After tons of radio hype, I was dying to get my hands on the customizable iHeartRadio app / website and see if it is worth all the attention. As a semi-infrequent visitor to Pandora, I keep asking myself, “Do we need another Pandora?” Doesn’t Pandora do what we want for customization? Now that the beta test for iHeartRadio is open and I was in immediately.

First impressions:

  • iHeartRadio is tied closely to Facebook and allows instantly sharing the station and post comments on songs that you like.
  • There are a lot of similarities between Pandora and iHeartRadio with the “play” controls and the Thumbs-up or down controls to vote for songs you want to keep in.
  • The “how to build” a station needs just one artist or song to define the center lane for iHeartRadio as well as Pandora.
  • iHeartRadio has a unique 3-position level (Graphic User Interface) that allows an option of having Familiar Artists, More Discovery, or 50/50 Familiar and Discovery. Listeners can jockey between the safe and familiar. This is very cool and different than Pandora.
  • Of course both give plenty of artist information along the listening journey.

The test drive:

My test for this “off road” radio station is to stay away from the well-worn path that broadcast provides for the masses. So, let’s skip the Rihanna, Led Zeppelin, and other familiar radio artists and get “boutique.” How will this music machine perform off the pavement and into the rocks and mud is the question that I want to answer.

I built similar stations on both Pandora and iHeartRadio customized around one artist, Stabbing Westward, and have been toying with them for days. Whether you know or like the band Stabbing Westward is incidental for this experiment. You must certainly know at least one band or artist that you are a connoisseur of and can hear different aspects of within their sound that can cross several musical style lanes. Stabbing Westward is a band that I can pinpoint the specific aspects of what I hear in the music and WHY I like this music; thus, it makes for a good petri dish. If you are interested, the heavy guitar and bass put Stabbing Westward on the fringe of Active rock, but they never became a known entity in the format playing more melodic rhythms and beats that sound more “club” than “metal.” And they are dark rather than angry which is also why they may never have fully popularized in the Active lane.

Notes from the Road Test…

Pandora:

  • Pandora does not seem to be intuitive enough to know why I dislike a song. All the songs seem lumped under a major format heading and play any qualifying song that comes in this format.
  • Pandora is broad and stays broad musically and narrow with artists. Pandora deals out commercially friendly, Bush, Disturbed, System of a Down, Tool, Drowning Pool, Seether, Soundgarden, and Disturbed (again).
  • Bush and Disturbed seem to be the go-to artists for this customizable station; there does not seem to be any artist separation by hour or daypart. Pandora also seems to stay with familiar artists and they cycle back to them more often.
  • (I can forgive the lack of finesse with an automatic music system not having a Program Director to hand select songs, but…) there seems to be no sound coding at all. Despite liking the music, it sounds flat – antiseptic – and doesn’t jump out at me. So, I have to baby sit it closely using the thumbs up / thumbs down.
  • Summary: it feels like it is a jukebox that is not playing to the style nuances of my core artist.

iHeartRadio:

  • Out of the box, they play a Stabbing Westward song, and songs similar follow, but with the lever set for ‘Discovery’ there are many artists that are new to me.
  • While I make my choices with thumbs up or down (again, based upon aspects of the music that I want) iHeartRadio is paying attention in a few short songs to what style qualities I am envisioning for my custom station. The thumbs up / down tool, tailor the songs to match my expectations musically quickly. This lane I am building seems more pure towards the style qualities I want.
  • The experience for this customization iHeartRadio is narrow musically, and broad with artists, which is the opposite of the Pandora experience (see Pandora above: broad musically and narrow with artists.)
  •  Moving the 3-position lever back to “Familiar” and back on paved roads does not disrupt the current song. Out of the undiscovered artists comes a familiar radio song Trippin’ on a Hole… by Stone Temple Pilots. Yes, familiar, and yes fits my expectation.

The road report:

This iHeartRadio custom station seems superior to Pandora version since there is not the constant “massaging” to get rid of the occasional song lumped into a nebulous category. While it seems that Pandora can hear the colors of the music, iHeartRadio can hear the deeper dimensions of shades, hues, and tones. Sonically, iHeartRadio seems more intuitive to learning and matching the qualities of the music styles and more perfectly match the musical mood.

Giving the thumbs up or down should be more than a vote for or against; it needs to define the “what” about the song creates the center sound. The entire catalog of most bands are not (necessarily) created equal. Else, thousands of Boston (the band) fans would say ‘Amanda’ equals ‘Foreplay/Long Time’ or Van Halen III with Gary Cherone equals David Lee Roth. There has to be more than one criterion evaluated to find the center of the artist lane and the qualities of that mid-point sound and cross thread those characteristics with other songs of similar qualities.

This doesn’t seem to be the case with Pandora. There are too many rogue Bush songs and Stabbing Westward songs that come up on my station and suggest there is only 2 dimensional thinking going on behind the scenes. The ultimate customization needs to compare songs voted on in an algorithm and determine why the user tosses them out compared to other songs that are voted out. In other words, If I like hamburgers and I like pickles, the system has to be able to learn that I might not want pickles on my hamburger even though the rest of America does, but I still want them on the side. The music system can’t be truly customizable if it is not learning based upon listener choices on several levels.

From my years of researching and looking at listener response groups I have learned that there are certain reasons that people gravitate to certain stations. And it becomes clear that the stations who can’t read the tastes (style wants) of the listeners either die off or spin their wheels in mediocrity with no ratings success. In focus groups, most listeners can’t articulate this very well, but they know instinctively when they are dealing with a superior or inferior product. There are plenty of research tools available to help pull this information out so that programmers can define core listener values. Most Program Directors already know that 3-dimensional thinking and research will take them to greater success than automation-customized “antiseptic” stations can aspire to.

If this music test drive I took were actually a test drive of off-road vehicles, I would call Pandora a Jeep, and iHeartRadio a Land Rover. Both are likable brands and have distinct characteristics. Both can get you there and have a certain amount of swagger. The difference is that iHeartRadio feels more like a performance and customized vehicle that is loaded with options and is engineered and improved by listening to the consumer. The Jeep is nice and enjoyable and can give a close experience, but the Land Rover is higher on the food chain. As radio programmers, we need to closely listen to our listeners and become the advocates of what they want with the music they like.