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Internet Radio Failing to Find Support?
K Fox asks: "WOXY, one of the Internet's larger radio stations, has announced that it will soon implement a monthly subscription fee, to support operations. When the Cincinnati based station went from terrestrial broadcast 97.7 to Internet only, they vowed to keep their streams free to listers. Now, they are saying that increased broadcast taxes, falling advertising revenue, and the overall uncertainty in the market (local or global?) has pushed them to change their business model. Is this a sign of things to come for the other radio stations, that broadcast over the Internet? Will digital music distribution fall solely to giants like XM and iTunes?"
Radio over the internet is great untill the conection goes "a bit funny" and it stops streaming or drops to a lower sample rate.
Also how do you listen to it on the move - I can't listen to it in the car or on my portable device.
Then there's the problem whereby you can't go to your local comet (or other electronics store) and buy a radio for the office that has an ethernet port on the back - and no i'm not going to connect my computer up to the stereo becase evry time someone IM's me or I get an email or windows breaks you get horible alert noises that would drive everyone insane!
Surley these problems are why these broadcasters are having problems.
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
Its simply a glorified PA system. Radio is wireless so unless you're
using wi-fi to listen to the radio station it doesn't have the
flexibility as a normal radio station (can't listen walking down the
street , in the car or anywhere not near a cable or dial up line).
Even with wi-fi , who wants to walk around with a laptop switched on
under their arm?
Internet radio is fine for the home and work markets , but it fails
miserably for the on-the-move market where a large proportion of
people listen to the radio.
It will if the RIAA has any say in the matter. The last thing they want is Internet radio. Consider that they pay broadcast radio to play songs but demand to be paid for the same songs going over the Internet.
We can speculate on why (greed doesn't explain it, since they don't stand to gain any revenue from strangling the baby.) My own guess is that Internet radio is cheap enough to run that independent artists might build listeners and escape from the RIAA plantation.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
KCRW is one of the larger NPR affiliates, so they are in a completely different league than a small commercial station. One of the joys of being a non-profit publically funded entity...
This guy's the limit!
I suspect it's the same for most people. That would explain the difficulty of being a 100% internet-only radio station.
...but not in the WOXY/broadcast model. Two types of stations will persevere: (1) stations that stay off the royalties radar. (2) sites like pandora and last.fm that use personalization and social aspects to attract throngs of listeners and maximize ad revenue. WOXY made the mistake of trying to keep a high profile, i think. charging a subscription doesn't stand a chance. there are just too many other choices.
It means that they realized people don't want to listen to advertisment and if you are listening to internet radio, you might as well listen to non-crap non-commercialized radio.
The problem is that radio stations have to fool advertisers that people are listening to them with contests and call in campaigns and sheer speculation. There is no way to prove how many people are listening at any given time. Just a big assumuption. With internet streaming, you have stastics and logs of who is actually listening. As with the problem with click through ads, people discovered that people ignore ads and have been for years.
I've personally never bought or been influenced by an add on a TV or radio. Mostly because 99% of the products don't apply to a geek other than laughing at Geico commercials.
However, I have bought plenty of things because of Adsense and searching on google because it interests me or I was actually looking for comparable products. Brute force advertising is just a waste of money.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
WOXY has long been an independant station that played what the DJ's and fans liked. They never sold out to corporate rock, and their motto always has been "Corporate Radio SUCKS!" Their selection varies so widely, and they try their bests to honor requests from everyone. Even when they were on the air and internet at the same time, they took email request around the world.
Gonna have to buy a subscription and support this incredible station.
If you have access to a computer with all of your mp3's on iTunes or whatever digital music player, why chew up bandwidth to listen to someone else pick songs you don't really want to listen to?
The only online radio stations I ever listen to, and barely at that, are playlists from David Byrne on his website cast as streaming audio.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
1. The music is usually bad
2. The music is the same playlist shuffled differently for each new day
3. There are no deejays that will actually play obscure requests
4. Too many annoying commercials / fake deejays
5. Too many stations are owned by the same companies
6. Companies have been doing 'pay to play' illegally - big surprise
7. I buy my own music to hear the artists I enjoy - I am in control
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Also, critically KCRW's webcast is a simulcast of their over-the-air signal. WOXY.com is now internet-only.
Uh -- no. But internet radio is in its infancy. It will take off with the deployment of wireless broadband and a new class of devices capable of pulling streams without being connected to a computer.
The first show will drop when Apple makes available a wireless version of the iPod. I bet this will happen before Christmas.
After that, it's just a function of wireless rollout. According to Bridge Research, a research company that does most of its work for commercial radio, There will be something on the order of 130 million wireless broadband users in 2010. Wired users will make up another 150 million or so. This should be enough critical mass to make internet radio commercially viable.
Of course, all advertising-supported media is changing. The day of mass-media supremacy is coming to an end, and wirelessly delivered entertainment should further democratize content delivery.
In the meantime, internet broadcasters will have to find clever business models to stay afloat. Applying old-school models to new media won't be effective.
By the way, Bridge projects XM and Sirius to be at a combined market of less than 50 million subscribers in 2010. Sat broadcasting could become quite profitable at that level, but hardly dominant in terms of ears. Look for major satelite entertainment brands to migrate to internet radio as it grows.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
The internet radio station I listen to, Radio Paradise, seems to be doing all right, and it's run entirely on user contributions and affiliate programs (iTunes, Amazon, etc). There are no commercials and it isn't even a non-profit. In fact, they recently topped ten thousand simultaneous listeners for the first time. The only minus is that they occasionally mention being listener-supported and ask for donations. Nowhere near as obnoxious as NPR pledge drives, though....
I know this is just one example, but it shows that it's possible to have an internet radio stations with free streams be a successful business.
I lived in OH, went to Miami University and for any of you that are/were locals, this station represents independent radio. Sure, there are others nationally, but this one is hard to match in its variety, its zest for new artists and the unique way they can pull in bands for sets, interviews, etc. Is any radio/media venue worth $120 a year? Boy, WOXY's two streaming stations v. XM and Sirius at ~$15/month is a tough match up. HBO at ~$10/month is also a tough pricing comparable. With Oprah getting $55mm, why can't they just partner up with a sattelite provider for who they are? Howard Stern sure did. In the end, I've subscribed for one reason - I've learned more from this station about new artists than anywhere else. Who can put a price on knowledge and credibility?
Working to make ideas into reality. www.i4e.com
It would be very easy and very economical to run an internet radio station. It would be fairly simple to build a p2p broadcast client that operated like bittorrent (so as to eliminate the need for a single server to serve bandwidth to everyone). And find people who would want to DJ and play music is easy. There is nothing inherently expensive or technically difficult about that. Because the costs are so cheap, it wouldn't take much to make it a profitable buisness.
The hard part of Internet radio is dealing with all the legal restrictions, licencing, ASCAP payments, and whatever.
Like all government regulation, the regulations and legal restrictions are designed to create fixed costs such that the barrier to entry is so high that there are only a few large competitors in the industry.
Eliminate all the restrictions and regulations, and Internet radio will take off.