Social Radio and R&DIO Announce “Human Vs. Algorithm” Music Experiment at www.DJsVsRobots.com

July 19, 2012 - PRLog -- Social Radio and R&DIO announced the first ever test to determine if music listeners prefer a human curated music experience or an algorithm selected music experience. The question specifically posed by the group R&DIO seeks to put Pandora’s Music Genome* up against a Radio DJ to see if listeners prefer one or the other. The website  DJsVsRobots.com (http://www.DJsVsRobots.com) was launched today to administer the test.

R&DIO creator and Social Radio Director of Sales Carl Magnuson stated, “Pandora offers listeners a compelling experience and they’ve been rewarded with great success. But is Pandora’s core value, their music algorithm, better than a human at curating a listening experience? And would listeners be able to tell them apart? We don’t know. So let’s test it!”

R&DIO recruited the help of long time San Diego radio station program director, Garett Michaels, to represent the human side of the blind listening taste test.

To conduct the test as fairly as possible R&DIO took several steps to ensure an accurate and unbiased experiment.

Those steps included:

- Pandora and the DJ, Garett Michaels, were both given the same song to start with for inspiration and were free to go in whatever musical direction they wanted.
- The playlists aren’t marked so a participant won’t know which is which.
- The playlist in the first position is randomized each time the page loads (Sometimes the DJ’s will be first, sometimes Pandora’s will be first)
- Each participant may only vote once
- Each vote will be verified by link sent to email


R&DIO hopes that results from the test at DJsVsRobots.com (http://www.DJsVsRobots.com) will contribute to Radio’s understanding of listener preferences and lead to innovation in the way broadcast and online stations create and present their content. Results of the test will be published prior to the fall NAB Radio Show this September in Dallas.

About R&DIO: R&DIO is an initiative lead by Social Radio to research, develop and advance Radio, audio content, the multimedia that can enhance it and the technology to deliver and monetize it. R&DIO is a device/platform agnostic initiative dedicated to pursuing innovative Radio no matter who is creating it or where it is being listened to.

About The DJ: Garett Michaels is a Radio Programming professional with over 20 years of experience managing stations - including most recently 10 years as Program Director of FM 94/9 (KZBT) in San Diego.

About Social Radio: Social Radio is a Portland, Oregon based software company developing products/platforms designed to help Radio stations improve their content experience for listeners through personalization, choice and more control, and for advertisers by enabling better accountability and ad targeting.

R&DIO Press contact: Carl Magnuson carl@socialradio.org
Social Radio Press contact: Steve Allaway steve@socialradio.org

* PANDORA is a registered trademark of Pandora Media, Inc. R&DIO is not affilitated with Pandora Media, and this experiment has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Pandora Media.