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WESTERGREN: CLEAR CHANNEL WON’T HAVE A PROGRAMMING SAY ON STREAMS: Pandora founder Tim Westergren reassures Wired’s “Listening Post” (here) the programming Clear Channel will stream as part of a “test” agreement (RAIN coverage here) will be “pure Pandora.” Like all major broadcasters (but probably foremost among them), critics have blamed Clear Channel for the stale, repetitive, and homogeneous programming they say characterizes U.S. radio, as “Listening Post” points out. “We’re not making any kind of compromise in how we sequence songs,” Westergren said. The trial run of a potential partnership between the two is to begin at summer’s end.

DON’T EXPECT TYPICAL CLEAR CHANNEL FROM eROCKSTER, SZMANDA SAYS: Actor/music vet Eric Szmanda also makes it a point to distance his work at eRockster from the negative associations of Clear Channel. In an interview with Reuters/Billboard (here), Szmanda says, “I was obviously super nervous about working for Clear Channel… But I always loved the idea of working with the system to do something cool rather than just complaining about the system all the time. Even though we work with Clear Channel, we’re not them.” Szmanda heads Clear Channel’s eRockster initiative, and online music and social network, which launched late last month (RAIN coverage here). “There are things you’re not going to hear on erockster, which is basically the stuff you’ve heard enough of.” He added that the next big direction for eRockster was sealing deals with labels for on-demand music services. “That’s the direction Internet radio is going,” he explains. Szmanda is best known for his role on CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” television series, but was also a marketing rep at BMG Music.

SENS. WANT MORE COMPETITION IS XM, SIRIUS MERGE: Two U.S. Senators say that
if XM and Sirius are allowed to merge, they should give up as much as half of the spectrum they use, possibly opening the door for a new satellite radio competitor. In a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin from Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) say, “while over-the-air radio broadcasters, Internet radio, and digital television radio provide some amount of competition, they are not perfect substitutes to satellite radio,” and that allowing a single company to control a spectrum larger than the AM and FM bands combined is anticompetitive.

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