AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are some of the online radio services which have become popular these last few years. Many of these are also accessible on mobile devices including mobile phones. Does this mean the end of conventional radio stations? I will take a look at the effect of streaming radio on the radio landscape.
I seems that local radio stations are on their way to become extinct. They are being threatened by the development of online and satellite radio. These competing services generally offer hundreds of music and entertainment channels. A number of the channels are even commercial-free. Specifically, online radio has become pretty popular by offering a virtually unlimited amount of radio stations.
Pandora in addition to other online radio providers have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices by installing the suitable app. This raises convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has up to now been the biggest benefit of local radio.
AOL Radio provides more than 200 music channels in addition to 150 national CBS radio stations because it employs CBS radio as its platform. The underlying platform “play.it” also has a feature that permits listeners to make their own radio stations by entering preferred albums, artists and so on. The individual tracks of each music channel are also available for storage on an iPod via 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 providers will play songs based on that information. Other services, on the other hand, fail to offer fully customized music channels.
Are conventional radio stations destined to become extinct by the continuous reduction of market share due to online radio? Online radio is especially useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high expense and licensing of frequency space.
As the diversity 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 draw a reasonably large number of listeners and be lucrative. The lower cost of online radio at the same time enables creation of more interesting content than local radio by serving niche markets and inserting less commercials.
On the other hand, local radio has one big benefit over satellite and online radio. That is local content such as local news and events. One disadvantage of local radio has been the inferior audio quality of FM broadcasts. Nonetheless, that is being remedied by the recent launch of digital radio broadcasts such as HD radio. Content and mobility will be essential in determining the fate of online and local radio. Online radio provides 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.
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