Listener Led - Discovery Driven Radio

There has been a lot of debate of late about allowing listeners to choose all the music played on their favourite radio stations. Some radio stations continue to invest heavily in antiquated music testing where they cram people into a room, play music and ask them what they like most. The more experimental stations sign up some third party sites and get people to listen to 30 second previews and rate songs. It ain’t real guys - if you want real insight into music listening then start using some of the many tools out there like CBS have started doing with their new station called Last.fm Discovers that it is broadcasting in four cities in the US (more… http://tinyurl.com/ya8eaar). One show plays a popular song on Last.fm and then two related and recommended songs according to the Last.fm’s recommendation algorithms, another focuses on the weekly Last.fm charts, and interestingly DJs read out comments on tracks from Last.fm while playing the songs. Who does know best about what people want to hear - music programmers in traditional radio stations or the Internet???

Conor Ryan