Sean Ross posts in Infinite Dial, a radio website well worth visiting, about a new radio station, being broadcast on FM and also on erockster.com:

Here’s erockster.com as heard on KAJR at 7:40 local time this morning, mostly unhosted but with various artist drops:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
Beach Boys, “California Girls”
Tegan & Sara, “Burn Your Life”
Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean”
Bright Eyes, “Old Soul Song”
…
If, three years ago, you were one of those people who liked to point out that Bob- and Jack-FM were not your iPod on shuffle, this may well be.

If we continue to think of radio stations as purely music (“unhosted but with artist drops”), we’re going to hell in a handcart. Because last.fm, Pandora, et al, does a much better job of playing me new music that I’ve otherwise not heard of but I like than the likes of the nonstop music channels like Core, The Arrow, Virgin Groove, Century Digital, etc.

I’m not a typical listener: nor a typical music fan. Listen to my music choice (that’s my music collection in one big playlist), while looking at my most-played tracks of the last 3 months, and you’ll see that my most played track in that three months is The Divine Comedy’s “Absent Friends”, which I’ve played just four times. A typical commercial radio station will play their top tracks eight times a day – once every three hours. Assuming I listen to music for a total of two hours a day (in commutes and desk-bound working), commercial radio would have had me listen to that track 60 times in three months.

Indeed, over the last week, my 210 different artists, and a total of 323 tracks means that, in just 18 hours, I’ve listened to more tracks than many commercial radio stations play per week. I’m singling out commercial radio here, by the way, not because of a misplaced loyalty to my employer, but that commercial radio’s music choice is, by and large, far more tightly musically formatted – and that, for whatever reason, only commercial radio runs nonstop music services.

Clear Channel’s new radio station, or The Arrow, or Virgin Xtreme, or any number of other “music jukebox” channels, just play a mix of music which is suboptimal, for me, to that available from a computer program or a website – or, even, from a tightly tuned iTunes.

Surely the future of radio isn’t just non-stop music jukebox channels? Can’t one-to-one technology do that job better? Or is the job of a programme director really just the job of a music scheduler these days?

(And does the above shine any light on the widening gap between commercial radio services and those from the BBC? Is the Radio 1 breakfast show, or Terry Wogan, or Chris Evans, or Scott Mills ‘all about the music’?)

Photo: flickr user niznoz. Used under licence.

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