By Dana Sedgwick

In the US, radio still rules the roost as the #1 method for music discovery. Increasingly, this means a shift over to internet radio formats, particularly for younger listeners. As Billboard reported in April, “Internet radio services like Pandora and iHeartRadio accounted for 23% of listening time for consumers between the ages of 13 and 35, up six percentage points from 17% a year earlier.”

And with more and more listeners tuning in via their web browser or mobile, these companies now hold the same predictive powers for big hits that the major FM stations do… especially when considering the long tail of the whole web radio world, which in fact is a mixture of independently broadcasted Internet-only radio stations and rebroadcasts of FM/AM radio.

Enter FindStream, a startup still in beta that scans the playlists of 30,000+ radio stations on the web and provides for the fast detection of potential hits trending on the radio. The discovery and recommendation service comes from the team at Balakam, a Russian-based developer which specializes in research and development in the field of web search technologies.

While Billboard obviously is the big dog in terms of tracking any given song’s impact – inclusive of digital download sales, physical singles sales, terrestrial radio airplay, on-demand audio streaming, and online radio streaming – it doesn’t have the same day to day functionality and flexibility as a service like FindStream.

As the online pool of data grows ever more deep, services such as FindStream will become increasingly important predictors of musical trends – the question is whether by limiting their search to just Internet-radio services, FindStream runs the risk of discounting credible and relevant information that would help influence their findings.

For example, a service like Next Big Sound takes into account social data generated before, during and after any given song is played… the ability to track billions of social signals gives a more accurate picture of what songs may be about to break, which is different than finding those which may have just broken.

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