Why do radio station websites exist?

Mark Ramsey compares (contrasts?) radio websites to those of TV stations and newspapers. He concludes "consumers have more good reasons to visit one newspaper site than thirty radio station sites."

And poses The Big Question: "Why do we exist? What do we offer listeners that they can get nowhere else?"

A pretty good question for radio networks, too.

Comments

[Zach the Intern]

Streaming audio. The convience of being able to listen when you aren't near a radio. It has kept me sane at prior jobs of desk work that were mindless.

[smays]

Streaming your signal is good, but I think the question Mr. Ramsey poses is: how is your radio station stream different from the stream you and I could produce from our blogs or web pages.

[Andy Waschick]

As the web developer who helps you realize the answer to this question, I feel I have some insight. It's different because it's not linear; It's user-directed.

I remember when I was in college in the mid-90's-- I worked as a support tech in the college of Education at SMSU and the rage du jour in ed-tech was Multimedia delivered by CD-ROM and LaserDisc. The hip kids all called it "Multimedia Authoring".

This was a misnomer in my opinion. An author is the storyteller, the one who decides what is shown to the audience when. A DJ in a radio station is the author of his program. But for interactive content (on a CD-Rom, in a HyperCard-driven LaserDisc, or the Web today) the author is the audience. THEY decide what they will look at.

Providing the audience an opportunity to consume content according to their own interest... and in fact harnessing these decisions in a feedback loop that alters future presentation is an unqustionable value-add.

This can only happen through an outlet such as a web site and its various components (e.g. RSS/Podcasts, weblogs, galleries, forums, etc.) and is fundamentally different from the single thread of presentation that the traditional broadcast audio channel provides. All a radio station needs to do is move past the hangup that they are not in business if they are not radiating electromagnetism into the atmosphere. It's not about that, and never was.