[by Peggy Anne Salz] This time it’s more than another iRadio sighting - we have concrete details on the content (and roll out) Moto says will make the subscription music service rock.  Elaborating on earlier announcements that outline the game plan for expanding the number of channels and overall reach, Dave Ulmer, senior director of marketing for Motorola Digital Media Solutions, gave a progress report on the Get Heard Network. The model borrows from the MySpace model to provide aspiring musicians, bands and DJs a vehicle to take their music directly to iRadio subscribers. “Anyone can create their own radio station and we will publish it on our network,” Ulmer says.
Among the converts: Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills & Nash) and Billy Bob Thorton have joined the network to create their own radio stations and promote new material. According to Ulmer, Moto is launching plans to launch iRadio “city-by-city” across the major metros in the U.S. Consumer trials are in place in L.A., Washington D.C. and Phoenix.  Additionally, a “top tier major carrier” in the U.S. is testing the service, and more are in the queue. In Europe, Moto has to do it the hard way - obtaining the required licenses for music and talk programming. “We can’t ignore the allegiance and desire for regional content, so we’re out there gathering up all the licensing rights for that [content] right now.”
More is better: Why aim for hundreds, even thousands of radio stations? To discover (and ultimately buy) more tracks. ”There’s a phenomenon … called i-Pod Fatigue, which is where you fill up your i-Pod—you have 5,000 or 10,000 songs on there, your brain tends to know it’s already there and it gets to be stale pretty quickly…. One doesn’t need to go far to wonder why popular music sales are down.  It’s because your ability to discover music has really gone down as more people are listening to the same music they already own and the same songs that people want you to hear.”
Taking the wraps off new navigation:  “We’re focusing on making it easy for somebody to navigate through the choices of channels, grouping them into emotions and themes and decades and genres, and also be able to provide people with logical choices for the type of music that they would like to hear, based upon what they’ve already heard.”
Recommendation engine pros &  cons: Ulmer divides recommendation into “human recommendation,”  where people sit down and tag all the songs, and “machine learning,”  where software stamps tracks with a kind of acoustical finger print and then suggests similar content on the basis of a match. What Works?  Both deliver erroneous recommendations, so harness the user. “The ‘Amazon model’ - people who are listening to this song and like it also are listening to these songs and like them.  This is what works. We just need to build up the records inside of our own database to determine which ones link together.”
Discovery rut: Moto focus research reveals users don’t always want a perfect match. “If tell you [the service] I like to listen to Avril Lavigne, and you give me more and more songs just like Avril Lavigne, then I really start ending up in a rut.” Ulmer believes users want to be challenged to listen to new music, and they get the inspiration from their friends and like-minded members of their mobile communities. Moto will add this “missing link”  to the system shortly. It will allow users “a means to send recommendations and referrals for the type of music [users] have to [their] own community.  It’s what’s been successful for MySpace groups, Yahoo! groups, YouTube and I expect we’ll be successful with it as well.”
The Long Tail of talk radio: Moto has made a lot of noise about its recent deals with the label to secure their catalogues for iRadio, but Ulmer’s new focus is talk.  “I am wallowing now in the extreme long tail of even talk content that I hadn’t thought about much.  Sure, we want news, weather,  information and popular podcasts, but when we remove bandwidth restrictions and open up the choice for the consumer, there’s a whole long list of content we can provide to a consumer in the talk side.  If you want to know about the latest fly fishing techniques or how to knit a quilt or news in the jogging and marathon front, there’s all of this that’s available that is not readily available to consumers,  because they really have to go out searching for it.”
Next step: Watch for Moto to seal deals with “three-letter networks” to provide their talk content to mobile subscribers.
You can download the audio of the interview here (10.2 MB, 25 mins).
Or you can stream it here ... click on the arrow: [audio:http://www.moconews.net/audio/Motorola_Dave Ulmer.mp3]