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Radio Listening Declining w/ Digital On Its Way Up
Redlands CRC writes "According to C|Net and The NPD Group, the number of listeners to radio media has declined by 4% against the previous year, and the number of people listening to music on their computer has risen 22%. The study has also shown that online radio station listeners have increased to 53.5 million this March, up from 45.3 million a year ago. Music streaming also saw an greater uptake in listeners this year, with an increase of 37% compared to the previous year."
Well, traditional over the air radio was bound to lose out with the digital revolution. Just take a look at shoutcast or any other popular online radio index and the number of choices is infinitely greater than over the air.
...have anything todo with the fact that most radio stations are canned and pre-programmed from a master list of the "latest hits".
{fineprint}
Notice: Latest hit has been defined as the latest album or single that the master controlling agency (see RIAA) demands be played over and over and over and over.
{/fineprint}
Three things annoy me about radio stations
1. Lame on-air "personalities" that are never critical of anything [specially sponsor related].
2. Same music over and over
3. Lame advertisements and endorsements that are for things you just don't need that much advertisement for. e.g. I don't care how often you mention it, I'm not buying a $200,000 yacht!
And seriously an mp3 player with a shuffle mode can replace the "selection" of music played on air.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Thats because most of the crap stations are out-sourced to a big company with a building full of generic DJs who just play the same record industry generated play lists and pretend to be in some town they've never heard of between songs. The whole thing is just one big advert. A few years ago, a radio station would have a massive library, now days people have an even bigger library stored in the palm of their hand and with full control over what they listen to - how can a radio compete? New music is more likely to be played online rather than a real radio station so you'll get every band, not just the ones that have been heard by a producer. All thats left is talk radio which is great and has a real future (theres never any shortage of things to talk about) ironically, radio stations seem scared to carry people like Howard Stern in the US because of the pussy FCC.
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Broadcast Radio - a few dozen stations per city.
Internet Radio - Tens of thousands of stations, if not more, plus you can listen to your favorite station in any city.
The huge variety of internet radio menas there literally is something for everyone. With more choices, there's bound to be migration to the more robust medium.
Gee, do you think maybe the reason nobody listens to radio anymore is that they fill everything with "CharlieFM" or "BobFM" or "AliceFM" or "JackFM" with pseudo-random crap and call it "variety"? Or that they replace great AM radio stations with hosts like Rick Emerson and Clyde Lewis and replace them with failing "oldies" format programming?
It's so much cheaper to lose most of your audience and deliver pre-programmed drivel without a host (or just an automated "host") from another part of the country than it is to provide customized, interested, live, provocative, intelligent local content.
I was never a fan of FM, but I did listen to AM talk radio since I was eight years old. After 20 years, I've stopped listening. The last great talk show I found was Rick Emerson's geek-oriented program and Clyde Lewis's bizarre (but better than Coast to Coast AM) program on the weekends. Now that they removed that from the Portland air-waves and I've moved to Colorado where the only talk radio states are sports, jesus and Air America, I don't even own a radio.
Radio is eating itself and will hopefully implode soon.
Listen to the specific music I not only like but am in the mood for at the moment, without interruptions, anywhere I want, with good quality, or...
Listen to a prefab mix of so-called "Top 40," most of which consists of people screaming off-key as if they had been seriously injured, no matter what kind of music I feel like listening to; having to put up with constant advertisements as the price of listening to this crap; only while in range of a radio station, and with dubious quality.
Hmm. No wonder I hardly ever listen to radio!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
This just confirms my theory that, as radio declines and digital goes up, digital will become radio with all that that implies. FCC regulation, commercials etc...
Don't believe it? Look at cable TV. When it started, you paid for cable because it had no commercials. That made sense. Commercials paid for television. If people pay for it directly, no need for commercials right? Wrong. Now we pay for cable and still have commercials.
It's only a matter of time before this happens to radio.
That said, I do listen to some stuff that's not available via broadcast (at least locally) as well, but the point was I normally prefer to listen via the computer either way. In fact, I don't listen to a couple of shows just because they're not available via the net.
Also interesting to me is that I'm increasingly listening to recordings of radio broadcasts (that weren't originally intended as "podcasts"). That's a big deal for me since I'm frequently interrupted in my listening, but I like to hear a complete program.
Yea. It's MP3 in action. It's tossing out audio data that you can hear (I have the same issue) even at high bitrates. That's why I love OGG, it doesn't toss out that particular frequency notch in comparative high bitrate settings.
Most people probably can't hear the difference between 44k and 48k audio (frequency range, not bitrate). I know I can.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I stopped listening to the radio about five years ago, when I started to not hear music on the way to and from work.
Instead, I got a series of advertisments, including the station self-promotional ones, periodically interrupted by a pair of ADD sufferers who seem to be under the mistaken impression that I might be interested in what happened to one of them last night at the grocery store, or, for that matter, find it amusing.
The standard CD player in my car meets my needs quite nicely.
One reason for a decline in radio may be the monumental stupidty of hte radio industry in not making online radio easy to get (don't both, afficionados of program x, which u think does make it easy) It's like the movie industry opposing videos - total lack of intelligence
I, for one, don't need long discussions about anal sex and so forth on my morning drive to work. Neither do I care to listen about how liberals are ruining the country, even though conservatives have been in control for like 12 years now. As for the music - well, thank god for the Morning Buzz, 100.5 - but their signal is weak and I can't get it a lot. Oh yeah, and screw Clear Channel.
Vote Quimby!
Where does satellite radio fit into the picture? XM & Sirius could also be lumped into "digital listening" but they aren't mentioned in the article. Satellite radio, like online streaming, also offers a much greater variety of content than terrestrial radio with the benefit of greater portability.
This article also makes the mistake that is almost always made when comparing traditional radio to newer mediums for delivering audio entertainment. This isn't the 1940's, a very low percentage of radio's listeners are in their homes or offices. Nearly all tranditional radio listeners are in their cars. Sure people bring their iPods with them in their cars and that does provide some competition to traditional radios but the 80's technology of casette tapes probably has a bigger impact and more people are listening to CDs in their cars than an mp3 player.
I doubt very much that you can hear anything in the range 22kHz - 24 kHz, which is the only inherent improvement between 44kHz and 48kHz sampling (cf. Nyquist).
As far as I'm aware, there is no scientific evidence that any human can. Members of the Audiophile cult claim they can, but their methods are as credible as astrologers'.
Of course, mp3s (at the level of compression used in file shares) and radio broadcasts sound like crap. We're talking much more serious distortion and bandwidth limitation than this.
It may be that to your ear, for what you listen to, for a particular level of compression, OGG sounds better than mp3. That's be hard to demonstrate in any scientific way. Both methods do substantial transforms on the signal, and if one "sounds better" than the other there's no trivial explanation.
Psycho-acoustics is very complex.
Where I work at, our bandwidth is dedicated to the servers, so we can't play stream download songs. So I bought myself a portable radio and tune my favorit e station.
I think most jobs are like this. Anyway, didn't we think that "video killed the radio stars" about 20 years ago? IMO, Radio's still alive and kicking.
The only advantages I see of digital radio over broadcast are:
1. No commercials.
2. Clear signal (I haven't tried it but it should be a nice signal...someone with experience chime in)
3. No commercials.
4. More targeted programming.
5. No commercials.
6. Wider Selection.
7. NO FREAKIN COMMERCIALS
Disadvantages:
1. You gotta pay
2. No local news and info
3. Pay to listen.
4. Needs special equipment.
5. You gots ta pay!
TANSTAFL
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
I think one of the very big problems with music radio stations nowadays is that the increasing corporate ownership of radio stations has pretty much killed off a lot of music formats we used to hear on radio. Remember things like classical music? Or easy listening? Or a lot of ethnic music formats? Is it small wonder why XM and Sirius are getting a lot of subscribers because they want to hear a large variety of music?
As for talk radio, it works because it's cheap to syndicate and also talk radio doesn't need the high-quality sound of FM, so an AM station broadcasting a talk show could reach many states from one transmitter. (One thing though: I wonder why Howard Stern is syndicated mostly on FM stations currently, given that his show is mostly talk anyway; that is unless shock talk is primarily an FM phenomenon.)
I myself, due to my job, drive upwards of 10-14 hours a day. So 99% of the time im sitting in my car. I live in the bay area california, So we have quite a few broadcast radio stations, covers almost every single Music style there is. (Short of Trance/techno, which only comes on once a week in the middle of saturday night.. sigh, i love you subsonic) /SUCK/. Get with the times. Play what your customers want, or you'll lose them.
What station do I listen to? The 24/7 news station with 10 minuite Traffic and weather. If not that, I have tapes (Err im too poor to afford a CD player) of Downloaded Trance tracks you cant get anywhere else.
Do i really want to listen to howard stern talking about how hed like to fuck some dumb bimbo because she has big boobies? Or How funny it would be for two morning talkshow hosts, who laugh at themselfs cause their so damned funny, taser their lacky? No, I don't want to listen to that crap at all, it isnt funny, and if people belive it is in *FACT* entertaining, they need to be cleansed from the world, seriously. Fart jokes, big boobies, How bush is the greatest president in the world and how they (who hide behind) freespeech is the bane of the world, is NOT actual entertainment. Its drivel to be archived on 8tracks and remembered like Disco.
Yes Broadcasting industry, yes RIAA, yes the Entire music industry, you
To the RIAA/Broadcast Industry: Either Shit, or get off the pot. Seriously.
I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.
;-)
Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.
I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).
Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.
Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball
Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a