Radio reinvented

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This is the year of music discovery. Or so you might think listening to the hallway chatter at the recent National Assn. of Recording Merchandisers annual meeting in San Francisco.

People want more music, but they want trusted guides who could tell them how liking Prince might lead them to Portishead. They don’t need to spend a lot of money buying CDs or individual songs to find out what they don’t like. Social networking sites such as Imeem and MySpace have become popular ways for people to share musical tastes, as have music sites such as Mog and Pitchfork.

But what is there for people who don’t want to work as hard, who want to feel like they have discovered music without the hard work of signing up ‘friends,’ socializing with anyone and sifting through all the bad stuff?

Not to be left out of the music discovery business is an old hand at it: Clear Channel Communications, the broadcasting and advertising giant whose name is synonymous to some with centralized programing.

Clear Channel is experimenting with ways to give customers more control with a new site called Erockster, which streams music throughout the day with few ads. The slogan ‘you listen, you interact, you control the airwaves’ promises a lot but the experience is still one-way: a smart D.J. picking music (albeit great music) for the listener.

And maybe that is why Clear Channel is reportedly looking at partnering with online sites such as Pandora.com and Last.FM to capture the wave of people who want a D.J. who is also part Jeeves.

-- Michelle Quinn