Station to Station

The real future of Internet radio.

Jesse Walker from the December 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Invented in 1979, Selector has produced a series of offspring in the ensuing decade. One is SelectorReach, which combines Selector's data with info from the local Arbitron ratings. ("Filters include age, gender, ethnicity and preference," declares the company Web site, "all of which can be selected individually. For example, you can see black women age 25-34.") Another is Master Control NT, which doesn't just choose which songs to play: It actually plays them, along with all the appropriate ads, promos, and prerecorded DJ bits. Welcome to the completely automated radio station.

Think about this. For decades, each radio station has been trying to figure out the formula that will generate the perfect series of songs for its audience. Now some bright computer programmers have created a tool that will turn its preferences into a playlist. But what happens if its listeners have access to that same program--and to a much larger library of music on the World Wide Web? What if a Web site let listeners select their own parameters and then followed them to the letter, with no commercial interruptions and no DJ schtick?

Some users might choose a familiar generic format, such as those standby oxymorons, "young country" and "classic rock." Some might combine a couple of formats ("play young country and classic rock"). Some might get ridiculously specific ("I like old-school hip hop, mid-tempo ska, country music from before 1970, and Miles Davis' 1959 album Kind of Blue"). It would be a relatively simple matter for the site to track which songs are being played and to pay the appropriate parties a licensing fee, perhaps covered by user subscriptions and perhaps by some other means.

"Some form of that is certainly going to happen," says Tom Zarecki, director of marketing at Radio Computing Services, the company that produces Selector. "It's the same thing as traditional radio programming, but to a more tightened niche than ever before." Already, crude versions of this are beginning to appear. Imagine Radio lets Web surfers create their own stations, with a process that includes checking off as many as 11 musical genres for the station to play. And RealJukebox will shuf-fle all kinds of digitally stored music: You can load on tracks from your own CDs and you can pull in MP3s from around the Net. The RealJukebox Web site helpfully includes links to hundreds of other sites offering songs for free or for a small fee, many of them far from the musical mainstream.

As the new medium grows, it will continue to evolve. It might, for example, incorporate the technology called collaborative filtering. Such a program would ask you to rate a variety of songs and musicians, and, after accumulating a sufficiently long list and matching it with other people's responses, recommend other songs and musicians you might like. Or, if you prefer, it would just add them to your playlist. (I have experimented with MovieLens, a highly touted Web site that purports to recommend movies on this basis, and in my opinion the program is worthless. Still, the software may yet improve to the point where many consumers would choose to use it. I mention it only as one possible direction the medium could take.)

If Radio Computing Services doesn't offer a music scheduling engine to this market, someone else will: Zarecki estimates that there are about 200 companies in the radio software business, offering everything from scheduling engines to programs that help talk show hosts screen their calls. The only real barrier will be a legal one: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 puts a host of restrictions on Net stations to make it harder for listeners to predict when songs will be played, so they won't copy them without paying for them. It's unclear whether this would restrict a customized radio station--nor, for that matter, why such "piracy" is any different from simply taping songs off the radio. If the incumbent radio and record industries get sufficiently scared, though, a legal fight may ensue.

Customized radio won't mean the death of traditional broadcasting. It will mean changes, though, for the research-driven style that currently dominates radio. As Net access becomes cheaper and portable, it will be harder and harder for old-fashioned stations to draw listeners away from online services, especially as they simultaneously face competition from direct-satellite radio, with its hundreds of channels, and from low-power microbroadcasters (see "Radio Waves," June).

Traditional stations will be able to do one thing, though, that an automated, Web-based system can't. Like the old freeform stations, they can hire skilled knowledgeable hosts who understand how to put disparate songs together in creative sets that no scheduling engine could conceive. A good DJ knows how to introduce listeners to music they haven't heard before, how to put new or eccentric records in a familiar or otherwise enticing context. She might combine this with theater or with interviews. She might invite musicians to perform live in the studio. If she's adventurous, she might make sound collages, mixing different records and other noises together. (This used to be considered ridiculously avant-garde--until someone got the bright idea to put a beat behind it and call it hip hop.)

Then program directors could stop playing super-DJ, and take on the larger visionary role of shaping the station's personality, of figuring out the boundaries of what it will play and finding the right staff to play it.

And if the old stations don't do that, surely there are Web-based stations that will.