Szmanda Rocks Out

Internet radio gets help from a CSI.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation's Eric Szmanda (Greg Sanders) was once a marketing rep at the BMG music company and served as a music consultant on the movie Life as a House. Szmanda also acts as a club promoter though his side company Doop. When Evan Harrison, executive vice president and head of online music and radio at Clear Channel, was looking to launch erockster, he gave his old friend Szmanda a call.

"Eric has an unparalleled love and appreciation for a vast array of music," Harrison told Reuters. "His talent will absolutely resonate with like-minded fans." Szmanda worked with childhood friend and business partner Tyler Malin to create erockster. "Our main focus will be on quality and we're going to give a lot of bands that don't have a chance to be heard on the radio that opportunity," Szmanda said. "We want to be playing everything from indie rock to hip-hop to classic rock to soul to dance rock." By logging on to www.erockster.com and registering their preferences, fans can influence the content featured on the site.

"I was obviously super nervous about working for Clear Channel. If it wasn't for Evan I probably wouldn't be doing this," Szmanda said. "But I always loved the idea of working with the system to do something cool rather than just complaining about the system all the time. Even though we work with Clear Channel, we're not them. We're geared to give artists a chance to be heard, whether it be talking about music or playing live concerts or broadcasting multiple tracks off a record. It's not just playing one single."

Szmanda and his team selected all of the music featured on erockster. "There are things you're not going to hear on erockster, which is basically the stuff you've heard enough of," Szmanda explained. "There are some great hits which are hits for a reason, but they're going to be spaced out. You're going to hear the B-sides from them, remixes, mashups, a full concept album sometimes. We want to always be evolving the playlist. For us, heavy rotation is like once a day."

"I'm trying to play down my involvement as much as possible," Szmanda said, and he went on to say fans won't hear him talking on the radio show. "I just want to be the mediator between the listener and the artist. I'd like to think that all the work I did at BMG 12 years ago was kind of preparing me for this."

"We're going to be building our on-demand library by going directly to labels and management and working out deals where music will be available whenever people want it. That's the direction Internet radio is going, just like TV. That's what's going to keep people coming back for more," Szmanda said, but he didn't give away all of the details. "There's definitely another step involved in this, but I'm not going to talk about it yet."

The question and answer session is from Reuters, which also provided the other information included in the article.

Discuss this news item at Talk CSI!
 Add CSI Files RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a Desperate Housewives fan? Then visit GetDesperate.com!