Internet is killing the radio star

The days of radio just might be numbered. Or, that is, radio as we know it.

According to a New York Times article published in September, the amount of time 18 to 24-year-olds spend listening to the radio has decreased by 15 percent since 1999. Overall, the survey said, the 12-34 age group has seen the largest decline of all listeners, with the average number of hours listened per week decreasing from 20 to 17.

Answering the call of music listeners dissatisfied with the constraints of traditional radio and open to an array of digital options, certain music providers have begun to present new ways of discovering and listening to music.

Sensing the narrow selection of traditional radio and the hardware constraints involved with receiving satellite radio, Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. has recently begun to make its material available online for a monthly subscription fee.

RELATED LINKS Internet radio stations have been gaining much ground on traditional radio broadcasts. Sirius Satellite Radio http://www.sirius.com SpotDJ: http://www.spotdj.com The Hype Machine: http://hype.non-standard.net Pandora Internet Radio: http://www.pandora.com

“A lot of people have asked for satellite radio to be offered online, and a lot of regular radio has very narrow content. This is as much diversity as you can get,” said Scott Greenstein, president of entertainment and sports at Sirius.

Greenstein senses the appeal of this form of radio because of the opportunities it affords students to discover new music. Content is organized into stations by genre, like in traditional radio, but with a much higher degree of specificity. Specialists in each genre make representative selections with one ear toward current trends and another toward listener feedback.

“You can discover music much like browsing through a friend’s CD collection,” Greenstein said. “We have a staff of specialists that program music from the metropolitan opera to classical to reggae to Eminem and 50 Cent producing a hip-hop channel.”

As Sirius sets out to stream diverse, ad-free content across the Internet as well as the airwaves, another group seeks to approach radio from another angle – your hard drive.

Scott J. Kleper, along with co-founder Kevin Barenblat, created SpotDJ after finding traditional radio insipid and ad-laden, but his own iPod selection a bit lonely. Craving the community radio can create but discouraged by radio’s narrow potential, Kleper decided to do what others stuck in transit probably dream about – replace the DJ.

“The idea is that people can record and share comments about the music they listen to, making short clips that can be heard after a song finishes playing on your iTunes,” Barenblat said. “We want to bring community into the listening experience.”

SpotDJ has accumulated about 5,000 spots – the short clips recorded by listeners – since launching two weeks ago. Any member can record a spot, and content includes information about the artists to secret meanings of songs to personal experiences involving the music. Just whose spot any one listener experiences is, according to Barenblat, a personalized matter.

“While you’re listening, we look at spots and pick the one that’s best for you, based on criteria like high ratings, spots you’ve never heard before or spots that your friends have recorded,” Barenblat said.

Barenblat says that for many who have used the service, it provides them a new vehicle – in addition to blogs or podcasts – to express themselves about the music they love. According to Barenblat, the program skirts around some legal issues these enthusiasts might encounter with other venues.

“Podcasts are a copyright issue – with SpotDJ, the DJ does not actually select the music to be played; they just attach their spot. This way you can connect to anyone without actually playing the music yourself,” Barenblat said.

Pandora, a service offered at Pandora.com, is removing obstacles to musical discovery in its own way. The service allows listeners to find music similar to the music they already enjoy, discovering new artists that are especially applicable to their tastes. By entering the name of a song or an artist, they set Pandora to the task of retrieving similar music, and the program uses the characteristic attributes of any group or song to make this comparison. Another service is the site Last.fm, which keeps automatic stats on what people listen to and plays streaming music based on listeners’ individual tastes.

Another unique tool available to listeners is Anthony Volodkin’s Hype Machine, a sort of mother-blog that compiles information from other blogs and directs readers toward new music. The site is a database where people are able to search for an artist or song, and the Hype Machine will find all recent postings of the artist or song on the countless MP3 blogs it tracks. These songs can then be streamed in a mini-player, one after another. The site keeps track of the most popular tracks and the most-searched artists, making it easy to keep up with the latest buzz bands.

While blogs themselves are a resource in the search to expand musical tastes, the question of which blogs are worthwhile – and where to find them – could impede many users. This way, Volodkin sidesteps another boundary between music and consumers.

Ian Rios, a fourth-year religious studies student, is excited by any chance to connect music and community. He receives much of his music from his friends. He was intrigued by the idea of reaching a community through programs such as SpotDJ.

“For me, sharing music is very important. The experience is kind of like judging a work of art – on its own it can mean nothing, but it’s the people and context that give it meaning,” Rios said.

Other students are just fine with the safety of a personalized iPod experience.

“All my music is on my computer. I know all my favorite bands and listen to them on my iPod,” said Adria Jimenez, a third-year molecular, cellular and developmental biology student.

Still, others have turned to the Internet for discovery the way Greenstein suspected. While not familiar with Sirius, third-year economics and ecology, behavior and evolution student Susanne Marczak is excited about the specificity of Internet radio.

“I listen to an Internet station from Minnesota,” Marczak said. “They’ve got content I like, and I’ve never really followed mainstream radio for trends anyway.”