Music Discovery versus Rediscovering Favorites

I’m spending some more time with Pandora.

This is the custom radio station built just for you using the music genome project.

To me, it seems pretty much silly. They have a huge bias away from familiarity. If there is a hit version of a song, they'll find it recorded by another artist as an album track.

So it is all about new music discovery.

I'm thinking that new music discovery is overrated.

Pandora isn’t about music memories, familiarity and comfort.

Great, for age 12-24. Well, for 30% of 12-24 anyway.

Most of us want to use music to reconnect to something, I think. We like what we like. We want what we like. In small doses, a little challenge might be nice. But every song?

I'm thinking that the role of radio is not usually music discovery. Our role is to create an entertaining and informative companion. For most people, that means familiarity.

Forget My Opinion. What Do Listeners Want?

This raises a question. In all the research we do, have we ever found and then used a measurement that tells us the relative interest in music discovery and exploration versus returning to familiar, comfortable songs?

The only thing I can think of at this moment is the often included,“On a scale from 1-10, where 1 means “PLAYS ALL NEW MUSIC” and 10 means “PLAYS ALL OLD MUSIC”, where would you like your favorite station to be? "

And then we usually ask, "Where on this same scale is [name of station here]?"

Sounds like a pretty weak attempt, I hate to say. How about you? Have you found a survey question or other way to keep your station properly balanced between "discovery" and "favorites"?