It’s been ten years. So why hasn’t anyone figured this recommendation puzzle out?  Why is old-school FM radio still dictating the favorite songs of a majority of music fans?

At NARM, power-attorney Ken Hertz said there’s a Google-level breakthrough possibility ahead.  But that’s not right now: NPD Group later reaffirmed that most new music is propogated by the lumbering, repetitive, and limiting radio dial.  And the question is whether music fans really want more than Rihanna and Train; if they really have an appetite for new stuff.

Maybe: according to stats just shared with Digital Music News by NPD Group, 42 percent of the time, a ‘discovery moment’ involves a new artist.  Which means that, when a song perks the interest of a potential fan, nearly half the time it is coming from an unfamiliar, never-heard-of artist.  And in a large percentage of those situations, the song isn’t properly Shazam’d, back-announced, otherwise identified.

It’s another eye-popping ‘discovery’ from NPD’s Russ Crupnick, and part of a broader research stab into how people find new stuff.  Part of that research found that Facebook actually has a very minor role in the discovery process, despite the extreme hype surrounding social networking.

But outside of the where, there’s the what. “We took [survey participants] down the path of discovery,” Crupnick relayed.  “As you can imagine, asking ‘what makes you discover’ is a blunt tool, so we ask about a specific new song they heard recently. When they hear it, do they remember, who was it from, etc.”

“It was that third question that yielded the 42% unfamiliar and highlights the importance of providing information, whether it’s via radio, on TV shows, social media, in-store, etc.  My point has been… you can’t buy what you don’t know.  And I’m open to the fact that some may just want to add it to a playlist, which counts as a transaction too.”