Radio DJs as Curators
Saturday, August 18, 2012 at 12:31PM
As a follow-up to my rant entitled How Radio Is Killing the Radio Star, take a look at this article from The Future of Music Coalition about the need for radio DJs to be musical curators.
June’s “Future of Audio” hearing got all of us at FMC thinking about, well, the future of audio. Listening to testimonials from music heavyweights like Tim Westergren of Pandora and Cary Sherman from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) left us wondering how the public will experience the soundtrack of tomorrow.
Over the past decade, music has gone through as many movements and changes as Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” As the medium of listening has evolved, so too has the manner in which we turn on to the artists we love. The digitization of the music industry has ushered in sophisticated means of finding new music — social media, video broadcasting, blogs, and algorithm-based platforms like Pandora are a few of the novel ways that music discovery has been revolutionized and arguably, liberated. Together, these services are helping consumers better ensure that they have the ability to listen to what they want, when they want.
By the same token, now that anybody with a laptop, a microphone, and basic audio software can record an album, there is simply more music out there. In turn, this places more emphasis on smart, efficient ways to find the right music for you at the right moment. As the old saying goes, the past informs the future. So when it comes to music discovery, we expect that one tried and true curation method will continue to play a part in the future of audio — the radio DJ.
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Listening to testimonials from music heavyweights like Tim Westergren of Pandora and Cary Sherman from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) left us wondering how the public will experience the soundtrack of tomorrow.