Who Will Emerge as The Future of Radio?

As the audience for AM and FM radio declines, start-up entrepreneurs and giant media companies alike search 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.

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 the University of Southern California 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."

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 your favorite's characteristics. Based on a handcrafted database that catalogues 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.

For those who recoil at the notion of anyone -- a radio station program director or Pandora's musicologists -- deciding what music is best for them, Last.fm chooses tunes in a different way. Rather than employ its own experts, Last.fm relies on the collective listening habits of its users. When you choose a song on the site, you see a list of artists who are "similar;" if many people who joined you in listening to Booker T. and the MGs also listened to the Delfonics, the software leads you in that direction.

"I often hear people from my parents' generation say, 'There will never be another Beatles,' and they are absolutely correct," McKinnon says. "Not because there will never be another band capable of making music as well as the Beatles, but because we no longer have to form our musical preferences based on a limited number of competing radio stations. We now have millions of people making millions of choices about what they want to listen to; it becomes rather improbable that a large majority will gravitate to the same conclusions about what music they prefer."

That may be the ideal, but the reality looks a lot more like hit radio. The top artists on Last.fm the other week were Radiohead, the Beatles and Red Hot Chili Peppers -- not exactly acts unknown to FM radio. Indeed, on the most popular online music sites, the lists of most popular songs are almost indistinguishable from what's on most pop or hip-hop radio stations.

Whatever form the next radio takes, it's clear what need it will fulfill. "Every day I am bombarded with new and interesting technologies competing for my already limited time," Patrick McKinnon, 27, a computer engineer in Austin says. "Having the ability to turn on a personal radio station that will grow and evolve as new music becomes available, tailored accurately to my musical preferences, will be truly amazing. It isn't here yet."

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