One company that measures such stats says definitely.

While it may not seem like much of a surprise that web radio plays more artists than traditional broadcasters, new data supplied by streamSerf — a company that monitors and reports on music played on terrestrial and web radio — highlights a pretty big disparity. According to the company, last month American broadcast radio stations played 25,399 unique artists (this includes public radio stations) while Internet radio stations played 829,971 unique artists. We’re no mathematicians, but apparently that’s 32 times as much.

While FMC has not independently verified these figures, they do seem in keeping with our recent studies of the commercial broadcasting space. In April 2009, we released a major report called “Same Old Song,” which examined whether commercial radio playlists had changed at all as a result of the 2005-2007 payola investigations, after which the Federal Communications Commission and the nation’s four largest radio station group owners – Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel and Entercom – signed voluntary agreements meant to curb payola and open the airwaves to more local and independent artists. read more