New Radio Strategies

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about social media over the past couple of months. So much so, that I’ve almost had no time for blogging. Social media’s the term now given to what was for a time known as ‘interactive media’ – until we all figured out that it wasn’t interactive in the sense of being able to actually affect the outcome of the content.

I attended a blogging conference in Chicago last week, and had a lot of discussions about this very issue, and at every opportunity, tried out the idea of radio as a social network for music fandom. I think there’s good work to be done here.

Chris Brogan brought up (in passing) the topic of music in social network sites, and the ways in which social networking needs to specialise in order to develop. It’s no good just being able to log on, make friends and build a profile anymore. Social engagement is a feature, no longer a destination.

Network radio – as in ’social’
And it occurred to me that what he was really talking about was an opportunity for radio.

Music Radio stations are, at least potentially, pre-existing music communities. People have self-selected into groups organised around a brand. The role of that brand, looked at from a social perspective, is to reinforce certain cultural values, reflect musical taste, and (most importantly) act as an source of opinion leadership.

That, I think, is where much music radio currently falls down. And I think this is where new strategies could come into play to help re-think music radio. Reflecting musical taste is prioritised, and making the most of the opinion leaders is downplayed because of what are now quite dated philosophies of music programming.

Not just a jukebox
Because emergent technologies increasingly allow for radio to act as a many-to-many medium, rather than just as a one-to-many medium, there is the opportunity for radio stations to draw upon the wisdom of the crowd and to reward and incentivise music taste-making. And this is an area in which radio has not already been beaten out by internet music servces. Because I think most online music services who cast themselves as ‘the new radio’ miss this one very important point:

It’s not just a jukebox – it’s a very human way of ordering, presenting and making sense of musical cultures. One that understands human routines, changing moods and preferences, why you might want to listen to something at night that you wouldn’t want to listen to during the day… and so on.

And likewise, I think there’s scope for radio to draw on the power of the community to generate and present metadata about the music that allows fans to make connections, develop new ways of engaging with the station output, and contributing more to the informational content about the music than simply “that was… this is… I’m… the time is… and you’re listening to…”

I’d be really interested in your thoughts about the ways in which this idea of community built around a station can be fostered – because I think this is one of the keys to the ongoing success of music radio.

Tagged: Music, social