What if you woke up tomorrow with wings? Do you think you’d jump out of a ten story building to try them out, or would you at first be skeptical of flight?
You’d probably be skeptical. After a life as a land animal anchored to the ground, your first thought wouldn't be to travel through the air.
In an earlier post we asked why a radio person didn’t come up with the idea of personalized streaming.
It’s because radio people weren’t born with wings.
Radio people have spent their careers thinking of radio as a linear sequence of predetermined events. You play a song, talk a little bit, play a commercial, then play another song. Each element is programmed to create what we think of as radio.
A radio person naturally thinks of this arrangement, a single pre-packaged assemblage of elements sent out to the audience, as the essence of radio. The sound is pre-determined.
Call it Deterministic Radio.
Pandora’s contribution to radio has been to show that streaming allows radio to take a quantum leap (literally) and become probabilistic.
Instead of pre-planning what all listeners are going to hear, an algorithm determines what each user’s stream is going to play.
Streaming frees radio from the constraints of linear sequential thinking. It opens up all sorts of possibilities, but none that a radio person thinking in terms of traditional radio would think of.
But all innovation seems obvious after the fact. Now that Probabilistic radio has been demonstrated, it will take little time before radio people start sprouting wings.
Just in the nick of time.
As reported by Digital Music News, hot money is pouring into music start-ups, $24.3 million in August alone, bringing the year’s total to $437.3 million so far.
And it looks like Last.fm and Spotify won’t be the only major International services to invade the New World. Three new European services, Boinc, Deezer, and Aupeo are all joining a crowded field that just keeps getting more crowded.
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