Goodbye Program Director, Hello Crowdsourcing Playlists
It sounds like a great idea, but then I think wayyyy back to when I used to DJ in a club and remember all of the drunk fools who would come in and Yell “Freebird! — Play Freebird!” … if the obsessive fans had their way, it would have been all Freebird 24X7… forget about that Elvis Costello tune or the new cut from The Clash…
What happens if you crowd source your play list now?
One name: Justin Bieber.
What if you could bomb the ones you don’t like, seconds before they’re supposed to play, or even make the DJ yank a painfully offensive tune once it’s on the air?
Listeners to a growing number of U.S. radio stations now have that chance.
Jelli, a Web-based service created by former staffers from Amazon and Microsoft, offers stations a portal to let their listeners, in effect, use crowdsourcing to program their shows.
Creators say it’s a way to marry traditional terrestrial radio with the online tools that, for the past decade or so, have been creating a new wave of competition for them.
“We thought … what would it look like to kind of reinvent radio? Could we create something new with something old?” said Michael Dougherty, Jelli’s CEO.