Recent reports show that Pandora has streamed 3.3 million songs to iPhone users since the launch of its new mobile application. That’s a lot of peeps in a short span of time. Since the new iPhone came out Pandora has registered 180K new users and around 200K new stations have been created on the iPhone alone! Hey again, that’s a lot of peeps. These figures coupled with the continuing robust sales of iPods and their kind means there are a lot of people out there who just by the variety of technology choices aren’t listening to the radio as much… or at all.
Daunting, yes indeed. But I am perplexed but the multiplicity of radio stations that are trying to emulate facets of the iPod hardware and Pandora (music genome) models.
How about these radio offerings:
All request lunch
You Choose Weekends
Radio Impulse
Station WXYZ on shuffle
Stop it… You’re only a cheap façade of what’s going on in the narrowcast pull technology world. You are a broadcaster, a purveyor of push technology. You can’t narrow cast. Well, you could if you bought one transmitter and tower and got a frequency position for every one person who Cumes your station. That’s ridiculous. You’d have a field of transmitter towers that would run for miles. That’s perfectly good land that could be used for a shopping mall or golf course. (Oh, I just kill me… and only me)
Again, you’re a broadcaster! Slow, clumsy on-air social network programs pale in comparison to one of a 1000 on-line social networks. All request shows may at best make you temporarily more diverse (if you let it) but in the end each request played (real or fake) only momentarily satiates that one listener until the next selection doesn’t.
Stop it Stop It Stop it! Again, you are a broadcaster. You can’t narrow cast to each individual in the cume. Stop trying to be a tool that you’re not!
You don’t bang nails with a screwdriver, you don’t sweep floors with a dump truck and don’t snorkel with a vacuum cleaner strapped to your back.
As a broadcaster what you do do, can do, should do and must do is entertain. You can’t play the exact right song that one person needs but you can present the music you’ve chosen with meaning, stories, feelings, shared emotions and purpose.
Examples of the top of my head:
“I picked out this track from Coldplay right now because I was in the car with my wife last night and this song came on WXYZ and she started singing along. As she sang the words I fell in love with her all over again”
Somebody help me! So I’m in the shower and I started singing, ”I can ride my bike with no handle bar, no handle bars…”that was three days ago and I can’t stop. Oh God here it is again on WXYZ.
“Is it just me? When I play I Will Posses Your Heart by Death Cab for Cuite… images of Silence of the Lambs and Texas Chain Saw Massacre engulf my cranium. That’s not just me… right?”
“I downloaded it from iTunes and now all twelve tracks are the soundtrack to anything I’m doing…”
“Trent Reznor seems incessantly mad and sad no matter what he’s singing…”
“If you buy the Silversun Pickups CD or download the tracks and you don’t think it’s the best album of songs ever recorded by human beings with opposable thumbs… I will eat this radio station.”
I could come up with 10,000 more but you get the idea. Yeah, that’s right… sharing ideas, visions, feelings, moments of elation, distraction or the painted veil of sadness, etc., etc…
These are the things that the broadcaster can do that Pandora or your iPod cannot. Music delivered with meaning is so powerful that it can take over the mind. If we’re talking the battle for mind share then I can’t think of anything more important than finding entertainers who can engage a listener. As they used to say, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” That’s true now more than ever.
