A new Internet radio startup launched today, called Raditaz, which thinks of itself as “an evolution of the Pandora model,” adding a location layer for discovering music based on what’s trending in various regions around the US (and later, around the world).

In an exclusive interview with WebProNews, the company’s CEO tells us why he thinks another entrant into the Internet radio space matters.

On what Raditaz doing with social and location different than other products, CEO Tom Brophy tells WebProNews, “Raditaz enables users to discover music the way they want to discover music…we give them several options all tied to location, popularity, trending, friends and/or personal interests. Stations are anonymous so users have no inhibitions about sharing.”

“GPS coordinates are automatically assigned to each station that is created and it is posted onto the Raditaz Music Map for anyone to discover,” he explains. “Want to see what’s playing nearby or anywhere in the US or what your friend’s listen to, just peruse the Music Map, discover and listen to any station.”

“Filter the map to show trending, popular, new, my, other and/or all stations,” he says. “This makes it easy to pinpoint the type of station that you’re looking for.”

“We rate stations so users can discover music based on what’s trending or what’s popular in various regions around the US,” says Brophy. “Trending stations are part of the ‘Stations’ section of Raditaz and can also be found in Explore on the Raditaz Music Map.”

“Users can discover music by searching on tags,” he explains. “Users personalize their music by adding ‘tags’ to their stations in order to organize their music and to make them discoverable. For example, if you are going for a run, you can search tags for “running” and discover music for running.”

“We will soon be integrating with The Echo Nest’s Music Intelligence Platform giving us the ability to create a station with up to 5 artist and/or song and/or genre inputs,” he tells us. “We also will be able to display similar artists when users are creating a station and when they are listening.”

Here are the things Echo Nest is able to provide:

With quite a few services, such as Pandora and Spotify out, one might not feel a great need for another. On this note, Brophy tells us, “There are 241 million broadcast radio listeners in the U.S, 93% of whom listen weekly, they average 15 hours of listening per week, and this category represents 80% of all listening. The industry is huge and many people are now just beginning to actively listen to Internet radio. The majority of these listeners want a personal experience without a lot of effort, more of a lean back experience. Pandora was the first to make listening simple. Discovering and sharing also needs to be simple. That is where Raditaz comes in, we generate high quality stations with over 14 million songs, enable users to discover music by tags, trends, location (music map), and all these stations are available independent of the user’s personal information.”

On what the radio landscape will look like in 5 years (Internet or otherwise), he says: “There is a major transition underway in the music space, and in particular, in the way people listen to music, mostly driven by technology.”

“Services like Raditaz are able to stream music to smart phones, tablets, computers, Internet enabled TVs, autos and lots of other devices and equipment,” he adds. “As connectivity continues to improve over the next few years, the user experience will get better and better. The growth of smartphones is and will continue to drive the growth of Internet radio for the foreseeable future. Users can effectively walk around with 14 million songs in their pockets. We’re excited about the future of radio, and believe that lean back listening will dominate time spent listening for many years to come.”