The future is becoming quite clear to me. I don’t yet know who is going to win, but I know where the battle will be lost.
Jump to 3:36 for the radio part.
You can read more about Windows in the Car on Gizmodo.
Author: John McDermott @mcdradio
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The best comedian you haven’t heard of yet: Hannibal Buress
I thought I’d mix it up today since it’s Friday.
Doing comedy for SiriusXM for ten years I got to know a lot of comics well before the mainstream. One guy that I got to know, and I love his material is Hannibal Buress.
I’m glad to see he was on Fallon (so maybe you do know him now). Keep an eye on Hannibal, you will start to notice him on various sitcoms…and he’s a rising star.
And I love his aside in this clip about the “rule of three” – I mention that to people when I write copy and they think I am nuts.
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The playbook: why Amazon’s Fire TV is a guaranteed hit | The Verge
Good insight from The Verge…always look at the complete picture of why someone is doing something.
If the device gets to scale (it’s already number one on the best-seller list), Amazon will make money by using the Fire TV to sell everything else. That’s how it’s always done things. “We have a philosophy that we try to price our devices as close to break-even as we possibly can,” says Kindle VP Dave Limp. “If they put it in a drawer, we’ve not benefited at all.” Once the consumer has a Fire TV in their living room, he says, “somebody might by à la carte content, movies, TV shows. Somebody might sign up for Prime… we want to be really aligned with the customer that we only make money when they use our products, not when they buy them.”
via The playbook: why Amazon’s Fire TV is a guaranteed hit | The Verge.
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Oh yeah that pesky YouTube thing
One aspect of my life is that I teach radio at a college on Monday nights, and I didn’t need this study to tell me what you all now know: The kids like “free.”
From Edison Research’s Infinite Dial Study, this is making the rounds today
Somerville, New Jersey — April 1, 2014 — Over a third of Americans age 12-and-up used YouTube to watch music videos or listen to music in the last week. For listeners to most current-based formats, those numbers are significantly higher. 57% of CHR P1s have used YouTube for music in the last week, followed by 53% of Urban P1s and 48% of Rock P1s.
And legal or not, don’t put your head in the sand about the websites that allow folks to make mp3’s from the YouTube videos. That’s not just the kids. I recently told my friend he would like the new U2 song and he should drop the $1.29 on it. He told me he’d go to (website) and convert it.
Some of the other data is interesting and seems quite logical to me.
Yes the streaming services are being used for music. Nobody has gone in hard on talk yet, and nobody has gone in for real on comedy yet (oh hi, feel free to check out my resume/portfolio if you want to get serious about your comedy offerings.)
Yes people in the car like spoken word, they have satellite radio, they are older. Yep – all makes sense. My college students don’t have cars and they don’t have money. (Slide 37)
And don’t ignore slide 18. That’s the one that tells you that iTunes radio has general awareness. They have the reach. Once they go all-in on content watch out. Watch. Out.
The survey is here if you’d like to take a look.
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Spitballing streaming audio with the college kids on a Monday night
On Monday nights I teach a radio management course to college students at FDU. This week’s homework was to tell me who they thought would win in the streaming audio wars.
Half the class went with Pandora. The Pandorans like the market share lead that Pandora has. They like the product. They like free. They don’t mind the ads. They wouldn’t mind super-targetted ads. They like Pandora and their generation isn’t going to change to another service.
The other half of the class went with Apple. They have seen what Apple has done in other spaces. They think Apple hangs back and watches what others do then they come in and do it better. They like the advantage iTunes Radio has of being on the phone.
So I jumped in and asked if anyone has heard of Galaxy. Oh yeah that.
Milk isn’t on their radar (yet?). This particular set of students all have iPhones, so factor that into the conversation. But the “it’s on my phone” argument will hold for both services. My two cents is it is kind of impossible/not-smart to ignore the amount of units Samsung is selling.
Nobody picked Beats Audio. Beats is perceived as having way cool headphones. They’ll even spend the extra buck to get Beats headphones over my hypothetical “Walmart headphones that sound better.” But as far as paying for Beats Audio…non-starter.
So I called their bluff and told them Spotify was now $5 for college students. In previous classes they told me that $5 was the price-point they would go for. Now that it’s a reality they still aren’t interested.
I don’t think they understand Spotify – but that’s Spotify’s problem, right? Pandora is the perceived cool with the college kids.
Now, I wouldn’t go making any billion dollar bets based upon an adjunct-professor and 12 college kids, but I do really really enjoy these discussions every week. We throw things around and play in the hypothetical sandbox. And in that sandbox, here’s one…
What if Apple decides (because it is cash-rich) to throw money at Howard Stern when he is a free agent. What if they just want to own the space…and go grab the biggest fish. Would “free” Howard on iTunes radio get people to the service? Would it move phones? Would it increase use of CarPlay?
I’m not ready to make a half-billion dollar bet on a college class vamping…but it’s an interesting hypothetical discussion to have.
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I’m in favor of the humans
Interesting stuff about how the…we need a term for all the streamers like the New Radio….the New Radio are starting to involve more humans.
Now that people assume bots lurk behind most every online experience, they seem to place more value on a human presence. Slacker, a seven-year-old Internet radio service, has 65 curators on staff, each responsible for programming the songs on up to five stations. Before, they mostly worked behind the scenes, but after Slacker discovered that listening sessions last up to 20% longer on stations hosted by a person, the company “doubled down,” says Jack Isquith, Slacker’s senior vice president of content programming. Now curators come on between songs to talk about the music.
via The Search for the Perfect Playlist – WSJ.com.
As a human, I am in favor of the humans.
As a programmer, yes you do need that human touch on the mouse/algorithm to give it that extra special something. Yes you can get by just hitting shuffle….but for how long.
As a programmer with expertise in comedy, none of the New Radio have nailed this yet for that format. The computers are spitting out the same Jim Gaffigan clip every time I hit play, and Jim Gaffigan every 4th cut (is that what people want – comedy is not music), and the computers don’t know who Ryan Belleville is.
But the New Radio will get there. Good stuff from the WSJ, worth a read!
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Spotify now offers US college students half-price music streaming
This will be interesting to discuss with my students on Monday. Every week they tell me that they don’t want to pay for things, then I ask for suggestions on how to monetize these services. Their response is usually “lower the price.”
Spotify has launched a US student program that lets you pay just $5 per month for Premium access (half of the usual price) as long as you’re attending a post-secondary school that qualifies for federal aid, whether it’s a college or a vocational outlet.
via Spotify now offers US college students half-price music streaming (updated).
Your move students.
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iTunes Radio Adds NPR News Channel – what’s next?
This was quite surprising and fascinating…
When iTunes Radio launched last fall, the service was designed for music fans and music labels. Now it is branching out: National Public Radio is adding the first news station to Apple’s audio streaming service, with more on the way.
A few obvious but important things:
1. This is not music. Why is that important? Take out your iPhone. Note that the button you use to access iTunes radio is labeled “music.” This suggests that the rumor of iTunes Radio getting its own app may be correct.
2. This is not music. It’s talk. Will Apple just add one talk source and stop? That would seem weird to me. So what else is coming? (The article I linked mentions “more on the way.”
3. They brought NPR within iTunes radio. Why not just encourage folks to download an NPR News app? Why bring it inside? What else might they bring inside?
I don’t know the answers, but I sure am keeping an eye on what they are up to. Fascinating.
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This next generation doesn’t have a clock radio either, so why do the weather?
I teach a college class on radio so I spend a decent amount of time with 18-22’s. And in the not too distant future these folks will be entering 25-54. They definitely do not have clock radios.
The assumption that most core radio listeners have a clock radio is faulty. Like so many things in radio, assuming these people will simply set their station without reminders or encouragement is questionable, too. And it also reinforces the importance of having presence on mobile phones.”
via Worldwide Radio Summit 2014 Exclusive TechSurvey10 Sneak Peek: The Decline Of Clock ….
I am one of the old-timers (at 44 with 21+ years in radio). I have a clock radio. When I had to head into the city every morning, I would set the alarm to WCBS at 6:15. I would get the Mets score, eat one commercial, traffic and weather and then click. Headlines could wait until I was in the car (or looked at email/twitter in the kitchen.)
More and more folks are getting those services, especially weather, from their phones.
I read an article last week that suggests that radio programmers shouldn’t forfeit the services to the phones. Now forfeit is a loaded word, but I will ask if it is necessary for all stations to do traffic and weather.
WCBS New York (an All News* station for you out of towners, the asterisk is for those pesky sporting events) should do traffic and weather. Of course.
But why does WFAN need traffic reports. Is anyone listening to Boomer & Carton thinking I really need a traffic report here. Or is it just one more thing to billboard. Couldn’t we come up with something else to billboard? WFAN figured out how to do mornings without 20/20s and they have a very popular show. Maybe they don’t need that traffic report. Does anyone miss the news that they used to do in the first year of Boomer & Carton?
So maybe you don’t need the traffic. And maybe Z-100 doesn’t need the weather (do they even do weather, I haven’t listened to Z-100 since Shannon was there. It’s me, Z, I aged…you do your thing and you do it well.)
There was a time when school closings was not only a smart thing to do, it was a money maker. Now, nobody does it on the radio. I get woken up by texts at 4:45am…why do I need John Gambling to read me everyone else’s texts?
So maybe you don’t need that traffic and weather. Maybe it’s clutter. Just asking.
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Penguin Real Estate, LLC
My second grader asked me to help with her homework. The assignment?
“Write an advertisement to sell land to penguins.”
She had taken a stab at “copy” (she had no idea what I was talking about when I used that word) and I asked if she wanted me to “punch it up.” (Still no idea.)
Well daddy has no job and used to write 95% of the copy for the SiriusXM Comedy Channels…and has this cool MacBook Air and…..an hour later here is where we finished.