Social Internet Radio Archive

AOL is announcing a new partnership with CBS today and the re-launch of its AOL Radio destination site. Over 350 radio channels are available including 200 CBS channels and 200 AOL radio channels plus user-generated custom channels.

The new player works on both Mac and PC, create preset channels and click back to the last 30 songs you’ve listened to. You can also share songs with friends and run a mini-player inside of AIM.

As of April 2008, comScore ranks AOL radio as the most trafficked radio site online.

NYC’s 1010 WINS is one of the new stations available on AOL Radio. Growing up, this was the only station that worked on the shower radio – everyday I heard “you give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.” I wonder if it’s still 22 minutes today.

CBS and CBS-owned Last.fm have announced a distribution deal today that will bring CBS Radio stations across the U.S. to the Last.fm Internet music service. The deal will bring the top stations including New York’s WCBS-FM, Los Angeles’ KROQ, Chicago’s WXRT and Atlanta’s WVEE to Last.fm. CBS also notes, "A staggered rollout of CBS RADIO’s streams to Last.fm is currently underway and includes all genres, including rock, pop, country, news, talk
and sports stations, among others. The full online version of the stations will be streamed, providing Web-based advertisers additional exposure to Last.fm’s growing U.S. audience."

Basically what this means is that if you like the on-air personalities on one CBS station and move to another city, you can still live like you were in the old city before you moved to the new city where you will now listen to music and information from the old city. 

Caroline at CNET has more details and check out Jake’s review of Music 2.0 from 2007.

NY-based Social Internet Radio provider Jango is announcing that they have hit the 1 million listener mark in just 60 days in public beta. In my tests, the service is fun and I now know what some of the other journalists’ music tastes are. 

The company describes the service as: Jango combines music and social networking by enabling listeners to not only create their own custom stations – but also tune in to each other’s stations in a fun and easy way. Its unique “social music player” lets you actually see who’s listening to the same artists at the same time as you, who’s tuning in to your stations, and what music your friends are playing. At any time, you can tune in and listen to any station.

The real "viral power" of Jango is in the widgetization. Once you create a radio station that you like, you can stick it in widget form on your blog or MySpace profile. Regarding the widgets, CEO Dan Kaufman noted, "Until now, music widgets have been surprisingly drab and boring. The Jango Jukebox is the first music widget that’s really cool looking and fun to use – perfect for anyone who wants to spice up their MySpace page”.

The site competes with leaders Pandora and Last.fm. For December 2007, Compete shows Last.fm at 990k visitors, Pandora at 1.5 million and Jango with a more rapid growth curve at 423k.

It’s great to see a NY-based company experiencing rapid growth and I will contact them for a full interview in the coming week.