BROADCAST INTERACTIVE DIGITAL RADIO

A digital radio broadcast system provides various interactive features, including skip forward and skip backward. In one embodiment, data is transmitted at a faster than real time rate and accumulated in a buffer at a receiver. The user can play a current track or skip to subsequent or earlier tracks. In another embodiment, two or more programming service streams (i.e., user channels) are communicated such that a user can move directly from a current track to the beginning of a track of another stream. In another embodiment, tiers of service levels are provided so that paying subscribers can bypass some or all of the commercial messages, while non-paying subscribers can not bypass the commercials. Replacement programming may be transmitted in a portion of the bandwidth of the free service. At a receiver, control data may be used with multimedia data to provide a multimedia clip which identifies features of a track, such as artist, song title or lyrics. Identifying data may be communicated with the tracks to allow a user to skip disliked tracks or recover favorite tracks on another programming service stream.