Social radio tool lets friends create shared stations

Hard on the heels of our story about SongVote comes word of another collaborative musical decision-making tool. Just as SongVote lets friends vote up front on the music that goes into a joint playlist, so Songza lets them jointly create and refine a shared online radio station. With a library of more than 8 million songs to choose from, New York-based Songza makes it free, easy and legal for communities of any kind to create the perfect shared station for any occasion. Users simply give their station a name and choose 10 songs by at least six artists to begin with—the minimum diversity, presumably, to make it listenable. All stations on the site are public; listeners can both vote on songs to determine how often they get played, and they can request that new songs be added to the station. “We believe this makes for a far more social and relevant experience than radio based on ‘experts’ or algorithms analyzing tone and timbre,” Songza CEO Elias Roman explains. Now in beta, Songza is DMCA-compliant and ad-supported. There is no limit on the number of stations users can create. There is also no limit, of course, on the social possibilities associated with virtually any kind of content these days–or the potential advertising and/or referral fees that go along with them. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Songza add the ability to make stations private, thereby controlling who can make changes to them. Meanwhile, time to get toes tapping together in your part of the world…? (Related: Wiki book publisher for collaborative writing.)