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I’ve been checking out the weblog for The Current, a new format just launched by the folks at Minnesota Public Radio. They’re trying to capture the same kind of audience that we targeted at WXPN, the 35+ NPR-loving hipster who doesn’t want to listen to classical all day. What’s remarkable is that part of the station’s programming mandate is to play music from a local artist every hour.

But will it help the station, or hurt it?

The challenge of being a broadcaster is that, by definition, your job is to create compelling programming that reaches as wide an audience as possible. In most music research circles, any song that’s either off-putting or unfamiliar causes the listener to switch the dial. Whether you measure your success in ratings like commercial radio or raw listener donations like public radio, cutting out parts of your audience leads to your demise.

And I’ve seen this happen in person. You take a focus group full of people that tell you that they want to hear "local" music and "new" music on their radios. Give them trackable tuners and see what they actually do in practice. And nine times out of ten, they flip the dial to something else when one of those program elements pops on. The disconnect between what listeners say they want and how they act is driving programmers crazy and/or out of the business.

That’s why, when I wrote Grow Your Band’s Audience just after leaving WXPN, I emphasized that radio programmers love to discover new music and they love to help new artists — yet they understand that putting new artists on the air too soon hurts the artist and the station. Radio airplay, therefore, is a symptom of your musical success, not a cause.

Coming back to The Current, I see another listener thread that’s stayed the same since my radio days. In our current, multi-channel, feed-driven media environment, listeners are more and more accustomed to receiving news and entertainment customized to their explicit tastes. The trend with public radio listeners, who feel heavily invested in the stations they love, is to not necessarily turn the dial when they hear a song they don’t like, but to complain vigorously until the next song comes on.

Until recently, listeners would hang around, gripe, call up the station and threaten, repeatedly, to cancel their membership. What’s changing is that, for music lovers, there’s a choice. You can take the same $10 a month that you could have donated to public radio, and sign up for Sirius or XM. Or you can buy an iPod Shuffle and listen to podcasts. Even if you have to buy a new one every year, you’re still up on the deal and getting to hear exactly what you want, without sacrificing the editorial oversight that makes radio (and podcasts) valuable.

If Thistle and Shamrock or World Cafe or Echoes could find a financially feasible way to podcast their shows, they could start to bundle packages together the way Audible does with news shows like Marketplace and All Things Considered. (For $15 a month, Marketplace downloads to an MP3 player I got for free.) From the consumer standpoint, it would be huge.

It won’t happen.

The royalties program producers would have to pay to podcast RIAA music would crush them — they’re only able to afford to stream their shows live thanks to the direct intervention of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This, despite the wishes of  many artists who don’t know or understand how those particular restrictions came into being. There’s no way pubcasters could spring for the time-delayed archives that the BBC have just launched (the benefits of being in another country), let alone the on-demand, background archival of podcasting.

Which brings me to one of the reasons I’ve wanted to launch TryTunes.com. We’ll have two elements to our feed. First, you’ll get individual, Creative Commons-licensed new music from artists eager to reach those tastemakers. You can subscribe to the all-you-can-eat feed, or pare down your selections to specific genres and modes to grab only the stuff you expect you’ll like. Second, you’ll get the occasional mix-show, where we’ll try to put some of the new songs into a context that’s easier to manage for commuters and office listeners. As much as we all love the shuffle feature on our players, there’s really nothing like the craft of a well-considered set of segues. That’s the element of radio that I’ve missed the most. I had the joy of building those links on The Difference and on World Cafe, and it will be fun to get back in the saddle on TryTunes.

Yes, we’re using only CC-licensed material *or* material granted to us under similar licensing. I’m doing this under the "hobby" umbrella for now, and I’ll worry about making it pay off down the road. (Though one can make the argument that I’ll get to interact with lots more artists who might want to participate in some of my programs — that would be a side effect I could live with!)

If we can program TryTunes correctly, some of our shows will sound like what you’ll hear on World Cafe two years from now, once our featured artists move up the food chain to bigger labels that enforce the statutory royalties and probably have no clue or care for Creative Commons-licensed music.

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