July 22nd, 2010
RAIN reviews CBS’s new Radio.com
(Source) RAIN /
Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), 
that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.
Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?
That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that 
kind of music.
It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.
The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.
So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS
