GORDON HASTINGS

As we have suggested over the past several months, Crowdsourcing is a real opportunity for radio as evidenced in this most recent Wall Street Journal article. Please check out my earlier blogs. There is so much more potential here. Gordon Hastings

For Radio Listeners, a Louder Voice —- Broadcasters Experiment With Online Services Letting Audiences Vote on Songs By Sarah McBride 31 December 2009 “No suits. No DJs. No kidding,” reads the Web site for CBS Corp.’s radio station KITS in San Francisco. “You decide what plays.” After years of having program directors choose which songs get airtime, the alternative rock station is trying to give listeners the same thing the Internet does: control. Like most stations, KITS, 105.3 on the dial, normally works from a playlist chosen after extensive market research and put into heavier or lighter rotation depending on how new the song is, the artist’s name recognition and whether it seems to be catching on with listeners. But on Sunday nights, the station experiments with something called Jelli Radio, where listeners go online and vote songs up or down to decide what ends up on the airwaves. If enough listeners hate a song, it can get yanked mid-spin. “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon was the first to get yanked on KITS’s Jelli radio; the chat room viewed it as overplayed. Jelli is part of a strategy to harness online radio, a technology that has the potential to siphon thousands of listeners from the airwaves, or, if done right, bring in thousands more. “If Google created a radio station, what would it be?” asks Mike Dougherty, chief executive of Jelli Inc., based in San Mateo, Calif. Jelli considered how Google tunes its search product to deliver the most relevant possible results, based on data from other users. “That’s the genesis of what we did.” It’s called “crowdsourced” radio and companies such as Jelli and Listener Driven Radio LLC, are making it available to stations on a syndication basis, as well as through their own Web sites. Typically, they are using barter terms, meaning stations can run the programming if they turn over a chunk of the advertising airtime so Jelli or Listener Driven Radio can sell it. Both services are new and relatively unproven. KITS in San Francisco is the largest station to try crowdsourced radio, but it’s been on only since the summer. Still, it’s been beating the programming it replaced and the station plans to expand Jelli’s hours, says a person familiar with the situation. Jelli is talking with several more CBS stations around the country. Crowdsourced radio takes the concept of caller-request lines and kicks it up a notch, with a voting element. While some radio stations allow listeners to vote for a top song, usually it’s just for a small portion of the programming, rather than the whole. On the Internet, radio services such as Pandora.com — which allows users to create personal radio stations, banishing some songs from play while giving the thumbs-up to others — are gaining traction with listeners. In some rankings of visitors to online audio sites, Pandora.com is the top service. But traditional radio broadcasters can’t afford to cede the interactive radio field to the online-only specialists. Radio companies are struggling against some of the sharpest declines in decades. Citadel Broadcasting Corp. just filed a prearranged bankruptcy reorganization plan and Regent Communications Inc. fell into technical default earlier this year. Consulting firm BIA/Kelsey estimates radio revenue has fallen 19% this year. Online revenue, while accounting for only a few hundred million dollars of the $19 billion radio business, is growing the fastest, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. If radio companies can marry the reach and convenience of over-the-airwaves broadcasts with the tailoring of the Web, they will be in a strong position as they compete for listener ears and advertiser dollars. Both Jelli and Listener Driven Radio, based in Cleveland, strive to do that. LDR, which is on Northern Lights Broadcasting’s KTTB in Minneapolis and soon will be on two big Citadel stations in Detroit and four Border Media Partners stations in Texas, asks listeners for email or SMS addresses when they request a song. It’s optional, but if listeners give contact details, “We can send a notification whenever that song plays,” says Daniel Anstandig, president of McVay New Media. “That creates more tune-in.” In an era where radio audiences are increasingly measured by electronic recorders that track minute-by-minute listening, jumpstarting tune-ins has become crucial. Because crowdsourced radio serves as a bridge between the Internet and regular airwaves, it becomes easier to sell advertising for both, say its creators. John Rosso, president at Citadel Media, the syndication unit of Citadel, says that once he has Listener Driven Radio up and running on stations early next year, he plans marketing blitzes for advertisers. For a pizzeria, “We’ll sell spots on the air, spots online, we’ll send a DJ over there to do an appearance… . We’ll send out a text to say listeners get free pepperoni on their pizza today,” he says. “The whole idea is to try to surround the audience.” Jelli’s Web site features a set of videogame-like tools designed to make the experience more interactive. Listeners can click on virtual animated rockets that accelerate a song’s rise to the top of a playlist. Virtual bombs can kill a song’s chances. It’s “a videogame on a radio station,” says Mr. Dougherty. Listener Driven Radio — which touts a shift from broadcasts to “crowdcasts” — relies more on old-fashioned voting, but does so through modern technology, including mobile devices, a station’s Web site and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. To help prevent any manipulation of the voting or the playlist, both LDR and Jelli say they have technologies in place to monitor abuses of the system.