Category Archives: Radio

Listeners of tomorrow are online today

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Jerry Del Colliano, Professor of Music Industry at USC and founder of Inside Radio, offers still another warning to radio broadcasters:

“When universal WiFi or its equivalent is available and consumers can take the Internet with them then it’s all over for radio. Ditto for satellite radio. That is, of course, assuming that terrestrial radio broadcasters don’t have an epiphany soon and decide to get into the Internet radio business.

Radio and the merged satellite radio company need to get into the Internet radio business now because tomorrow Internet radio will be the next radio. Why? Because that’s where the listeners will be and universal WiFi will make it all possible.” [via RAIN]

I’m tempted to email Mr. Del Colliano and ask if this applies equally to small and large market broadcasters. But I’m afraid of the answer.

XM, Sirius merger?

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The New York Post is reporting the long-awaited merger of Sirius and XM may be announced today. Combining Sirius and XM would result in a single satellite radio operator with more than 12 million total subscribers. A deal would also marry Sirius content, such as Howard Stern, Frank Sinatra and Nascar with XM’s Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan and Major League Baseball. More important, analysts widely predict that a deal would also save the two companies nearly $7 billion annually.

Total radio silence from XM Ben on this story. And XM and Sirius have to get this just right to keep me. I’m spending more time with the nano and less with my XM. If they don’t make the merged service better/cheaper… I’ll be gone at the end of the contract.

“NPR is not radio”

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Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen and some other New Media thought leaders have been invited to Washington to talk/think about the future of National Public Radio. Mr. Jarvis shares some of his notes going in and I found myself substituting the names of our radio networks for NPR.

“NPR is not radio. If I tell newspapers they have to stop thinking on paper, so I’ll argue that NPR must throw off the limits of its medium. And I don’t just mean that the can go multimedia, adding photos or videos to their sound. I mean changing the culture, not thinking like a radio network anymore so they can see the options the internet opens up to work in every appropriate medium with entirely new kinds of content, from TV to data bases. So change the name: It’s National Public Media, except that Doc will scold me that this is more than media. It’s National Public Whatsis.”

Some of his other ideas: NPR should be a network of networks and a training ground for great media. They should add to their mission finding and nurturing new talent and help local affiliates become hyperlocal.

I surely would love to sit in a corner and listen to these guys. But it appears they will be blogging all or parts of the conversations so I’ll follow it there.

“Is radio still radio if there’s video?”

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“The nation’s commercial radio stations have seen the future, and it is in, of all things, video. Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances.” – NYTimes.com

Okay, how about some bonus spots?

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Betsy Lazar –Executive Director of Advertising and Media Operations at GM– gave a keynote at the rcent Radio Advertising Bureau conference in Dallas. According to INSIDE RADIO, she was pretty specific in her advice to broadcasters;

“…doing business the old way won’t cut it. Pitching schedules of :30s won’t do it. What GM wants is ideas that show involvement by the station. Things that come from mining the listener database and exploiting the station website in fresh ways.”

Ad Age reports that GM “slashed ad spending by more than $600 million last year, a drop so stunning it should convince even the staunchest doubters that the age of mass-media marketing is going the way of the horse and buggy.”

In that same issue of INSIDE RADIO: Bank of America analyst Jonathan Jacoby admits his survey of 34 industry pros last week in Dallas is not statistically significant. But he says 43% of them (14-15 people) said they’ve “used or plan to use Google/dMarcto sell airtime.”

dMarc founders leave Google

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Looks like Google’s plans to reinvent the way radio ads are bought has hit a rough spot. Online Media Daily reports Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the founders of dMark, an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company.

The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google.

“Radio” listening up UK

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According to figures released yesterday, the number of radio listeners in Britain is at a record high of more than 45 million every week. The increase is attributed to growing numbers of people tuning in on the internet, digital television and mobile phones.

Almost 8 per cent of people aged 15 and above listen to the radio on their mobile phones, a 24 per cent increase over the same period of 2005. A quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds said they tuned in this way. Listening over the internet rose by 10 per cent and by 9 per cent on digital television.

Podcasts are also more popular. More than two million people, the equivalent of 17 per cent of all owners of MP3 players, listen to the audio downloads – a rise of 15 per cent on the previous three months. [Thanks, Bob]

iPods no threat to radio?

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Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0:

“Every so often someone in the radio industry trots out a study which says iPods really aren’t that threatening to the radio industry’s long-term health and welfare. ‘Folks get tired of maintaining them,’ they will say. ‘They’re just a new form of Walkman,’ say others.”

And the radio industry has (apparently) spent a bazillion dollars promoting HD radio. Check out the Google Trends graph posted as one of the comments.

Everything might turn out roses and sunshine for Radio but it won’t be because of HD.

Bloggers take on talk radio hosts

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A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers. This article at NYTimes.com explains and I posted on this when it first came up.

For a dozen years (a long time ago) I co-hosted a one-hour daily call-in show. We did silly shit and almost never got into politics. But we picked the topics for the most part and if the water had gotten too hot, we’d have just stopped taking calls.

That bloggers can now record what we say and send those recordings to our advertisers, urging them to stop advertising on our show… well, that just changes the rules of the game. Big time. Nothing gets a station manager’s attention like a cancellation from a sponsor. “We can always find a new talk show host. Sponsors? Not so easy.”

Your politics will dictate who’s “right” in the story above. But like it or not, yesterday’s “broadcast” is today’s “conversation.” And sometimes it’s all shouting.

Google deal with CBS Radio imminent?

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Merrill Lynch broadcast analyst Jessica Reif Cohen expects Google will team with a CBS Radio in a wide-ranging advertising deal. In a nutshell, Google would allow advertisers to bid for radio airtime using some of the same functionality as its online sales tool. But again, no deal has been announced.

Cohen estimated that a Google deal to sell 10% of CBS Radio’s advertising inventory would generate approximately $200 million in revenues and that the upside for CBS would be two-fold: “1) attracting new (likely smaller) advertisers to its platforms a la Google’s experience with search, and 2) creating a more efficient sales model that reduces the friction/cost of selling advertising.” [LostRemote]