The Future of Internet Radio
This kind of cross-promotion drives a tremendous amount of traffic online, according to King.
"Almost all of these stations do a good job of cross-promotion," he says. "Over the air during car drives, they will say, ‘Hey, listen to us online during the day while you’re at work.’"
And if you’re at the office at 8 a.m. and need your Stephanie Miller fix, that’s a heck of a motivator to stay with the station throughout the day instead of logging on to Last.fm when you get to your desk. Listener loyalty and localism are huge for terrestrial stations.
"Since our morning show, Bob & Sheri, is syndicated nationwide and is very popular, we’ll get a lot of email from listeners if their local radio station drops the show," says Mauney. "We always point them to our stream, and a large part of the audience on WLNK comes from all over the country due to the popularity of Bob & Sheri."
King can see this shift taking place from his clients’ analytics.
"Most of our internet-only broadcasters have seen a decline since terrestrial radio has come back online in a big way," he says. "Some of our internet-only broadcasters were having four, five, six, ten thousand simultaneous during the midday, and they’re down to, like, two or three thousand now because those people have literally gone back to terrestrial radio online instead."
Lewis concurs, but he warns that terrestrial stations need to remain relevant to listeners and their communities.
"The terrestrial broadcasting industry is faced with an evolving environment where their listening audience is inevitably shifting to a digital medium," he says. "If they are going to keep up, they need to build a more compelling story as to why their listeners need to remain loyal to local radio."
And localism is radio’s raison d’être, King believes.
"Local personalities who know local places, talk about local things, with local weather and local sports, that part will continue to drive people to radio," he says. "As long as local radio exists, I think it’s going to dominate that space because it is tied to geographic areas that you care about."Ma echoes King’s sentiment, saying, "It gives people something to hold onto. Something that they grew up with or just feel really comfortable with," which is why ex-pats, travelers, or college students often will listen to their hometown stations’ streams.
One of Liquid Compass’ clients that is doing a great job of keeping ties with local listeners, Lewis points out, is Indie 103.1 out of Los Angeles (www.indie1031.com).
"Their listeners are actually rewarded for their online listening through a new Indie Activist Club, which they launched earlier this summer," he says. "Listeners can also send in music requests directly from their media player, which makes the listening experience all that more personal."
Indie 103.1 is über-accessible to boot, Lewis points out.
"They are making themselves as accessible as they possibly can, offering listeners the ability to access their stream via Silverlight, Windows Media, and MP3," he says.
Where the Bands Are
If you stream it, they will come. But will they stay? That depends on a couple of things: namely, kick-ass content and stream quality.
"Listeners are now expecting an uninterrupted, CD-like quality and the ability to access it anywhere they want," Lewis says. "By offering high-bitrate streams in multiple formats, stations can ensure that they are highly accessible."
Mauney believes that "the most important thing is to make the sound good." Historically, simulcasters have struggled with cluttery stop sets and clunky transitions. Because they aren’t allowed to use the same commercials they use on-air, stations pad the breaks with fill songs, morning show promos, and PSAs. But these days it’s vital to opt for filling those stop sets with quality ad inventory instead.
"We work hard to make sure it’s clean and that we don’t play station promos or PSAs over and over during the on-air commercial breaks," Mauney says.
Helping their clients adapt are Liquid Compass’ TrafficMyAds tool, which handles in-stream ad inventory, and Abacast’s Ad Injection 2.0 tool, which permits the webcast of easily switchable streams from over-the-air content to online-only content "in a heartbeat," according to King. These tools have helped stations such as Abacast client KPLU "maintain a strong, solid infrastructure for our streams so we don’t have down times," says Craig Coovert, KPLU’s web director. Not only does KPLU simulcast its on-air programming, the station also streams a totally automated 24-hour jazz program called jazz24. In a testament to the importance of innovative programming, jazz24 was named the No. 1 jazz web stream worldwide last fall by Webcast Metrics.Kennedy agrees that jazz24 is an example of damn good content.
"Reminiscent of the Clinton presidential campaign, we have a saying around here: ‘It’s the playlist, stupid,’" he says. "That’s really what people experience, and the degree to which those playlists meet the tastes of listeners is enormously important. I think the great thing about broadband connectivity is that it enables a provider to meet the full range of tastes that characterize this great and vast country, which listens to everything from obscure traditional jazz to 16th century Renaissance motets to Christian hip-hop to heavy metal."
Livin’ in the Future
While education, promotion, and programming are all vital to internet radio’s survival, there is one last driver that has proven especially important for pure plays, perhaps because of their already stream-savvy audience. If the battleground for radio is the internet, the next frontier is the mobile space (read: how easily internet radio stations can be accessed from geek-friendly devices such as the iPhone).
Before the Pandora iPhone application stole headlines on July 11, Kennedy said that "Pandora has spread overwhelmingly because of just one thing: Pandora listeners telling other people. That has fueled all of our growth, which has now taken us to over 14 million registered users." But they’ve had to do some recalculating since then. For the first few days after the application’s launch, it was reported that Pandora got a new iPhone listener every 2 seconds.
Mobile music apps are indeed among the fastest growing mobile services, and companies should rush to satisfy listener hunger, Kennedy says.
"Certainly anyone who understands how people listen to radio understands how important mobility is," Kennedy says, pointing to stats that say roughly 80% of all listening takes place away from the laptop or desktop. "People aren’t going to change their basic habits about where they listen to radio, and so, obviously, getting internet radio into the car, into the living room, into the kitchen, into a form that can be experienced when walking, jogging, commuting, etc., is absolutely crucial. It’s the difference between being able to address 10 to 20% of the market to being able to address 100% of the market."
Ward couldn’t agree more.
"Our recent developments have, for the most part, had one goal in mind, which is to bring the Last.fm experience to you wherever you are, not just on the computer,̶
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