Once upon a time, radio deejays represented the vanguard of new music. Alan Freed put Chuck Berry on the pop charts in the '50s, John Peel introduced the world to the Velvet Underground in the '60s, and, not long after, Tom Donahue invented the eclectic free-form style still heard on today's college radio. But tune in to Internet-based stations like Spinner.com, The Green Witch, Live365.com, or Imagine Radio, and -- aside from promotional bumpers -- hours of music can go by without the howl of a Wolfman Jack wannabe. Today's digital radio stations are run by hard discs as much as disc jockeys, and the weird thing is, it's getting hard to tell them apart.
Take AOL's Spinner.com (www.spinner.com) and the indie-rockin' Green Witch (www.greenwitch.com). Both offer a huge variety of genres -- Green Witch has 17 formats (including one devoted to ''Coffee House'' tunes), while Spinner.com offers 130, with subsets like neo-Japanese rock. What separates the two? At Spinner.com human deejays pick the songs, while at Green Witch a computer does the job. The latter's digital hard-disc jockey -- a.k.a. ''Olive'' the Green Witch -- creates a playlist by using algorithms to match genres and song tempos. The aim, says company cofounder Brian Zisk, is to make the computer so smart that ''it can program in [such] a way that people will like it better than a human.''
As it turns out, removing personality from the mix is exactly what some listeners want -- at least according to Spinner.com, whose focus groups said they find on-air talk annoying. That doesn't mean computers should fill in for real people entirely. Stan Dunn, who was a silky-voiced jazz jockey in the San Francisco Bay area for 35 years before moving to Spinner.com, says that even without the talk, a deejay's selections can still ''make a statement.''
Though maybe not a statement like the uproar Alan Freed caused by playing black R&B for white teen audiences in 1951. Still, there is a kind of buzz that can't be re-created by PCs. That's how Live365.com (www.live365. com), which offers 220 stations programmed by listeners, hopes to differentiate itself from MTV's Imagine Radio (www.imagine radio.com), which is hosted by artificial-intelligence software. Live365's idea is that you'll be more interested in hearing a buddy's music mix than a preprogrammed one, so the site's most popular stations, based on user ratings, are listed right on the home page (and the top deejays will soon be given personal Web space on the site to promote themselves to a wider audience). Imagine Radio also works on the popularity principle, except that the AI refines a playlist based on your ratings of a long list of artists. When a song you dislike comes up, just click a few buttons and you'll never have to hear that artist again -- but you'll still be exposed to new tracks that are chosen based on your favorite selections.
Who wins this man-versus-machine spin-off? One day a deejay will turn the Net-radio world on its headphone jack, but right now Imagine Radio's hard-disc jockeys keep me listening longer than Live365's real ones. That's partly because Netcasters haven't figured out how to turn clicks into cliques -- and until they do, personal computers will continue to trump radio personalities.
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