AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are some of the online radio services that have become popular these last few years. A lot of of these are also accessible on mobile devices including mobile phones. Are local radio stations doomed? I will take a closer look at online radio to attempt to answer this question. In particular I will study the effect of streaming radio on local broadcasters.
Local radio seems to be having a hard time in today’s radio landscape with competing satellite and online radio services taking away listeners by supplying commercial-free music and entertainment. In particular, online radio has turn out to be fairly popular by providing a virtually indefinite amount of radio stations.
While historically local radio has been the only truly mobile radio, online radio providers including Pandora are now available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices such as mobile phones.
AOL Radio which features 200 plus music channels of 25 genres makes use of CBS radio as its underlying platform. It also provides access to 150 national CBS radio stations. The underlying platform “play.it” also has a feature that allows listeners to create their own radio stations by entering preferred albums, artists etc. The individual tracks of each music channel are also available for storage on an iPod through 3rd-party software such as iGetMusic.
Users can also create customized radio on other online music services by entering the artist and album names and these services will play songs based on that information. On the other hand, most online radio broadcasters lack the ability to create fully customized radio stations such as the “play.it” platform.
Does online radio mean the extinction of local radio? The rising number of options evidently is going to reduce the market share of traditional radio broadcasters. Online radio has proved useful in particular for niche broadcasters because of the inherently lower broadcasting cost in comparison with local radio stations.
As the variety of stations is a benefit to listeners, it is at the same time diluting market share and online radio broadcasters are finding it hard to attract a moderately large number of listeners and be profitable. On the other hand, online radio has less pressure to insert commercials which has made the content more appealing to listeners.
One big benefit of local stations though is local content such as news or current events. Thus far the poor audio quality of FM radio has been a big disadvantage. Nonetheless, recent digital radio broadcasts are set to enhance the audio quality. One of these technologies is HD radio. It is hard to predict a clear winner in the battle between online and local radio since both offer their own unique content and high mobility which are the vital factors that will determine the destiny of each service.
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