Turn casual fans into super fans

Whats the future of radio? According to Steve Pratt, Director of digital music at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the answer is that radio has to be more than just radio.

One example of that is “The Canadian social radio experiment”, a music channel and music platform where artists are invited to upload songs. And they do. 20 000 artists have uploaded 90 000 songs. And the audience likes it. On the web they can create member pages, personal playlists, share songs, rate songs, become fans, listen to songs that other people listen to right now and connect to Facebook and Twitter. It´s a way of reaching a new, young audience.

So what has the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation learnt from the experiment? You have to stop trying to provide exactly what the audience wants and start empowering the audience to help each other and provide options. Give up the control! Offer the possibility to go from passive to active, from mainstream to niche, from familiar to emerging. With the on-demand content and possibility to share content you turn casual fans into super fans.