Imagine going to a bar or a restaurant where the music is ENTIRELY controlled by the people at the bar. Anyone who has an Android or iPhone is able to put a song in the radio queue. They would post it from THEIR OWN phone, so it could be ANYTHING... their own demo, a top 20, a parody song, whatever. Songs would be (basically) uploaded (or streamed?) by the users' devices and (if on a central playing system) would be deleted as soon as they are played. The bar/restaurant could also have immediate overwrite controls, or give privilege to their employees' music, etc. (that might be a bad idea because then users wouldn't be driving it as much... perhaps it's best ENTIRELY user-driven).
Other people in the bar could vote down a song or vote up a song and, depending on how songs are reviewed by listeners, they could be cut from the list or over-ruled as cut and stay on. There could even be a count-down of some sort that interfaces with the app. As more and more people vote the song down, the countdown until it is cut increases. And there has to be a minimum number of votes to cut a song. Perhaps every vote cuts off 5 seconds from the end of the song and at least 30 seconds (or 20% or whatever) has to be voted off for it to be cut. A banner would say "This song is scheduled to be cut in 1 minute..." A vote to keep the song on would grant it an extra 5 seconds.
It's like a dueling piano bar---only instead of pianos, all of the music is uniquely generated by the users. The restaurant/bar never has to own any of the music (unless they want to?).
If someone LEAVES the bar/restaurant (or travels some odd-distance from the bar) then they lose their place in the queue after a certain amount of time.
How does this make money? Well, perhaps ads. OR, like a dueling piano bar, users can PAY to vote down or up a song. Perhaps $1 is worth 10 votes. OR users could PAY to move their song up in the queue. A prompt could say "Your song is number 54 in the queue. Pay $.25 to move it up to #24, pay $1 to move it to #10, pay $5 to move it to #5, $20 to play it next, etc." People could "buy votes" in bulk if they wanted to. Profits could be shared with the bar/restaurant.
Musicians get a credit, and perhaps somehow, we could post a link to buy the song on iTunes or Amazon MP3 or wherever, and take a cut from that. Maybe our app could interface with the app that knows what songs are playing to determine what song it is.
