Monday, November 11, 2013

A Search Engine For Radio

Have you ever listened to the radio and wished that the station would play a song that you can't wait to hear? You had to wait until either the song was played, or search for another station where the song might be playing and risk missing it on the original channel. Of course, if you're near a computer you can dial that song up in a second on any number of streaming services or YouTube, but if radio is your thing, that meant that you were stuck with the way we've listened for nearly a century. But that's changed now with the a new service called Radio Search Engine.

Radio Search Engine, the brainchild of Michael Robertson (who's also responsible for DAR.fm and way back, MP3.com), allows you to search for a song or artist, and the service will find a station that's currently playing it. It gives you a list of popular songs that are playing, and poses suggestions of other songs and stations after the search engine has found your query. You can think of it sort of like Google for radio.

Radio Search Engine works pretty well but it's not perfect, probably because it depends upon song metadata. If the metadata is incorrect or incomplete, a song could be playing but RSE won't find. That's not RSE's fault, but it's something that does come up. Then there's the fact that, as stated before, you can use one of the many streaming services to do the same thing.

One area where Radio Search Engine can help an artist is by searching to see what songs are being played on radio and where. While there are other ways to measure airplay, there's nothing like hearing it yourself as the ultimate aircheck. Check out the video below on how it works.



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1 comment:

The Accidental Lyricist said...

Think I'll run a few of my songs through it and contact the shows to offer exclusives. ;-)

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