Radio Ink - Radio's Premier Management & Marketing Magazine

November 2, 2009: Citadel Media has signed a deal to offer Listener Driven Radio, a "crowdcasting" platform developed by McVay Media CEO Mike McVay, McVay New Media President Daniel Anstandig, and Zapis Capital CEO Lee Zapis. LDR lets listeners influence programming with requests and through uploads and votes for new music via station websites, smartphones, and a widget that can be added to pages on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and 80 other social networks.

Anstandig tells Radio Ink, "Instead of playing music to our audience, we're playing music with our audience, and giving the audience an opportunity to have a direct say in how our playlists are shaped, so that radio stations become more interactive and give the audience more opportunity to pull a programming chair right up to the table and control what's happening on the air."

PDs can, Anstandig said, "dial up or dial down as much audience influence as they want," allowing minute-to-minute control of songs, using LRD info for a program or feature, or using the data simply as research. Anstandig said, "It's built to be dynamic and as open as possible to follow what the PD wants to do."

LDR sponsorship opportunities are available on station websites, in the LDR widget, and in e-mails and instant message alerts that go out when listeners ask to be notified when a favorite song is about to play.

LDR has been in development for a couple of years, Anstandig said, and is already being used on Virgin Radio France and RFM France and at KTTB/Minneapolis. When conversations began with Citadel Media, he said, "We really got excited about the fact that most of their affiliate team are former programmers and managers in the business, and so they have helped give this program the extra mile that it really needed to be an attractive offering to radio."

Citadel SVP/Programming & Distribution Carl Anderson added, "In today's day and age, when oftentimes research dollars have gone by the wayside, this gives immediate interaction with listeners, constantly or as little or as much as they want to."

Anderson sees LDR as working with just about any format; he says, "It really is an opportunity to interact, regardless of radio format, regardless of market. Everyone, at some stage, is involved in social networking, so this is a perfect marriage of broadcasting and crowdcasting, and we're really excited about the immediate feedback, where instant gratification is certainly the catchphrase of what's going on today. This enables that."