Clear Channel is getting ready to expand its online presence with several interesting new services including a personalized radio player, lyrics page and widget applications. Although they have not provided details about the radio player, according to Billboard, Clear Channel will be partnering with Pandora offering the Pandora radio service across its Web sites.

Pandora is an internet radio station of sorts that allows users to build customized stations based off of an artist the user chooses. Based on this artist, the Pandora system recommends songs that sound similar based on a catalog of about 500,000 songs.

With options constantly increasing online for music entertainment, Clear Channel and other radio stations are realizing that if they do not expand their presence online, listeners will turn elsewhere. CBS Radio announced plans earlier this month that it will be partnering with Last.FM, its sister company, for a similar DJ/radio feature called Play.It. Both of these announcements indicate that traditional radio stations are responding to their listeners’ desires for a customized listening experience, one where they are in control of who and what they listen to.

Clear Channel also announced that it will be introducing a nationwide Internet radio station called erockster. This will be Clear Channel’s first radio station that isn’t simply a local station broadcasting on the Internet. Clear Channel has also added a lyrics service being provided by Gracenote. The service adds a lyrics link to each song profile streamed online as well as artist pages. The lyrics link takes the listener directly to a page with the lyrics for that song. Finally, Clear Channel also announced it is creating widgets, provided by Clearspring, allowing fans to stream member stations from social networking profiles.

All of these changes are necessary for Clear Channel to remain competitive at a time when users are increasingly turning away from radio stations which dictate their listening experience. Listeners are instead turning to the Internet, where their listening experience is highly customizable. The variety of music and genres available to listeners on the Internet does not even compare to the short playlist of songs most traditional radio stations rotate through.

How will other radio stations continue to respond, especially the smaller radio stations that aren’t owned by a big media company like Clear Channel? The implications this can have for the music industry as a whole will also be interesting to see. Record companies, for example, will increasingly have more and more options to distribute their artists’ music, rather than just relying on radio stations and TV music channels such as MTV.

-Melina

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.