GOOM Intends to Revolutionize Radio

If you still listen to FM radio, you can count yourself among an ever-shrinking minority at this point. While listeners still love a great playlist and mix, radio stations have migrated to the Internet and traditional outlets are having trouble adapting and bringing adequate sound quality to the table. That's where GOOM Radio comes in.

GOOM Radio presents a new platform that mixes what originally attracted listeners to traditional radio stations such as New York's Z100 or Hot 97 with Web 2.0 concepts such as social networking, content personalization and a trademark CD-quality compression technology called G-Sound.

"Say, like me, you wake up at 5:40AM," GOOM Radio CEO Emmanuel Jayr tells The BoomBox during a visit to the company's Jersey City, N.J., headquarters. "You don't want to sit around until 6AM waiting for the news. With GOOM, you can personalize your stream into a private station that provides our news content the second you wake up. If you want to listen to a particular morning show at night, just reschedule it yourself."

In contrast to popular online portals such as Pandora and Last.fm, GOOM uses curated components that are vetted and tagged by diehard music fans. Users can log into the site and use a function called MY GOOM that allows the mixture of parts from various shows, genres and songs into a unique personal feed. A service called M.I.C. (think Skype) allows the recording of original content to tie your show together. If your show gains enough followers (think Twitter or DIGG), then you even have a shot at getting an official spot on one of their bigger flagship stations. Instead of making friends on the site, all content easily plugs into your existing Facebook, Twitter and other similar applications to encourage sharing.

GOOM Radio's premiere stations are coming together from a combination of partnerships with celebrities such as Madonna(Candy Radio) and DIY DJs that were already popular on sites like YouTube. On the hip-hop front, GOOM houses a station called Explicit Content that is populated by playlists from allhiphop.com and features a morning show by DJ legend Eric B.

"Every brand needs a website, but in the future every brand will need its own radio station," says Jayr. "For hip-hop content, allhiphop.com presented a great opportunity. With them (and for them), we created Explicit Content radio. It serves to show their taste making abilities and gives masters like Eric B. a platform to create a radio show that could be loved on a national level."

GOOM Radio only launched in the U.S. a month ago, but has already logged 1 million unique visitors. Perhaps its biggest asset of all is G-Sound technology -- an all digital format that streams crystal clear content to the Internet, Internet radio devices and mobile phones. An in-house sound demonstration between GOOM's flagship Top-40 station ('All Hits') and New York's Hot 97 showed that traditional radio streams lack the ability to deliver HD content to listeners. GOOM uses the same diehard music fans that classify its songs to create individual mixing levels so that each track is optimized for digital streaming.

Overall, GOOM Radio is bringing an interesting model to the table that combines your favorite programming of yesteryear with modern concepts that pull the best elements from popular online channels. Their goal, as told by Jayr, is to truly bring radio into the 21st century. It will take awhile before we see if this pans out or not, but for now it's all clear ahead.