As the audience for AM and FM radio declines, start-up entrepreneurs and giant media companies alike are searching for the "next radio" -- a way to make money by helping listeners discover new music. Online music providers such as Pandora, Imeem and Last.fm provide an early glance at that next chapter in radio history.
The search for a user-customized music "station" started in the early 1990s, when MIT's Media Lab created Ringo, a music recommendation engine that asked listeners to grade a few tunes and then offered them songs they might like. Now, CBS' Last.fm site has become the first of the new generation of music sources to offer free, on-demand, full-length spins of any tune you want to hear -- not just the 30-second snippets available on iTunes and most other music sites.
As in other areas of media, the music industry is finally starting to come around to the difficult truth that we now live in a world in which consumers expect information and entertainment to be free. Efforts to sell music by subscription have mainly failed. (Yahoo recently gave up on its Music Unlimited subscription service and sent its customers to Rhapsody, another struggling music provider.) But traditional radio's offer of free music surrounded by audio advertising is also being rejected by a generation that resents undesirable interruptions.
"They want to be the program director, and they insist that the program be free," says Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of music industry at USC and a former executive at Top 40 WIBG in Philadelphia. "Young consumers don't have that need that we older folks have to have someone knowledgeable about the music tell them what's new. They have their social network to tell them what's cool."
Bring on what's new
With increasing evidence that many people suffer from iPod fatigue -- they know too well what's stored on their player and they crave surprise -- several companies are trying to figure out what blend of user-generated content and expert guidance will attract an audience.
Since 2005, Tim Westergren has crisscrossed the nation gathering fans of Pandora, his site that lets listeners create their own stations by typing in a favorite song or artist and letting the software generate a stream of music that shares their favorite's characteristics. Based on a handcrafted database that catalogs more than 500,000 songs according to their rhythm, harmony, mood, style and lyrics, Pandora serves up selections that you then fine-tune by rejecting those you loathe and embracing those you adore.
