Music discovery: Shaping up as the New Battleground?

The other day we posted about eMusic Radio, thirty-nine curated new music channels. Now Google has just rolled out Magnifier, a blog devoted to new music.

While there are plenty of new music blogs, Magnifier goes one step further, allowing downloads directly from the blog to Google’s music cloud.

We can expect more streaming players to put greater emphasis on similar music discovery mechanisms.

Broadcast has pretty much abandoned its traditional role of introducing new music to listeners. Even today’s CHRs play it pretty safe.

High profile efforts like that of eMusic and Google could usher in an era of broad new music interest after decades of music conservatism, where listeners favored the familiar over the new.

If music discovery becomes the new battleground, broadcast will have to rethink the cautious hyper-familiarity that has become a hallmark of music radio.