When Democracy isn't What the People Want

Recently I've given Jelli.net to see if it lives up to its promise to be the future of internet radio. The difference between Jelli and, well, just about every other internet radio is that Jelli opens up the playlist to its users and lets them vote on what is next from anything in their catalog. At first thought, this seems really cool. The thought that (for now) it's just you and a few dozen other users sorting through the catalog and pulling out and voting up the best of the best is pretty appealing. Ideally this would be a great way to discover new music. Sort of like sitting down with your BFF of Music and sharing iTunes libraries on a rainy afternoon.

In reality, Jelli is like that point in every party where everyone's had six too many and wants to hear THEIR favorite song. So every 30 seconds someone else is grabbing at the ipod "No, dude, you gotta hear THIS!."

And this is where Jelli fails. You'd be hard pressed to put three people in a room and have their musical tastes match up, let alone dozens of random people from all over the net. What happens is lots of crap you don't want to listen to (at all, not just stuff you've never heard before) mixed with the occasional track you love because you sat there and voted it up and rocketed (each user can send a track to the top, called rocketing) and generally spent 10 minutes voting down other songs to finally hear what you want.

But it's not all bad news. I think there's hope for Jelli if they are willing to segregate people out a little bit. Make separate "rooms" for various genres, thus semi-guaranteeing that you are surrounded by people with similar musical tastes. This eliminates the Metallica fans from having to deal with the Celine Dion fans and visa versa. Yeah, maybe that limits your exposure to diverse music, but there's a reason I (and presumably you) don't listen to the Adult Contemporary / Top 100 FM radio station - you know what (specific) genre you like and you want to hear a few hits you know and some new stuff you don't.

Another use I could see is traditional radio stations (that already have their niche / genre set) adopting the Jelli platform for requests and determining their playlists, even if only during a certain time. 105.3 FM in San Francisco lets Jelli control its playlist every Sunday night from 10-midnight. With Jelli's integrated chatroom and constantly updated voting it'd be a great way to re-engage listeners and you could easily display some ads (like what you would normally hear) alongside the music to keep the revenue coming in. And unlike other net radio sites, Jelli encourages you to keep watching its page since it constantly is updating.

It'll be interesting to see where the future takes Jelli, perhaps a larger user base will make it better as the crowd ebbs and flows with support for various genres / artists. In any case, it's a good step forward for internet radio. For now I'll stick with my iTunes library, but I'll keep half an ear on Jelli just in case it turns into something worth listening too.