Recently two start-ups, one in Australia and another in the US, have come up with the novel idea of setting up an online station where listeners can upload their own voice tracks to become part of the station’s line up.

The one in the US works via an app called Fradio which suggests it wants terrestrial radio to be very afraid. Damien King, chief technology officer, of the company behind Fradio, Guvera, openly admits that he’s out to disrupt the existing radio business. 

As reported in B&T last week, so far Fradio has more DJs than listeners but “With any sort of disruptive service, it takes a fair bit of time to gain traction. But we think there’s definitely an opportunity for people to start building a profile about themselves and getting a following,” says King.

In Australia a similar service called eJukebox radio is even less advanced but equally confident that its would-be radio stars will kill the established ones.

Heading his media release “Time is up for AM/FM radio” eJukebox founder Marc Kean is seeking funding on Kickstarter. So far, five investors have stumped up $2,222 between them towards a goal of $50,000.

Kean likens his app to Facebook and Twitter in the way that both are totally automatic and socially driven. “The difference being,” he says. “It’s completely hands free. The audience record their own voice tracks using the eJukebox radio app. Voice tracks can be recorded by anyone about any topic, they are broadcast to everyone listening and are played in between the songs. Just like how anyone can send a Tweet or Facebook post, anyone can record a voice track. It’s instant, informative, entertaining, thrilling and ‘edge-of-your-seat’ un-predictable. 

“Each voice track is completely different to the next; the audience are the DJ and anything goes. Retail stores can record voice tracks about specials of the day, or the roads and traffic authorities can record voice tracks about accidents, public transport or traffic delays,” says Kean. 

eJukebox is totally listener driven with no music director required. 

“Today, radio stations send out music surveys to music jurors and entice responses by giving away gifts. A human needs to take the survey results and then manually program a playlist for the radio station based on popular songs. 

“eJukebox radio negates the need for any of this time consuming manual work with the introduction of a totally automatic and real time song voting system. During the time while a song is being played, votes and requests for songs come in and are automatically tailed with the most popular song played next on eJukebox radio, then the same process starts again with each song played. The extensive number of votes received, each song played will be a memorable number one,” says Kean.