For music stations, trying to keep your website up to date with your playlist is both valuable and tough to keep up with. New artists may pop up every week, and keeping your website in sync with what's playing on air is time consuming. Of course, since your audio system and music scheduler are completely up to date with what you station is playing right now, the best case scenario would be for those programs to talk directly to your website and make updates automatically.

However, the prospect of writing a script to get that information and post it on your website in real time is well beyond the scope of this column as well as beyond the skills of almost all station and cluster webmasters. You could hire a programmer to write it for you - but that could cost at least thousands of dollars and require your overworked engineer to get involved. Or you could pay nothing, configure nothing and arrange nothing and have the people at YES.com do all that work for you - for free.

A tool that can help stations keep their website fresh, updated and relevant is clearly something worth passing along, so I talked to Drew Golkar, YES Ambassador. He broke down the ins and outs of YES, which I'll pass along this and next week.

YES and ASCAP co-own Mediaguide, a monitoring service, which tracks the songs and spots played on over 2600 stations. Mediaguide, and thus YES, covers the top 150 markets and some more beyond that. This means that YES already has access to what songs are playing on your station right now if you are in a monitored market. There is no setup on your part - you don't have to call or email YES to get started - they are already monitoring those top 150 market stations. Go ahead and check it out right now - visit YES.com and type in your call letters to see if your station is available.

What You'll Find and How It Works

Once you get there, you should notice quite a few cool features, and they are all relevant to your station. In the middle is a list of songs you have recently played. If you have a mainstream format, Drew estimates that YES will be able to correctly guess over 95% of the songs you play. From a geek perspective - that's pretty impressive. Mediaguide monitors your station over the air and then checks the audio to match "fingerprints" of songs in its huge database. There is no human listening nor are they following along with your audio system (although this is possible if you want to set it up with them to increase accuracy).

That forms the base of the service, and from that, YES gathers all sorts of related information from all around the internet, from links to iTunes and Amazon (discussed last week) to album art and even the recently launched video service. On top of that, YES allows users to chat with each other in that same window, inserting comments between songs and allowing your listeners to talk with each other with a central reference point of the music your station is playing. There's so much to these features that I will discuss them more in depth next week.

Above the songlist are four links: Top 100 Songs, Station Log, Station Website and Streaming Audio. YES depends on radio stations to bring in their audience, so they want visitors to be able to go back to the station's site and listen to their internet stream. The relationship between YES and stations is symbiotic, since YES works best when listeners are chatting about whats on the air and listening at the same time, strengthening TSL. The Station Log allows visitors and listeners to go back and check the last week's worth of music and what time it played (and also provides a great way to keep tabs on the competition).