In its effort to keep listeners and potential audience to stick with radio, a company in the US came up with a project that may redefine radio as a real-time interactive medium.

Radio, has become more interactive these days. Through social media, listeners can send in messages to DJs. But control of the music program for most radio stations is still done by their staff.

Song requests can be made via Facebook, Twitter or the station website, but in these days of on-demand, instant gratifying media like YouTube and Pandora, the delayed and more often less granted song request isn’t really much appealing to young and evolving listeners.

So, Listener Driven Radio or LDR (ldrradio.com) created a program that will allow listeners to pick which song is to be played next. It doesn’t work like the regular song request features on most radio websites, where you type in or check-box a song title/artist, hit a “SEND” button and hope the DJ picks your request.

But in LDR, the listener is given a lineup of songs and he arranges them according to his preferred sequence, which pretty much works like how you sequence songs on your Winamp or Windows Media Player, where you “push up” a song or songs you want to listen next.

Of course, since there will be plenty of other users re-arranging the list, each “push up” of a song (is considered a vote). The song with the most “push ups” (I don’t like how that sounds), gets to be played next.

This indeed gives the control of the station’s music programming to the listeners.

But it has of course, some drawbacks. Abuse of this service may include fans of certain artists to conspire a “push up” of a song so it gets played more often.

This is addressed however by limiting the hours when the listeners can use the service. Some stations allow such feature on their 3-5 pm afternoon drive only.

This isn’t actually new to internet radio stations, who have already introduced an on-demand or instant play of a song request. Stations that particularly use the SAM Broadcaster software can let users request a song and get it played instantly.

Services like these really give the users the democracy on a station’s music program. What do you think of this attempt of turning radio into an on-demand medium? Will you be using such listener-control features to your audience?