Long-time AccuRadio program director Paul Maloney has been promoted to the full-time position of Executive Vice President/Programming, AccuRadio CEO Kurt Hanson and COO John Gehron announced today.

“For the past 13 years, Paul has skillfully managed one of the toughest dual positions in our industry — serving as both Executive Editor of ‘RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter‘ and VP/Programming for AccuRadio,” Gehron said, “and we believe that permitting Paul to focus full-time on AccuRadio will allow us to take that service to a new level of growth.

Maloney began his radio programming career at one of the nation’s best-known student-operated commercial radio stations, WPGU/Champaign-Urbana. He eventually went on to program KFMZ/Columbia, MO, flipping the heritage AOR station to Alternative, and bringing its 12+ ratings above a 10 share before joining RAIN in the summer of 2000 as a journalist.

As for AccuRadio, it evolved out of a series of RAIN articles in 2000 through 2002 intended to show broadcasters how they could build a multichannel, personalizable Internet radio service. Beginning with three channels of music — “Swingin’ Pop Standards,” “Modern Rock Classics,” and “Piano Jazz” — AccuRadio now offers over 975 personalizable channels of rock, pop, classical, jazz, country, R&B, Broadway, and more, targeting P35-64 listeners. Maloney is responsible for supervising the programming of all 975 channels, working with a team of in-house music programmers and outside programming consultants.

“We’ve just launched a state-of-the-art sixth generation of our technology platform that is bringing some amazing new features to AccuRadio,” Maloney noted, “and I look forward to expanding our team of music programmers to take advantage of those features.”

Hanson added, “It’s been one of my great pleasures over the last 13 years to work with Paul on a day-to-day basis, and I’m thrilled we’re now in a position to be able to let him devote his full-time attention to programming the AccuRadio product.”

AccuRadio has outlived all of the other personalizable brands of the era in which is was founded, including NetRadio.com, AOL-owned Spinner, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast, WWW.com, MediAmazing, DiscJockey.com, and Viacom-owned Sonicnet. Maloney’s promotion is effective immediately. His transition to his new full-time AccuRadio responsibilities will occur over the next month, as veteran journalist Brad Hill takes over RAIN editorial duties (see today’s top story here).