In a streaming world where there are over 9,000 radio stations to choose from, how will people find the one they want to listen to?
If I go to your car and turn the key and the radio is on, the station that starts playing is your P1 station in radio jargon. The reality is most people most of the time listen to the same radio station (when they have the radio on)
The new iHeartradio app is out (the version that doesn’t require you to tie your usage to Facebook) and I gave it another look.
The app suffers from the same problem as the original one – my directory hints at how Streaming is not like radio and people in the radio business (especially Bob Pittman) have some fundamental rethinking to do – and I’m not claiming to have a silver bullet and know the answers – I just maybe more clearly see the problems.
With 9,000+ listening choices (just on conventional over-the-air radio stations), will people have a P1 station and how will they choose it? How will a person find that “right” station while driving down the road at 65 mph without becoming severely distracted?
You start by choosing “Live Stations” (some of which are not radio, and most of which are not “Live” – unless you consider a computer playing music from a playlist with 15 minutes an hour of commercials being “alive”).
Once you go into the “Live” “Stations”, you next choose “Local” (based on your zip code), or Cities (which gives a long alphabetical list of every state, then every city in which Clear Channel has a radio station [and soon to include Cumulus] . Do I really want to know what radio stations are in Columbus Georgia?…
or and I can go by Genre – if I choose Classic Rock, it offers the 5 most popular – I can choose among Q104.3, Lone Star 92.5, Big 100.3, 967 The Arrow or 102.5 WDVE rocks.
As Parrot just pointed out in another comment, Huh? I kind of guess the Lone Star 92.5 may be in Texas, but beyond that… Once I get beyond the most popular 5, then what? The player offers a “Scan” button which chooses a random “station” from the same genre… which just cycles between the 5 most popular, not the entire list.
Frequencies mean nothing in streaming radio. Location means almost nothing, particularly when the programming on the station is nationally syndicated like Glenn Beck or a music playlist selected by a programmer in San Antonio which chooses the same songs for every station in the country.
After the list of the 5 most popular stations, then I’m presented with the same alphabetical list of states, then cities – just filtered by the current genre.
iHeart needs a more robust way to find “My” station – the one that will become my P1 streaming station…. perhaps let me choose to only show major market stations, stations in a region of the country, stations that have played songs that I like in the last half hour, stations that currently have a live local host, etc…
Pandora is the end game for “radio”, and it’s why they are kicking Radio’s ass (along with Sirius/XM).
iHeart’s other “Pandora like” option is to create a custom radio station that chooses music that you like based on your age, gender, location and hints you gave the app about specific songs and artists you like or don’t like.
Once people are not held captive to the list of government licensed stations that own the monopoly to “serve” their city, the entire model of why people listen to radio for music breaks apart. This is why the FM band is rapidly becoming the home for more News/Talk and All news radio stations – but even there, with every Clear Channel news/talk radio station carrying Rush Limbaugh at the same time, why do you need 100 choices for the same thing? It’s the programming that matters, not the physical transmitter for a specific city.
This week the U.S. Supreme Court heard the “Indecency” case about whether the FCC can or should regulate the content of Over the Air TV. (the case in which this web site was cited as an authority!)
Justice Samuel Alito sent a chill through the entire TV industry with this statement:
“Broadcast TV is living on borrowed time. It is not going to be long before it goes the way of vinyl records and eight-track tapes,…Why not let this die a natural death?”
People now care even less what the fuck people on radio say.
Good analysis of the challenges facing traditional radio today. Local stations need to offer things that can only be offered locally in order to remain relevant. The revenue base will be smaller but it may be the only piece of the pie left to them.
Intersting part that Art I think addresses on programming, most of these stations are Clear channel, (they all maybe clear channel).
If you hear Jason Aldean on WTQR Winston Salem at 8:05 you may hear the same Jason Aldean song on WPOC Baltimore at 8:10 and then hear the same song on WMZQ Washington @ 8:15, then WRBT Harrisburg possibly after that. It dosesn’t matter if a older song or new one. They seem to play the same list.
It sounds that someone is in the studio, at these clear channel stations, but I can’t tell if they are local in the evenings. It could be some one that alternates between 4 or 5 stations, like they do in in Roanoke virginia, between a WSLC, WXLK, WSLQ, and WFIR. There is someone live but they run between each studio for the station. The announcer just changes his name as he rotates around each studio, in the evening. Its crazy.
I agree with Jerseydevil on the Local station doing something ‘ local specific’ besides dropping call letter of the station to identify it. I don’t know if the remote broadcast is the answer either because there isn’t many local business’s that advertise on radio.
Lowes and home depot ran out the local building supply and appliance dealer. They don’t buy local radio time, they do syndicated purchases. So its hard for a local station to sell advertising to be profitable. Nothing on main street makes it hard.
Its a shame people waste time watching “biggest looser” with so much else going on in the world.
hell, we may not have to worry about it anymore if they start shooting in Iran and it goes thermonuclear.
parrott
“hell, we may not have to worry about it anymore if they start shooting in Iran and it goes thermonuclear.”
The bright side of thermonuclear wars is that they never last long. 🙂
It’s over in a flash!
A lot of what you’re hearing is probably “voice tracking”. In the crudest version, the voice is recorded and just tied to a song, or talking about some “evergreen” topic… “the top 10 things to not do in a first date”.. John Tess and Delilah fit Into this category.
Then you get more sophisticated – you lay in a few items that are topical.. The football playoffs, the golden globes, Mohammed Ali’s birthday, so it sounds live – but those segments are done and edited and the computer splices in the songs. Time, temperature and basic weather report are done by voice generation, not a live person.
Back to my traffic helicopter story in Detroit – I used to have a police scanner radio that happened to pick up the real traffic helicopter. The same helicopter did the traffic reports for several different station’s, with the pilot and reporter using different names. The ones who probably were paying more went on the air live – other stations they connected to a recording machine that would be kicked off by a computer at the appropriate times.