According to a study from Down Under publication The Brisbane Times, the way traditional radio presents music still holds certain advantages over the internet services that attempt to tailor formats to each one of their users.
For starters, the streaming services can’t get over the fact that at some point there is human intervention before they can turn song selection over to a machine.
Pandora, for example, uses its “Music Genome Project” to get down to the basic DNA of a song – but this process has to be done by human beings who expert though they may be are still prone to normal human prejudices and tastes.
After that, the tunes a computer picks by applying algorithms may or may not actually work for the listener.
The author of the article, Hannah Francis, noted that all services that provide custom “stations” must find a way to do it. She wrote, “Central to each is an attempt to fuse art with science, human with machine; raising the question of whether computers can truly understand something as subjective as music.”
An Australian academic, Professor Andrew Brown, says all sorts of biases can affect how such programs work.
In contrast to the online services, an Australian noncom was cited which this not to play the same song more than once a week. The PD, Owen McKern, says one of the goals is surprise, the delivery of the “unexpected.”
McKern told the Times, “You get broadcasters who put songs together that you never would have thought to do in a million years – nor would any computer program. They just have that X factor to pull completely disparate things out that, for whatever reason, just kinda work.”
Brown noted that the ability of live air talent to tell a story about any tune they play can vastly increase the value to the listener. He suggested that maybe the online services will get to that point eventually, but they aren’t there yet.
RBR-TVBR observation: We have a few things to say about this:
One is that all too many stations are slimmed down, canned things that are as antiseptic as the online services. We know that talent costs money, but without talent AM-FM radio loses one of its key differentiators in the growing battle against digital. And it’s more than just music. Good local air talent is just that – local – another key advantage radio has but is increasingly squandering.
A word about Pandora. I created a Mahavishnu Orchestra station, hoping to find artists in the same vein as that legendary band but newer, that I was unaware of.
What I got was a surprising amount of repetition. Pandora had a few artists it really liked to lump in with Mahavishnu and I heard them a lot.
Back when it was active, Mahavishnu was a blend of jazz and rock (and a bunch of other elements), and the terms for that eventually became fusion, and fusion eventually came to be less adventurous musically as those seeking big album sales supplanted those making music for its own sake – to the point where my group of musical friends started calling it fuzak.
I did not want to hear the pop stuff, but I had a hard time getting Pandora to focus on the more intense electrified jazz that was Mahavishnu’s hallmark.
In the end, I do like Pandora, and I did discover a few new artists there, but I don’t use it all that often any longer. I did renew my relationship with the service during the past couple of weeks, and my opinion was confirmed – I still like it, but I’m still getting repetition and selections that aren’t quite in my own personal wheelhouse.
Of course, I have yet to hear Mahavishnu on an FM station, but no arguments from me, I realize it isn’t that kind of medium.
But radio can be live and local, completely tuned into its core audience and the community in which they live. If it isn’t, it will be a pale shadow of Pandora, nowhere near as versatile and just as antiseptic.
Just sayin’.
