A User-Generated Radio Station
Would you listen to a radio station that is programmed entirely by a community of thousands of music fans? Fred Wilson has a post this morning about CBS Radio’s new HD station, WNEW. CBS combined a music blog, a Last.fm group (CBS owns Last.fm), and a HD station to create an online & offline experience for WNEW. I don’t have HD or satellite radio and probably won’t get them till I buy a new car, but Fred’s post reminded me of an idea I had a while back. CBS or some other company should create a user-generated radio station.
The idea is similar to Threadless, the user-generated t-shirt company. On Threadless.com, anyone can submit t-shirt designs by uploading a Photoshop file to the site. Visitors then vote on the designs and Threadless produces the top rated artwork as t-shirts that you can order online. It’s a brilliant idea that has been adopted by other companies like JPG, a user-generated photography magazine. I’ve often thought that this could be an interesting concept for radio.
Listeners could visit a website and submit songs. Perhaps they could even submit brief audio recordings such as personal interviews with bands, commentary on albums, dedications, and other voice-over work typically performed by DJ’s between tracks. Site visitors would then vote on the audio posts and the most popular stuff would be featured on-air. You could listen to the station either online or through HD / satellite / terrestrial radio.
CBS seems particularly well positioned for this since they own radio stations across the country and they acquired Last.fm, a popular online music community. Sirius or XM could also do it. Or, maybe it’s an opportunity for a new start-up. I could see it becoming a popular service that markets itself, much like Threadless, through word-of-mouth among the people contributing and voting on the audio content.
Would you tune in?
