Curation, Playlists and the Death of the DJ
Written Jan. 10, 2010 by Tom Webster in Internet Radio + Terrestrial Radio with 10 Comments
The inexorable march of Pandora and other streaming services to auto dashboards has some pundits speculating that we've seen the end of "The DJ." ReadWriteWeb, for instance, reacted to Pioneer's new Pandora-enabled dashboard radio as more than just the death of Satellite radio, but the end of professionally curated music, period.
That online streaming radio will stick a fork in satellite-delivered radio is beyond debate. The survival of Sirius XM (especially post-Howard) is almost entirely dependent on their untethering themselves from those pricey birds in the sky, and getting their cost of doing business down to the level of their competition--which ranges from Pandora to Spotify and on down to some guy with a server in his garage.
The death of "the DJ," or to put it more broadly, professionally curated music, is another story entirely. While terrestrial broadcasters are, in fact, killing off DJ's left and right either through downsizing or simply eliminating live and local airshifts, the role of curation has never been more important, especially with the skull-drillingly vast array of music-as-commodity services available to music fans.
One thing the Internet has done has been to give artists themselves the ability to serve as curators to their communities. Spent anytime on the celebrity playlist section on the iTunes Music Store? I have, and I can tell you that it has driven hundreds of dollars of my music purchases.
Curators are important. I've written before here of my friend Chris MacDonald's venture Indiefeed, a wonderful "single-serve" podcast in various genres that showcases a single song per podcast as a music discovery service. Chris knows full well the value of curation, and goes beyond simply backselling artist and title to tell you why you should care about a song--its influences, backstory and place. With thousands of online streams doing little more than serve as faceless jukeboxes, adding value to both the music AND the experience is the only way to escape becoming a commodity. "Branding" is more than just a few audio jingles, and I suspect that even current streaming king Pandora will figure this out as the next generation of music discovery services starts to eat into their market share.
The insidious belief that has crept into the hearts and minds of many terrestrial radio executives is that professionally-programmed playlists are demonstrably superior to what the jukebox services can offer. This may or may not be true in various cases, but one thing is for sure--listeners will never grasp that distinction unless it is meaningful, and they are aware of it. New startups like Songza are certainly aware of the value of a professionally curated experience, and they are selling the fact that real humans choose their curated song lists. The only difference between what Songza is doing and what terrestrial radio stations are doing online is in their recognition of the value of playlists.
Playlists matter. Edison and other research companies have done scores of studies showing that finding out what has been played (or will be played) is one of the top three things listeners look for on radio station websites. Playlists are content. Furthermore, the word itself has immense power. One thing that Apple and iTunes have done in the 21st century is turn the word "Playlist" from radio industry wonkery to today's "mixtape." If I publish a list of the last 20 songs I heard on Pandora, that list may or may not have some meaning for some people. But if a recognized arbiter of taste, a curator, posts such a list--it instantly adds value not only to the individual songs, but to the selection and flow of those songs. Selector can never do this, as my super-smart Twitter pal Tom Barnes reminds me. Jocks do this--jocks that have built credibility and value as musical curators.
Music radio doesn't have to march its way into a commoditized future if broadcast leadership recognizes that even though the individual songs are commodities, the playlist is original, locally-owned content--and it has value directly proportionate to the equity the station has built in its music-focused personalities. You might be amazed at how much time visitors to your station's home page spend with super-sticky content like my friend Jeffrey Specter's TuneGenie. Jeff certainly knows--he sees the impressions, length of visit statistics and search queries for his online playlist discovery service. I've seen some of his aggregated data, and I can assure you that adding playlist discovery to a radio station's otherwise moribund homepage can have immense value. What Jeff has discovered is that not only is playlist discovery extraordinarily sticky content, it is also social content.
Services like TuneGenie are one of the keys to unlocking the value of the playlist as original content, but curation is the rest of the equation. Though sites like Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are fond of prognosticating the death of today's broadcast radio industry at the hands of web streamers, there is another possible future--a future in which radio stations and online-only streamers alike achieve technological parity in the distribution of their product, but differentiate themselves though the value they create in their music brand. Sorry, "Jack," but liners and drops won't do it in the 21st century. As Charlton Heston teaches us, it's people.
Reader Comments
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Going to write a detailed comment on your core comments elsewhere, but I am curious why you disregard Jack's liners and drops. There are people behind them, and they are more entertaining than most jocks. Jack is absolutely personality radio, and I always scratch my head when I read comments like yours, implying otherwise.
Jack is good for a chuckle. It's not laugh out loud funny, and it certainly isn't interactive or thought-provoking.
This whole article relates to the waning influence of music radio in general, not just live presenters. It costs a lot (and perhaps soon a lot more) to play records on the radio, and there are far more efficient channels for finding music.
Like I always say: talk shows are the future. Not 3 or 4 hour shows hosted by five or six people, but 24 one hour shows hosted by 24 people who are not full-time radio employees, but people from other walks of life who are influential in their fields and vocations who can sell products and services.
I would argue that a playlist by itself have very little value even coming from a high value source. The days of Top40 on Billboard is long gone. Any big enough outlet can produce enmass playlists for every given reason. Bolting on "social network" style interaction will be a failure simply because this style of interactivity is inherently shallow.
The value add of a broadcast in the new world isn't just the stingers, bumpers, curated playlists. Branding will need to be more of an overall experience. As much as terrestrial DJs dislike the syndicated programs like Delilah, the cost and technical needs to produce such a program is dropping to a point anyone can produce such a program.
What music industry has lost is that it should not have become just another entertainment avenue. The value of music comes from being an avenue of expression and empathy weaving into our collective social consciousness for both the music artists as well as us consumers.
Music, as a product currently, lags badly behind every other form of entertainment in overall value. Its advantages of ease of passive consumption and pervasiveness are no longer sufficient to allow music to command the type of profit margin of the past. The only way to inject value back into music itself is to make music more relevant to the listeners.
Jim, I merely call into question the ability of *any* prerecorded liners/drops to serve as a substitute for curation. I don't disregard them as a way to create attitude or build a brand personality, but that isn't quite what I'm driving at here. I have never seen any evidence that people *trust* a liner-driven station as a source of music discovery. People trust people. Within that scope, I stand by what I wrote.
Augmented playlists will be a possibility... If radio can create the content people want in there music mix it could be an easy solution... This is how you can try it out right now: Grab a few The Onion Radio News podcasts and add them to your playlist... Now imagine if you had entertainment news from Z100 New York... Local Traffic... Earth & Sky... or whatever you want, And If the content was synced up everyday!! DUH!!!! Watch!! Create Content for Playlists!
Listeners don't think like radio people, they just listen to the songs. And it has become very clear the listener wants to know what the song was they heard, and to see suggestions of other songs they will like. For the most part radio is programmed in a way that if you like song A most likely you will like B through Z. So it becomes a very easy way for the "regular person" to quickly find a list of songs they will like. What they do with that list, is the next big issue.
Truth is, when you focus down on the "music adventurers", you're using a microscope because it's a very small group and very vocal.
A lot of people SAY they're into "music discovery"...but when it comes down to it, they quickly get bored of it and want to be spoon-fed.
So...music curation? Sure! Jocks? If they're interesting and informative and can brand themselves as "taste makers". Music enthusiasts and the passive listener appreciates that kind of leadership.
One thing for sure: in the new world of media, time-temp-weather jocks are outmoded. One can get that info on-demand on even the most basic of cell phones and internet hook-ups. So is the current "daypart" jock.
What will work is a focus on "shows"...music features (from 1-4 hours in length) with show "hosts" as opposed to jocks.
It's going to be more like television.
At the left end of the dial we've been saying for some time that the stuff *between* the songs matters more than the songs themselves.
Virtually all of our music shows are considered "specialty" shows, with a huge appeal to a limited number of people. (I'd bet that 90% of my own listeners are P1's.) The people that tune in at all tune in to hear the *host*, not necessarily the music.
Yeah, it helps if they like the music, but it should be the job of every host to weave the music together to tell a coherent story. Context, details, factoids - it should all paint a picture to the listeners that the host is the curator of his/her subject matter. We've actually been using the term "curator" for a number of years.
I totally agree with John Hendricks. I just had this conversation yesterday with someone who thinks a large jukebox streamer will be the death of radio.
As someone who got into radio becasue of the great jocks/personalities like "Cousin" Bruce Morrow, Frankie Crocker, Gary Byrd, Dan Ingram, Chuck Leonard, Sonny Taylor, Harry Harrison, Jeff Troy, Herb Oscar Anderson, Jerry Bledsoe, Max Kinkle,Murry "the K" and many others, the disc jockey began to die when radio was degrgulated and these big conglomerates gobbled-up everything, the beancounters came in over we who shgould have rightfully ascended into being program Directors in music radio, whatever the genre, and the DESK jockies replaced the DISC jockies. I have personally felt the death knellin the past few years when my "demos" go unacknowledged or answered - even with constructive criticism - no longer can I see American the radio DJ way; I got stuck where I am which is wher eI was hired last by the old 'send me your T&R" method.
I find it intriguing to think of myself as a "cureator" geyond my personal record library of over 10,00 vinyls, cassettes, CDs etc and would like more information on that new idea.
RIP