The Infinite Dial

In the just released Arbitron/Edison Research Infinite Dial 2010 study, the Internet is rapidly closing the gap on radio as the place where people learn about new music, winnowing radio's lead to 39% to 31%. And among 12-to-34-year-olds, it's not even close, 52% to 32%.

Some will undoubtedly argue that anything radio can do now to recapture ground for music discovery will not be on its own airwaves, but on some last.fm-type play.Of course broadcasters need to engage on all platforms, but I'm not willing to concede the power of the over-the-airwaves shared discovery experience just yet. (And, oh yeah, if you oppose a performance royalty, conceding the music discovery function weakens radio's case for an exemption.)

So how could radio fight for the discovery franchise?

The most obvious one is that it could offer new music to more than one or two types of listeners. If you're a 16-year-old fan of the Rhythmic Pop that dominates Top 40, chances are that radio will still get to those songs in a relatively timely manner. If you're looking for the next "Say Hey (I Love You)" or "Hey Soul Sister," it might take its time to reach you. And if your tastes are toward the Alternative side, your new music is doled out a song or two an hour between "Lighting Crashes" and "Lithium." KBKS (Kiss 106.1) Seattle has built a new beachhead over the past two years playing more teen punk/emo than comparable CHRs and it seems to be working.

I'm also in favor of making the music director a star on the air. Every new song that goes on the station should sound like it was walked into the studio and set up by the MD (or PD, if that person is off-air and the MD isn't). Recommendations count these days and a person still counts more than a stager. And, hey, these days we're talking about that happening no more than once or twice a week anyway.

Or go a step further and have listeners introduce new music. The people who care enough to search out new music are the ones who want to evangelize for it with others. A 16-year-old make express indifference toward radio, but being able to reach tens of thousands of people with the song you thought you discovered is still pretty seductive. Deputize five listeners a week and play their picks off against each other (clips on the air, full song on the Web if you must).

We've also suggested making the whole music meeting process more transparent on your Website. Discuss every song you added and why. Discuss what you're still looking at. We've suggested this before and heard back from some programmers who say that they occasionally have a few listeners into the music meeting. It's not the same.

And this is probably a column unto itself, and does take us beyond the airwaves, but radio does need to have a strategy for dealing with YouTube as a new music destination. Radio Websites tease a new song (or album) or two at the time. Recently, I decided to use YouTube to listen to any new song that wasn't yet available to me on an industry Website or sampler; I was able to hear every song receiving 100 spins or more in every major format; (one or two of them had clearly been recorded off the air). Were radio to ever consider cutting a performance royalty deal with the labels, an ability to offer a more comprehensive new music library, including video, on station sites would have to be part of it.

Recently, a colleague was reflecting on WRXP New York morning man Matt Pinfield. "I was a huge '120 Minutes' fan," he told me. "I remember seeing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' six months before it showed up anywhere else." Then he went on to tell me that he couldn't see somebody waxing nostalgic about discovering a song on-line. The shared experience was too much a part of it, he said. And a constantly evolving type of shared experience is one of the things radio can still offer for music discovery.