After a little trimming around the edges, I’ve very satisfied with the change I just made to suppress the redundant listings. Instead of giving you a big long list, you see the “best” ones in my experienced opinion, starting from the stations that most visitors choose. I’ve put a firm emphasis on the stations that carry the entire show live and dropped the ones that carry a partial show unless that makes the list too short (example: Clark Howard)
Radio itself knows – and Tunein and iHeartradio are going to relearn – an old lesson. Most people are creatures of habit – they don’t go randomly exploring. Choosing from 1 of 10 stations is much more rewarding that choosing from one of 10,000. Less is more.
In Radio Jargon, this is called your P1 – it’s the station that if I turned on your car radio would start playing. It’s the station you listen to the most. You might switch to other stations – like to get the news or avoid commericals – but most people live most of their radio life on one station.
That behavior isn’t going to change. I’m not suddenly going to listen to opera or jazz or sports talk.. The one thing the internet might do is give me access to a P1 station outside where I live – I might be talked into making WABC my P1 if it wasn’t crap now 🙂 WLS was another choice until my favorite two hosts died (Don Wade and Jake Hartford).
But the end game is podcasts. Once people find podcasts, they just aren’t going to put up with the 24 minutes an hour of ads/PSAs accusing them of being a tax cheat, a drunk driver, a parent of an autistic child, a homophobe, a racist or a child molestor. Really, how stupid are people in radio? (don’t bother answering that)
SiriusXM now has over 26 million paying subscribers and record revenue and growing margins.
What I’m kind of saying in my own oblique way is this directory is increasingly irrelevant, and I’m OK with that.
It seems to me that I listen to a few radio stations for a few reasons… content, variety, reception. If I’m hearing what I want to listen to clearly, I’ll leave it on. But if some pundit gets on ranting about something I disagree with, or some commercial comes on that grates on my nerves, or the reception goes to hell, I’m hitting the scan. The other reason I look for other stations is to fit MY changing schedule. I want to listen to what I want and find it when I want to hear it, conveniently.
For example, I’ll listen to Coast at night until the guests get too wacko or depressing for even my jaded sensibilities, then I’m off to red eye radio, or jazz, or something that doesn’t annoy me. The same goes for Rush. When I get bored with his or Bennett’s fill-in’s ‘topics’, or Levin’s voice, I’m out of there, looking for something more agreeable or interesting to listen to. The reason I have used your site in the past was to sort through all the chaff. I found your content notes interesting and useful when looking, because they gave me some clues to whether I might be interested in connecting to a program for a while. BTW, you used to be easier to use when I could find those convenient links to the stream. I was sorry to see them go.
As a matter of fact, your idea of the value of what you were doing doesn’t work when cutting things out. A general store adds variety and becomes a ‘destination’ because folks can find what they are looking for when they go there. When the owner attempts to become a more ‘efficient’ merchant by whittling away at the variety of goods he offers, he looses that base of customers who stop by to see if he might have what they are looking for. He looses their motivation for making him the place to go to. It’s the difference between a vibrant, growing, word-of-mouth hot spot, and a I-wonder-if-they-still-carry-it location. You have to be very judicious when cutting the shoelaces and polish from your department store if you don’t want to loose your shoe customer. Or cutting the lumber out if you don’t want to miss that hardware buyer. It costs so much to bring people to you in the first place, to get that word of mouth advertising going, and it s so easy to let the excitement wane from something that was growing.
I’m not a store selling products.
hmmmm, yeah what Jack said,
Would you like your refund now?
The redundant station analysis is now visible to all visitors.
I’ve switched the web site to unattended mode, which turns off all (most?) of the features that permit users to “say something”. Show ratings, show topics, visibility to the blog.
Move along – there is nothing to see here.
http://www.tunein.com/