In an increasingly crowded field of general streaming platforms hosting immense catalogs of music to serve the long tail of listening demand, two trends are emerging.
First, services whose relationship to their catalog artists is keyed to non-financial values. For example, Earbits (whose iOS launch is covered in RAIN here) compensates its participating musicians with more intensive promotional tools than afforded by the big tech-music companies.
Second, services that furnish a function more specific than simple jukeboxing. DeliRadio is making splashes in this arena, by connecting its music selections to local appearances by the musicians. As such, it is difficult to decide whether it’s an artist-promotion service, or a user listening platform — and that is a refreshing balance.
DeliRadio is in the news because the 23-person company received its first major venture funding since its founding in January, 2011
— 9.35-million dollars kicked in by a small group of firms.
The DeliRadio experience is filtered primarily by the user’s location, and refined by genre and time period. Listening selections are shaped around artists scheduled to appear in local venues during the the near future. Locations with few performance spots will show slim pickings. Conversely, changing location to a hotbed of music activity, like the East Village of New York (try it: zip code 10003), pops up a wealth of listening and music discovery.
Acting as a reverse lookup for what’s going on tonight, or over the weekend, solves the typical problem of local outlet listings, when you don’t know what the listed bands sound like, and must rummage in YouTube, Spotify, or Bandcamp to piece together a night of musical bar-hopping. DeliRadio makes concert planning a music-first experience.
DeliRadio also works as a straight-ahead listening service, and encourages that user behavior with favoriting and playlisting. Many artists supply entire albums for free streaming, providing a more concentrated artist-discovery experience than Pandora or iTunes Radio.
Spotify has recently added concert listings to its app, so the investment in DeliRadio is well-timed to push its advantage as a dedicated concert-info solution.