I was about to board a Virgin America flight from Boston to Los Angeles, and pop music streamed through speakers at the gate.
As I passed by them, one airline employee said to another, “Who picked that music??”
The colleague replied, “Pandora did.”
So much for certain corporate radio executives who insist on saying, “Pandora never can compete with *local radio, because it doesn’t have the personality of a real local station.”
Really?
Name the closest big commercial music station. Let’s call it KIIS-FM (not to single out that station, but to use a name for which there are numerous permutations).
When’s the last time someone asked “Who picked out that music?” and was told, “KIIS-FM did”?
Pandora is radio.
To its millions of fans, it is live.
And to those fans, it is local…if we define “local” as “relevant to the listener’s life.”
*Sometimes they’ll say “live radio,” sometimes “live local radio,” and probably what they mean is “simulated live radio in a simulated local setting.”
Comments on this entry are closed.
Spot on. If “local” were all that mattered when it came to entertainment, we’d only watched locally-produced TV and movies, only listen to local bands or read local authors. Relevance is the key.
I could be amiss, but I detect there are several Pandora deniers in radio.