The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating and frankly depressing story about how US radio stations are playing the hits more to battle against the likes of Spotify and iTunes Radio. Because if there’s one thing I can find easily without listening to the radio, it’s the biggest hit songs. The piece ends with this profoundly downbeat quote from a US radio programmer: “Taking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before.” Good luck with that strategy. [Note: It may be paywalled, but this link is from Google News]

Google has put together a really interesting visualisation of the music Google Play Music users have in their libraries. Really quite fascinating and well worth playing with. There’s a bit of detail about how they put the data together here. [Via Chris Hamilton]

And a good read from Digg on why audio doesn’t go viral. It’s a real shame that it’s so hard to share decent audio online. If I hear a funny “bit” on the radio in the morning, it’s such an effort to wait for it to be made available via podcast/listen again, and then requires audio editing software to chop up the section you wanted to highlight. Even then, the easiest way is to probably make a YouTube “video”. [Via Brainpicker]

And I wonder who the mystery radio sales exec is who’s been posting on Twitter recently?