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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Web Radio: Didn't You Hear? It's the Next Big Thing One reason Web radio is mushrooming is the highly social nature of its core audience. Educated twenty- and thirty-somethings maintain their social network profiles where they often share music tips and services. One-third of Web radio listeners have social network profiles they visit regularly, according to Edison. And the technology and streaming experience has improved immeasurably in recent years. Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker allow users to create highly customized personal stations that target their tastes and help them discover new music. Pandora has 21 million registered users and a little less than half are active. About 90% of listening occurs on the PC desktop, says founder Tim Westergren. Web radio will get a boost in coming weeks when the industry settles a longstanding royalty dispute with the government’s Copyright Review Board, a body that oversees the “performance fees” digital streaming services must pay publishers. Two years ago, the CRB reset these rates so high that streamers like Pandora warned it would put them out of business. “They came up with a bizarrely high answer,” says Westergren. A more palatable rate has been struck according to sources, and all of the relevant parties soon will announce a fee structure that leads to realistic business models. Why is the rise and success of Internet radio important to publishers? On several grounds. First, this is what your prize in-office users are doing with much of their day. Finding ways to weave into one of the things they most enjoy about broadband should be a no-brainer for any veteran Web content provider. If you think they like social networks and video, then wait until you see how much users love their Pandora. The average session time is three hours. Also, Web radio is an enormously robust channel for audio programming, including podcasts. Services like Last.fm, for instance, let users find and save popular podcasts into their libraries for later playback as a channel. More to the point, however, streaming audio represents a massively popular mode of online behavior that invites a range of publisher partnerships: branded audio channels or “editor’s choice” channels, for instance. Why shouldn’t an online site offer an audio feed of its editor’s Web radio channel or channels created by that issue’s featured celebrities? What would an Utne radio channel sound like, or a BHG or High Times channel, for that matter? Lifestyle, art, regional and certainly music publications all aggregate taste groups that likely share musical or even talk radio preferences. Web radio listeners already swap their music channels in much the same way the rest of us trade and share article links in social media. Audio is the next content type users will want to coalesce around and share. This is a Web trend in the making that Web publishers should not take lightly. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
 Managing Editor - Thomas Publishing
Online Business Manager- Kiplinger.com Account Executive, Inside Sales - TMC Media Jobs | Job Alerts | Post Your Resume min Social Networks
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Using a <a href="http://www.signalpatterns.com/music_survey/learn_more">psychology-based approach to music preferences </a>, this method combines your individual preferences with identifying those that are <i>similar</i> to your 'music personality.'
This new form of social music recommendation was developed from years of research in this area by best selling author Dr. Dan Levitin and our team at Signal Patterns.
just like dave has said the real radio are the live terrestrial type networks, not the jukeboxes