Radio stations have invested a lot of time and money in developing brand loyalty (“The BIG talker!”), but after people arrive here, typically after a few weeks they realize their local station is irrelevant to hearing a syndicated program, since a radio station can only have one program on at a time. While initially, people were listening to their favorite show at work, increasingly employers are blocking streaming – that means if you want to hear the show, you aren’t going to hear it live.
The show is the product, not the radio station.
Glenn Beck really broke the ice with putting his daily show on the internet free 24/7 – looping the current day’s show all day. It’s not a podcast – it has the national commercials and isn’t on demand – you join the stream wherever it is in the 3 hour cycle, not at the start. NPR was way out ahead making podcasts available for free, in direct competition with their own affiliates.
Herman Cain has jumped on the bandwagon – this is significant for a couple reasons. His show (and Clark Howard) are produced by Cox Radio’s WSB-AM in Atlanta – and distributed by Dial Global, which is now owned by Cumulus Media. The Fox is in charge of the Cox hen house now. The Matron of Cox is getting very old and Cox Radio has been slowly backing out of the radio business. Cain or someone close to him sees his future is not safe being in syndicated radio distributed by their competitor (which also happens to be based in Atlanta).
Sort of related, I just ran the extract against his affiliate list:
[Total] 151
[notvalid] => 15
[simulcast] => 19
[duplicate] => 1
[nostream] => 40
My review of the “new” items shows they are mostly former Neil Boortz affiliates that dropped the show when Neil retired – or stations that are not news/talk stations that switched formats (America Loves Sports!) or never carried the show in the first place.
http://streamingradioguide.com/radio-show.php?showid=9309
I’ve added streams for Cain24/7 and Bloomberg Radio