MARCONI DREAMS

At one time, disc jockeys were hired for their talent as entertainers, and their love of, and feel for, music. Pandora.com has taken the music idea and run with it. Pandora is the offspring of the Music Genome Project, where musicologists have developed a method of classifying recordings by their musical and performance characteristics. An example explains it best: you can go to the site and create your own personal music channel(s) by typing in an artist, composer, or style, and the program delivers a continuous stream of music that matches your choice. Then you fine-tune the channel by rejecting or approving tunes, or adding more artist names or descriptors. Pandora is uncannily accurate at supplying music in the vein you identify. It’s probably the best marriage of geekiness and content on the Web. On radio-industry music stations–broadcast, satellite or Web–music selection is mandated by random-sample market survey techniques and stress-emphasis-frequency formulae. On all but the most obscure campus or non-commercial music-freak stations, the human element has been diminished to virtually nil. Now–as U.S. music radio is beginning to know what a Greenland glacier feels like–now would be a great time to steal back the idea of human-programmed music radio. It’s time to free up the suppressed radio guys–and women–stalking the back halls of stations all over the country. Or hire fascinating, talented people from your community–every town is loaded with them, and the radio business is conspicuously not. When people, not formats, reach out to listeners as only they can, sharing their lives and musical knowledge with their neighbors…then, AM and FM radio will recover its vitality and grow again.