It's the same story across the spectrum of these new Internet services. At iTunes, Apple's digital music store, fans have posted more than 898,000 individual playlists. And eMusic, a service specializing in independent-label releases, identifies users' "neighbors" -- people who have downloaded tracks from the same artists -- and allows them to view a list of everything their neighbors have been listening to.
Pandora has its own take on the trend, allowing fans to create stations and then e-mail them to a friend; other sharing features are in development. As a tool for discovery, it seems to show promise: Westergren said that 10 percent of the time people tune in to a Pandora station, they end up clicking through to buy a song or album from iTunes or Amazon. That's a much better rate than standard online retailers can claim.
Pandora receives a commission on such sales, and charges for advertising on its Web site. But so far it has not been enough to turn a profit.
These are still early days for digital music over all: digital singles are selling briskly, but more than 94 percent of the recording industry's album sales still involve pieces of plastic, not megabytes. And that leads to a central problem for makers of recommendation and sharing tools: unless consumers become more active and embrace them, these services may exist as the limited province of music geeks.
The heaviest buyers of music -- fans who spend more than US$100 a year on new recordings -- compose 10 percent of all music consumers but account for more than 40 percent of the industry's CD sales, according to the NPD Group, a research company in Port Washington, New York. Most of the audience is far less engaged, and may be less inclined to rummage for recommendations.
Still, Gartner Inc., a media analysis company, predict that by 2010, 25 percent of online music retail transactions will be driven by applications that allow fans to compare their tastes and by recommendation engines tracking their preferences.
Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst and co-author of the report, said the emergence of the empowered fan represented "the slow death of programmed content." He added, "Unless and until the DJs and programmers can start realizing that, they're going to find themselves inexorably pulled further and further apart from their audiences."
They've started realizing. In Seattle for example the modern-rock station KNDD has offered visitors to its Web site the chance to submit a list of 10 songs. A few of the lists are selected and played on a weekend segment. As a result of these suggestions, says Lazlo, the program director, at least two bands, Band of Horses and the Long Winters, have been added to the station's regular rotation.
"It's about listening to someone else's thoughts on music, and having the input and ability to then share your thoughts on music," he said.
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