Back in the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll, it was so cool to call up the DJ on the station everyone listened to and request a song. You waited by your radio, maybe a while, and then you heard that voice coming over the airwaves, clear as the night air:
“And this is dedicated to Joy from Frankie, who sends his love--'Teen Angel’ by Mark Dinning.”
Request radio has been a mainstay of music radio since that time, but in just the last year and some it’s begun to take on a whole new life in this era of social media. It’s too early to say it’s the next big thing in radio, but radio people see real promise.
Imagine music radio where the listeners, not DJs, pick what songs will be played, nominating songs and voting on them from their computers or for that matter their portable listening devices.
Two new formats, Jelli and Listener Driven Radio, offer listeners just that, enabling them to select what music gets played in real time.
"It’s a great idea because it really gets the listeners involved in the programming,” says John Gehron, a veteran radio industry programmer and consultant at Broadcast Consultant.
Jelli, founded in 2008, offers listeners a library of music to choose from, and they can vote for the song they want to hear next. Whenever one song ends, the song on the top of the list in votes is played next, in a kind of radio democracy.
But there's a twist, and it's here where Jelli introduces an element of social media.
In addition to voting on songs, listeners can campaign for votes for their favorite song in the site’s live chat room. Further, they can use what Jelli calls rockets and bombs to influence the playlist. A rocket moves a song into the top three places on the list; a bomb moves a song down to the bottom.
This ability to bomb songs works even for songs that are already playing. If enough people vote it down, the song can get pulled off before it finishes.
Jelli was developed for radio by Triton Media, which syndicates both national and local formats. With the national format, listeners vote as part of a nationwide pool. The local format limits voting to listeners in that one market. That gives the playlist a very local flavor, and listeners can even nominate and vote for local bands.
“If I were a programmer today I would love a system like this,” says Gehron. “It allows you to interact with your listeners at a high level and really customize a station to the audience at that point and time."
Last June CBS-owned KITS (Live 105)/San Francisco started carrying the nationally syndicated Jelli on Sunday nights. Triton VP of strategy Jim Kerr says the show has significantly higher ratings than its predecessor, the syndicated “Loveline” program. Now KITS has launched a local version weeknights from 7 p.m. to midnight.
Listener Driven Radio, launched last July by McVay New Media, is similar but works more closely with a local station's existing format. The station can specify what songs are available for listeners to vote on at any time. Voting could be as infrequent as once a daypart or for every song. The station can give listeners just two songs or the entire station library to vote from.
In addition, listeners can receive email or text alerts when the station is looking for voters. Users can also upload their own audio. It could be a local band submitting its songs or listeners uploading jokes as part of a station promotion to choose a new morning show co-host.
Like Jelli, Listener Driven Radio is in its infancy, with one station in Minneapolis and several international clients. It’s in the process of launching two stations in top 10 markets.
Presumably, more stations will follow the lead of Jelli and Listener Driven Radio. If they have to look further for inspiration, they can turn to the web and online stations like Last.fm, where listeners can create their own playlists.
