As many times as Radio has been declared dead, it has always risen again.  As it turns out there may always be room for audio-only news and entertainment.  People love talk and music-based radio during long drives and commutes.  Radio gives us a constant stream of information without distracting us from the job at hand.  You can’t effectively hammer nails or drive a car while watching a video, most of us wont even try.

No programming, no creating mix-tapes or remembering to change out the same 6 CDs that have taken up permanent residence in your changer, just turn it on and search for what you want to hear.  These are the qualities that keep a radio as a standard in every car made since the first car radio was developed.  However, the portable radio that also used to be a standard in the hands of every teenager whether at the beach or hiking in the mountains has faded.  Just try and find a portable radio during the next power outage, they are few and far between.

For the last couple of years there has been a push by digital content providers to bring back radio to our hands in new forms and on a new platform, smartphones.  Smartphones can now listen in to local and unimaginably distant stations with unsurpassed quality that the old portable radios could only dream of.  These newer platforms also support services like Pandora that guess what you’d like to hear next and services that can let all your friends know what your listening to.

NPR One

National Public Radio has been a strong contender in digital radio since it first became popular.  Local and national stations have been accessible on a wide variety of platforms for many years.  Their latest offering NPR One gives users a “personally curated”  experience.  What this means is that NPR One will let you browse through a wide library of current stories, remember what you liked and offer you more of the same.  The concept is to let listeners design their own radio listening experience on the fly.  Users can also search through NPRs current catalog for shows and pieces they already know they like. However, the search only covers recent news, events and shows.  It’s meant to be up to date and revenant rather than a historical tool.

NPR One requires that users log in so that they can create a listening profile for each and it requires use of the microphone.  The microphone comes in to play to let the user respond to one of the interactive features.  For example a piece or an ad about a movie may ask you to say the name of the movie to hear more about it.   It really is a clever app that will undoubtably grow in complexity and features.  Since it’s free, it’s definitely worth checking out.

iTunes Radio

It’s not surprising that iTunes got into digital radio, they have a huge catalog of audio entertainment and lots of licensing deals.  Like satellite radio they have some basic channels, “Top 50” for Pop, Alternative and Hip Hop, Classic rock, NPR and others however, users can also create their own channels based the artists they like.  iTunes Radio is not a fully interactive service you hear pretty much what they play.  You can skip songs, a limited amount of times (six skips per hour) and you are stuck with occasional ads unless you subscribe to iTunes Match, Apple’s cloud backup service for music.  What is surprising is that iTunes Radio is fast becoming one of the top three digital radio services while still not offering a player for Android devices.  With the largest catalog of music and entertainment on the planet, iTunes radio is the service to watch.

Pandora

Just about everyone has heard of Pandora.  They revolutionized digital radio with their Music genome project.  The algorithms represented by the music genome project are what make decisions about what song you will hear next.  Pick a song, listen to it, and then Pandora will search other songs you may like.  Users vote either thumbs up or down on each song and Pandora finds more it hopes you’ll like.  This gives them a huge database of information on user’s likes and dislikes as well as how songs are rated by their users.  Using all this information effectively has made Pandora the most popular of all the streaming music services. iTunes match has a lot to catch up to against this venerable streaming service.  I think one of the most interesting comments I’ve read about iTunes Radio and Pandora was about the differing philosophies. “Pandora wants you to keep listening, iTunes Radio wants to sell you music.”

Just plain old radio, please

So, radio is not dead its just changing, becoming more interactive and available.  In fact setting up your own Internet radio station has become quite easy, as several people I know can attest.  Ever thought of yourself as a DJ or running your own talk show?  Why not all you need is a computer, or a friend with one.

Prentiss Gray is a writer and stay at home Dad with 27 years in the information systems and technology business.  His favorite saying is “If you have to read the manual to use it, I don’t want one.”  He can be reached via his websiteGrayResearch.net .