Remember the old days, when you used to call in to request that the DJs over at KXPY play “Kiss From a Rose” on the “Phat 5 at 9?? Well, you no longer need to dial to request, as startup Spins.FM has made the process super simple via a new web service.
The service, which launches in public beta today, is pretty easy to use. Simply visit the Spins.FM site, search for the song you want, choose your location from a map, and the service is able to find a list of local stations. Choose a station, and either post a request to that station’s Twitter or Facebook Wall — all from within Spins.FM.
According to David Baker, founder of Spins.FM, the service has already enlisted artists like Mike Posner, Bryan J, Mann and Travis Porter to test out the service with customized artist pages. Spins.FM will also soon be working with Jive Records artists –including Britney Spears (the service had received more than 1,400 requests for “Hold It Against Me” before Spears’s page had even gone live).
Baker cites Posner as a particular success story — his page went live back in April, at which time his song “Cooler Than Me” hadn’t been picked up by any stations. Three months later, the page had 14,692 unique visitors, and the song was ranking quite well on the Billboard U.S. pop radio charts.
Baker realizes that Spins.FM was not the sole reason for the song’s success, but he does think that it helped the jam get early spins on the radio.
Starting today, any artist can attempt to mimic Posner’s success by signing onto the service for free — features like custom design and metrics will come with a fee, though. Request pages can also be embedded on websites and featured as a tab on Facebook.
At this juncture, you may be wondering: “Who the hell even listens to the radio? What good does that even do for artists?”
According to Baker, “Despite the popularity of Internet radio among fans, from a business perspective, terrestrial radio is still the driving force behind paid iTunes downloads and demand for nationwide shows and appearances. With Spins.FM artists and labels now have the ability to use social media to drastically increase radio play at a fraction of the cost of traditional radio promotion.”
Adam Farrell, VP of Marketing at Beggars Group, would tend to agree. “In general, I’d say that no matter how much we think all music discovery happens online these days and is what everyone talks about, the silent majority out there still listens to the radio.”
Still, while we can see this service being a boon to established musicians and those on major labels — and we like that any artists can add themselves to the roster — we wonder if it will be of any use to those artists who don’t generally get radio play.
Kip Berman, lead singer of the band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, says that it’s hard for indie bands like his (which is signed to Slumberland Records) to get on the radio. “It’s actually a really big deal for a band like ours that doesn’t normally get on those kinds of playlists,” he adds, joking that his grandma habitually lobbies for the band to get on the radio. “So if a DJ gets a Comic Sans e-mail from someone named Kaye requesting Pains,” he says, “well, her grandson says ‘Thank you!’”
We wonder what effect Spin.FM will have on the careers of bands not yet in the Britney Spears firmament, or if it will be a more useful marketing tool for established musicians alone.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, João Pedro, uai!
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posted Feb 10th 2011 3:49PM 
It's not every day that you see something handcrafted with time and care on the internet, but what you see above certainly qualifies. An art / craft project by German designer Maria Fischer, it's called Thoughts on Dreams, it contains threaded 'hyperlinks' which are there to help guide the reader to links between important passages. The book is sadly (for us) in German, so we can't know what it says, but we can imagine that it's all sorts of beautiful, mysterious things that can only be conveyed by paper and colored string.There is one more image after the break, just because. 
