Unless you’re native, you’ve figured out that “Listener advisory panels” and “request lines” have almost nothing to do with what music you hear on the radio. The local program director maintains a playlist of “allowed” songs – perhaps mandated to him by “corporate”.
Part of the reason for this was the “Payola” problem. Record companies would provide money, drugs, prostitutues, etc… to get a program director or disk jockey to play their songs. Taking away that freedom blocks that incentive [right, sure it does!]
What if the listeners to a music radio station were able to pick the music being played on their station – a “tug of war” done in real time with listeners fighting for which songs would play next (from a big play list).
Jelli is a mobile device app that is trying to find out. The company that makes Jelli owns a radio station in Las Vegas (maybe some others). Users of their “App” choose which songs play (the songs have to be within the genre, but the database of available songs is pretty big)
So it looks like maybe 1 or 2 people use the app 🙂 I definitely don’t understand the business model here. There are no ads in the stream.
My guess is if this was widely used, radio stations would tend to the eccentric – the people with “no life” who would spend all day playing tug of war would skew the playlist to the stuff nobody but them wants to hear. But I could be wrong.
I think Pandora on the net has a good idea where a listener more or less grooms his or her listening preferences, beginning with a genre or two and going from there. Of course that kind of thing applied to non-account listening would prove mighty hard to do, if not impossible.
Yes, but Jelli is being used on real radio stations, not your iPhone. Social Networking with a network of 1 member is an oxymoron.