Crowsourced Radio
Several years back, when I was a lot younger, I used to marvel at the voices I heard on radio. It was so enchanting and so out of this world that the possibility of ever hearing myself over the air was something I was scared to even dare imagine. Secretly though, in my dream world, I knew I wanted it. It was like that little taboo that even though publicly abhorred, has its own irresistible attraction.
Fast forward to the present and now the whole thing has flipped. It’s no longer surprising. It’s not even as attractive as it was. Somehow the shine has dulled through years of radio commercials, imaging voice and a myriad of other radio stuff.
It’s however not un-common to come across the excitement of a listener who has heard their voice for the first time on radio. Birthday calls, discussion call ins, music requests, salaams and incident reports are just some of the ways in which radio fans dreams of being on air have come alive. Rarely do they get an opportunity to control what goes on air though.
Imagine you are the listener and imagine it was possible for you to control what music is played and not just that. Even further, imagine that you could also say a few words concerning anything under the sun and all that is broadcast for everyone to hear. This is beyond radio as it is widely understood now. In fact, very few programming directors would let go the reigns on their station content in exchange for complete lack of control.
However, this is not a mirage any more. It’s now possible with crowdsourced radio.
The Oxford dictionary defines crowdsourcing as obtaining (information or input into a particular task or project) by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.
Crowdsourcing is not an entirely new concept in Kenya. Ardent ICT enthusiasts will find Ushahidi a not too strange name. It’s the organization that first widely deployed crowdsourcing in Kenya during the 2007/2008 general elections. It has also been used in bits by radio and TV stations over the years. One notable example is Kiss TV’s request sessions where for a few hours the viewer gets to control the station’s music playlist.
With an ever dwindling market share, radio stations are constantly under pressure to develop new ways of reaching out to their listeners and keeping them. Advancement in technology can be a good friend if used strategically and profitably. On the other hand, because of technology, listeners more than ever, continue to have extensive choice of media. After all, what hope does radio have when anyone can play any music, on-demand, any time they want? This is especially given that music is still the biggest driver of listenership. It doesn’t help radio’s cause at all. Nevertheless, very few companies have delved into fulltime crowdsourcing as a strategy to build listenership. One of those that stand out is 97x, a radio station in the US developed in a collaboration between media solutions company Cox Media Group and LDR Radio, (Listener Driven Radio) an interactive broadcast technology that turns broadcasters into crowdcasters.
The premise of 97x is the question “If a service, like a radio station, exists to give consumers what they want, why not let the consumers decide what that really is?”
Tech Crunch wrote an informative article about this and pointed out that “in the first four hours of teasing its launch, 97x received 31,000 song votes. To give you an idea, the station, in a typical week, usually has around 300,000 people tuning in. Assuming traction continues at this pace, it could translate into a massive leap in listeners.”
97x is special in that it doesn’t only allow listeners to vote for the songs they want to hear, but also get an opportunity to put their voices on air. Like several crowdsourcing techniques, this employs mobile technology via an iOS and android app installed on their mobile phones. The app, includes an “Open Mic” feature, which lets users record a 10-second introduction, dedication, song request, or whatever else they want to say, using their smartphone. The audio clip is then sent to the studio, where the DJs play it in conjunction with whatever song clip it’s referencing or in another timeslot that makes sense.
These DJs aren’t completely out of a job with the listener takeover, you’ll be glad to know. They’ll still vet those audio clips, of course, fill the queue with new music, and they still have some say over what goes on the air. That is, it has to match the station’s format.
Daily Crowdsource also documents Virgin Mobile’s entry into the crowdsourced radio scene with Radio Free in Australia.
Explorations have been on-going in Kenya for a while now with Internews Kenya and iHub research blazing the trail. Internews have especially gone a step ahead where radio is concerned with the Wanakonnect pilot Project which involved community radio stations. It was implemented between August 2011 and January 2012.
According to Internews Center for Innovation and Learning, the community radio stations participating in the pilot project offered special dedication and greeting programs that allowed community members to send greetings to friends and family on air. The main objective of this pilot was to understand whether these generally underfunded radio stations could monetize these greetings systems through a mobile money technology that would be developed with another implementing partner, MobiKash, a mobile wallet service provider based in Nairobi. iHub Research’s approach is slightly different although still employing mobile and internet technology for the transmission of messages. I attended the launch of its 3Vs (Viability, Validity, Verification) Crowdsourcing Framework for Elections at Bishop Magua Centre where Angela Crandall, Nanjira Sambuli and Chris Orwa, part of the the think tank behind the framework made very informative presentations on its passive crowdsourcing technique.
Twitter is the choice platform used in this framework. Simply put, an algorithm is used to mine tweets with specific words (tags) and rate them according to the number of appearances. The more the appearances of the tags in different tweets from different people, the higher the score and therefore their verifiability.
It attempted to verify the assumption that crowdsourced information (collected from Twitter, Facebook and text messaging) captures more information, faster about the on-ground reality than traditional media outlets.
The project found out that in Kenya, news has constantly broken out faster through social media than traditional news outlets. From the information available concerning the algorithm used in the 3Vs framework and how it works, it is clear that it can also be employed by media houses to mine specific key words and therefore acquire leads to stories sooner and advantageously use it to respond faster in coverage. A moving example is the Westgate terrorist attack where the first tweet was recorded about 30 minutes before any report of the incident went live on television.
The research and application of crowdsourcing for various purposes is practical proof of its viability as a new strategy for increased interactivity that taps into the wave of new media that is rapidly being adopted locally. Of course a lot more still needs to be done to modify, streamline and make it as effective and accurate as possible. What has been done so far, however point to a bright future for crowdsourcing in traditional media and especially radio for that matter.