Online radio services including AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm have become rather popular recently and are even available on various mobile wireless devices such as cell 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 examine the influence of online radio on local broadcasters.
I appears that local radio stations are on their way to become extinct. They are being threatened by the advance of online and satellite radio. These competing services usually offer hundreds of music and entertainment channels. A number of the channels are even commercial-free. Specifically, online radio has become pretty popular by providing a practically unlimited amount of radio stations.
Pandora and other online radio services have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices by installing the appropriate app. This raises convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has to this point been the main advantage of local radio.
AOL Radio uses CBS radio as its broadcasting platform. It comes with in excess of 200 music channels. Additionally it provides access to more than 150 local CBS radio stations. The underlying CBS radio platform “play.it” also allows listeners to make their own customized music channels. This is done by entering the names of albums, tracks or artists. The tracks played on each music channels can also be stored on an iPod for later playback by using 3-rd party tool iGetMusic.
Other online music services have followed suit and are providing similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm allow listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by arbitrarily selecting titles by these artist as well as other titles which are similar in genre or character. Up to now, however, competing music services have fallen short to offer similarly fully customized radio 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 difficult time to stop this trend. Online radio is particularly useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high price and licensing of frequency space.
The big number of available stations is a big benefit for online radio listeners. On the other hand, this is a problem for online broadcasters. This large number of stations is diluting the number of listeners. As a result streaming radio broadcasters have found it difficult to 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 advantage of local stations though is local content like news or current events. Additionally, 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 thus far. It is hard to predict a clear winner in the battle between online and local radio because both offer their own unique content and high mobility which are the vital factors that will decide the fate of each service.
