AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are a few of the online radio services that have become popular these last few years. Many of these are also accessible on portable products such as mobile phones. I will take a look at the impact of online radio on conventional radio broadcasters to find out if this means the end of local radio stations.
Local radio would seem to be having a hard time in today’s radio landscape with competing satellite and online radio providers taking away listeners by offering commercial-free music and entertainment. There is practically an unlimited number of online radio channels available.
Pandora along with other online radio providers have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices by installing the appropriate app. This increases convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has up to now been the biggest plus of local radio.
AOL Radio which boasts 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 permits listeners to make 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.
Pandora and other online radio services have equally started to offer customized music. The user can enter music-related information such as artist, track or album name. These channels will then select tracks which are similar to the information entered. Other services, however, fail to offer fully customized music channels.
Is the end of local radio near? The growth of competition from satellite and online radio has started to take away listeners from local radio stations. Traditional radio seems to have a hard time to stop this trend. Online radio is especially useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high cost and licensing of frequency space.
Online radio broadcasters have found it hard to be profitable. The major cause is the vast number of competiting channels which is diluting listeners. At the same time, however, there is less pressure to insert commercials because of the lower expenses of broadcasting compared with conventional stations. This has made online radio content more interesting than terrestrial radio.
One big plus of local stations however is local content like news or current events. Moreover, local radio is now improving the audio quality by using digital broadcast technologies versus conventional FM broadcasts which has been a big advantage of online radio up to now. Content and mobility will be vital in determining the destiny of online and local radio. Online radio offers a large number of choices while local radio excels by providing local content. Both online and local broadcasts offer great mobility. Therefore it is difficult to predict a clear winner in this radio battle.
Tags: aol radio, online radio, streaming radio, wireless audio