Radio vs. on-Demand: Why Make Them Choose?

Here's your cake: millions of on-demand songs at your fingertips, with or without a payment obligation attached. But it turns out that listeners don't want to play deejay all the time. Instead, a more passive, lean-back experience often does the trick—that is, until the listener wants something specific.

So why make them choose? That's sort of the learning at we7, which recently layered a Pandora-style offering on top of its on-demand service. But there are lots of other interesting combinations happening. Have you tried MOG's radio player, for example? Maybe this is just novelty to the outside world, but MOG's very slick radio player allows users to custom-control the influence of a specific artist.

Is this just a geek-out moment, or is there something interesting here? If Pandora can take thumbs-up, thumbs-down prime time, seems like anything's fair game. And now, RadioTime is dropping another innovation into the discussion. The company's 'Song Search' technology—officially unwrapped Wednesday morning—is being blended into TuneIn, now a top 40 paid app on iTunes. Song Search allows users to find stations by entering specific songs or artists—then RadioTime fetches an actual station playing or about to play that music.

All of this is real-time, though RadioTime is also building station histories. That allows better matching between user preferences and stations. “Song Search is the first technology that allows users to search for historical and real-time radio—both terrestrial and internet-only stations," relayed Bill Moore, CEO of RadioTime. Check it out at radiotime.com, or across the family of TuneIn mobile apps and widgets.