Crowdsourcing radio play lists
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Another application of consumers calling the shots via the Internet. Invariably, wine buyers will be turning to channels like CellarTracker and Snooth to guide their own purchases, not to the wine critics.
"Triton Media Group, which provides programming to 4,500 radio station affiliates, has signed an agreement with Jelli to syndicate two Internet programs on FM and high-def stations. The Top 40 Jelli and the Rock Jelli programs are scheduled to go live across the U.S. early next year.
The deal surfaced after Jelli began testing the application with CBS Radio Bay Area affiliate Live 105 KITS a few months ago. The Sunday night Jelli show on Live 105 also led to an agreement with Australian-based Austereo. In November, the station will launch a Hot 30 Jelli show on stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The stations will broadcast the show on FM and digital radio (DAB+), and it will be available online 24 hours daily.
The concept is the brainchild of Jelli co-founders Michael Dougherty and Jateen Parekh. The two set out to reinvent radio by giving terrestrial broadcast stations the ability to crowdsource music, target advertising and provide an outlet for promotions and games.
The Internet application provides terrestrial radio stations with a Google-like feel and experience. Run from a server sitting alongside the radio station's digital programming equipment in the broadcast studio, an Internet application allows listeners to take control of the music sent over the airwaves. The server plugs into the audio-out pin to transmit through the broadcast tower and the Internet.
Jelli's Internet interface provides a list of songs. The music listeners vote on the songs they want to hear. Votes move songs up or down the chart. Clicking on the "Rocks" or the "Sucks" meter keeps or removes songs from playing on the air. "It usually takes a little more than half the audience to blow up a song and take it off the air by hitting the 'Sucks' button," Dougherty says. "It usually happens about once per show." When the crowd blows up a song, the next track moves up the queue and into the play box..."
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115660
" '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.
Jelli chief technology officer and co-founder Jateen Parekh, left, with chief executive and co-founder Michael Dougherty.
"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....
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."
Wall Street Journal 12.31.09
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703462304574606992942654558.html
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