Good read.
From New York to San Francisco, radio’s monolithic news brands were largely built before the widespread availability of news on the web and smartphones. It’s something officials at Radio One acknowledged after making the painful decision to pull the plug on “News 92.” “People are getting their news via mobile devices that they travel with,” VP Yashima AziLove says.
This looks pretty cool. I’d love to have easy access to all my songs on the dash like that (not that it’s that hard to use my trusty cassette adapter connected to my phone).
For those of us in the industry, you’re going to want one of those buttons. Spotify has some premium real estate in this demo (even if the Spotify experience didn’t work so well). And where is the button that says FM? Uh-oh!!!!!
Check it out – the “radio” part is about three minutes in.
Another “radio is dominant” article…yes, and while that’s good and nice, I keep wondering about numbers like 41% and 36% that used to be zero.
Forty-eight percent of people polled say they use their own music libraries weekly when listening to their favorite artists and bands, while 41% use on-demand streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube.
Thirty-six percent tune in to curated streaming music services such as Pandora and iTunes Radio.
Those seem like really bug numbers to me, and when I talk to my college students who are all signed up for a “radio” class and none of them listen to radio unless I make them….watch out if you own a big metal tower in a swamp, make sure you have a solid streaming plan behind it.
Good read here about an FM positioning the juan element against algorithms Take That, Pandora | jacoBLOG.
Wow.
“It’s more about not leaving money on the table, realizing that if they don’t build a digital radio network that can bring in a couple hundred million, then that’s a wasted opportunity,” said Paul Verna, a senior analyst with eMarketer, when asked about Clear Channel’s business and the rise of the iHeartRadio brand. “On the flip side of that,” he continued, “I don’t think there is an opportunity to scale that up to the billions or create a whole new paradigm that supersedes their other business.”
via Clear Channel Renames Itself iHeartMedia, in an Embrace of the Digital – NYTimes.com.
An excerpt from a lengthy article about the very interesting DASH radio. Check out their app…
We’ve brought in the key curators, people who are so passionate about the music that really get it [and] that are the biggest in the field for old school Hip Hop. So guess what? We’re gonna do our old school and our classic station. We’re bringing Julio G who started KDAY back in the day. There’s nobody that can do Hip Hop like him, there’s not one person. I argue that you couldn’t find one person better for that. We’ve done the same thing across all these genres. We’re not just the same 10 formats over and over. We have such a wide variety of stations but it’s not overwhelming. They’re all programmed and they’re all real radio. They all have live people behind them. It’s programmed by algorithm. In terms of regular radio it’s not just the same formats over and over. Plus, we’ve got rid of the repetitive playlists, all the lack of variety and most importantly the commercials. The average station has 10 to 15 minutes of commercials per hour.
A free U2 album was a nice surprise yesterday. In the college class I teach on Monday night we were discussing what “radio” is (and my philosophy of why I am teaching much more than just AM/FM) and the various strengths and weaknesses of each form of “radio.” For Apple, we talked about the coolness factor and the ecosystem.
LiveNation has U2 under a 360 contract, they can simply build in the price of the album. Universal Music can collect on vinyl, a small amount of physical CDs, and streaming. My guess though is that “Songs of Innocence” will limited to streaming on iTunes Radio and not available on Spotify and other services.
via U2 Gives Away New Album NOW, Skip Charts, And Who Cares? No Money in CD Sales | Showbiz411.
So that’s pretty interesting. iTunes radio has at worst a window here where the album is exclusive to them. Heading forward I wonder if it will open up to the others.
Well here’s one I was hoping not to write.
I worked with Joan for a few years around the turn of the century when she had her radio show on WOR (a stroke of genius by Hollywood Dave Bernstein the PD). As the APD I helped launch the show and then bowed in and out depending on staffing or where the show was in its life cycle.
The big takeaway I had with Joan was how she was a master of timing. She worked with two writers who would cut up pieces of paper on which they would scribble fast jokes. Joan could be mid-sentence and handed a note and she would read it cold and nail the funny. Really a pleasure to watch.
We did a lot of serious shows as well in the horrible fall of 2001. Folks forget about all the anthrax stuff that fall that followed 9/11. Was it Al Qaeda? Was the mail at the radio station covered? What would happen next to New York City? Scary times.
Toward the end of my run at WOR the PD had been fired, Bob Grant’s producer had had a heart attack and Joan’s producer quit. I was covering all those roles as well as my daily duties producing Dr. Joy Browne. I got quite efficient at booking shows and multitasking.
Joan liked to work. In those days she was frankly overcommitted. She would do work for QVC, and would often land at LaGuardia at 5:30 for a 6pm radio show. She’d walk in as the theme was rolling. We still weren’t at the modern-style smartphone age so it was challenging to communicate with Joan.
The last time we worked together she strolled in at 6:00:01 or whatever and I quickly talked her through the show. She gave me an earful and didn’t like the guests. So I threw back a “well, then you have open phones (meaning no guests, the burden is on the host) tonight.” I was done with Joanie.
A few years later, I can’t remember the details, Jeremy Coleman – who was head of talk for Sirius(-XM?) when I ran comedy there -and I went to Joan’s apartment for a meeting. I don’t recall why but I do remember how gracious and upbeat Joan was, including serving us some delicious iced tea. I’m glad I had that extra meeting with her lest this post would be about the time I told Joan basically to go hose herself.
One more note that doesn’t fit in any of the other paragraphs – it always bothered her that Johnny Carson never forgave her for taking the late show on Fox.
A terrific talent. Hopefully whoever has SiriusXM Comedy now will do a proper tribute.
…
Vaguely related update: as I finished this post the neighbor kid came over. His dog ran away and his parents weren’t home. So I hit publish and jumped in the car. Dog safe, all OK. Then ran to soccer practice etc….checked my phone and saw this post was doing well on social media and noticed I had a few typos. Drat. Blame the dog.
It’s fun to see more and more players in the digital space.
But these services have also had difficulty attracting paying users when so much music is available free. According to a study released last week by Midia Research, a market research firm that studies digital music, 34 percent of people who stream music online will not pay for music “because they get all they need for free from YouTube.”
via Rdio Moves to Free Music Model to Compete with Spotify and Others – NYTimes.com.