connectors and interfaces carry either audio only or video only, whereas others carry both, audio and video.