Seattle radio station expands to NYC

From Lost Remote - Radio is having a tough time these days. More people are plugging their iPods into their cars (or playing mix CDs), and the radio audience is shrinking. But public radio station KEXP in Seattle is a great study on how to jump the curve. Beginning today, it’s simulcasting in New York, and KEXP’s morning show host will split his time between the two cities. So how did a local station in Seattle suddenly move into the nation’s largest market? First, KEXP is a “discovery engine” for new music. They scour MySpace, music blogs, just about everywhere for new original bands. (Like Vampire Weekend, which KEXP played first, and now the band is blowing up.) Their playlists rarely repeat. In short, you listen to KEXP to find new music to buy, right from KEXP.org (or elsewhere, if you prefer). Second, KEXP.org has simulcast the radio station for years, building up a massive national audience online (bigger than its local audience). It gave away free music podcasts before anyone was doing it. This is how KEXP got noticed in NYC and why WNYE-FM did the deal. Third, KEXP is listener supported. No ads (well, there are sponsor messages that run :05). But during their sponsor drives, people donate money from all over the country. | Read full article

Net Radio Gain: CBS Radio, Last.fm Collaborate

From Media Post - INTERNET RADIO IS SEEING THE flurry of content and sales deals continue in first-quarter 2008. The latest partnership brings together CBS Radio and Last.fm to share content. The deal will allow the Internet company to stream audio from CBS radio station broadcasts live, while giving listeners from the CBS Radio Internet Network access to Last.fm's library of free online music.

For Last.fm, the deal represents a substantial increase in the number of broadcast partners and breadth of content it can offer--adding CBS Radio's 140 stations to its existing partnerships with Universal, EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, as well as about 150,000 independent artists and studios. The station list includes top CBS properties like New York's WCBS-FM, Los Angeles' KROQ, Chicago's WXRT and Atlanta's WVEE. Last.fm users will be able to access the content through CBS' new online audio player. | Read full article

CBC Radio show adds a wiki

From The Globe And Mail - Much of what we call "public" radio often isn’t that public -- if by public you mean interactive -- apart from maybe the call-in shows, where everyone gets to rant about how the prime minister is a moron. Some radio programs are trying to change that, however, including a couple that are featured on our national broadcaster, the CBC.

Spark, a show about technology and culture hosted by founding Definitely Not The Opera host/producer Nora Young, has launched not only a blog (something many shows have), but has taken the idea one step farther and has added a “wiki.” The term wiki -- which comes from a Hawaiian slang term meaning “quickly” -- refers to websites that anyone can edit or contribute to easily. One of the most popular examples is Wikipedia, the “open source” encyclopedia, which allows anyone to add a fact or create an entry.

Ms. Young says that she hopes that listeners will use the Spark wiki, located here, to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff. | Read full article

Pandora Will Rock Radio As We Know It

From Portfolio - Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer and founder of Pandora, stopped by Portfolio yesterday and talked to our staff about the future of his online radio company. He's working to eventually take Pandora public and describes its growth as linear, with half a million new users each month, capturing a total of .2% of radio listeners in the U.S. Pandora sets itself apart from other internet radio sites by allowing users to personalize their own radio stations through a 'music genome' that analyzes songs for rhythm, lyrics, genre, etc. and then feeds similar songs into the user's play list.

Though this is a great way to discover new artists and appreciate ones you never thought you would, as one Portfolio staffer pointed out, play lists can tend to sound homogeneous sometimes. But Westergren assures that there are ways of mixing up one's radio selection. "The secret sauce is that people interact a lot with Pandora."

Users can give a recommended tune a thumb up or a thumb down, and they can also learn how their play list was selected for them. To expand on the user interaction the company right now is considering ways to incorporate into the site elements of online social-networking. | Read full article

Online Ads Trump Radio in 2008

From Media Research - Ben Macklin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of a new report, Radio Trends, concludes that "Traditional radio is rapidly being subsumed into a new, broader sector called 'audio'" that will include Internet radio, satellite radio, podcasting, high-definition radio and mobile audio services.

The study, reported for EMarketer, shows Online ad spending transactions through 2007 and 2008 will exceed that being spent on traditional radio. | Read full article

Music industry caps fees for Net radio stations

From The Globe And Mail - A music industry group Thursday said it would cap “per channel” fees for major Internet radio companies streaming music on multiple channels.

SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Webcasters and distributes them to artists and record labels, said it would limit fees — at $50,000 (U.S.) a year — for online radio station companies that offer more than 100 channels to customers.

A panel of three copyright judges earlier this year mandated that Webcasters had to pay higher royalty fees and a $500 fee “per station or channel” streamed, regardless of the total number of channels. | Read full article

Subscriber Gain Helps Sirius Narrow Loss

From The New York Times - Sirius Satellite Radio, the pay-radio broadcaster planning to buy XM Satellite Radio Holdings, posted a narrower second-quarter loss after gaining more subscribers than analysts expected.

The net loss shrank to $134.1 million, or 9 cents a share, from $237.8 million, or 17 cents a share, a year earlier, Sirius, based in New York, said yesterday. The result was 1 cent better than analysts had expected, according to the average estimate compiled by Bloomberg. Sales rose 51 percent, to $226.4 million.

Sirius, which broadcasts the talk-show host Howard Stern, added 561,500 net subscribers during the period, about 80,000 more than analysts estimated. Sirius ended June with 7.14 million subscribers and expects to have more than eight million by year-end. | Read full article

Radio Looks To Politics, Web For Relief

From Scientific American - With 2007 poised to be its seventh straight year of slow to no growth, the $20 billion U.S. radio industry hopes to break the trend with political advertising and revenues from nontraditional sources in 2008.

"I think it would be shortsighted to view the industry as hopeless," said Barrington Research analyst James Goss, noting that, despite slow growth and the "challenged" radio environment, these companies are strong cash generators.

"Chances are 2008 will be better due to Internet dollars or nontraditional revenues and political dollars."

While revenue from Web sites, concert promotions and other nontraditional areas amount to less than 10 percent of the total radio industry revenue base, it has grown steadily over the past few years as the rest of the industry lagged in the face of increased competition from iPods, the Web, music- playing cellphones and other entertainment devices.

Radio industry officials believe these revenue sources will contribute more over time. | Read full article

Pirated Music Helps Terrestrial Radio

From The Wall Street Journal - Record labels and artists might think they're going to recoup some of the revenue lost to music piracy thanks to higher online royalty rates, but Web radio may die in the wake of a recent court decision. And piracy isn't going away, either.

It's still the music industry bugaboo, but terrestrial radio giant Clear Channel Communications has a new outlook on music piracy. The company's Premiere Radio Networks unit has begun marketing data on music piracy to help radio stations shape their playlists. It's a great idea, because it gives stations' an idea about what's popular with 18-34s, regardless of the fact that its data about illegal activity.

Premiere's data comes from the file-sharing research firm BigChampagne. Premiere takes BigChampagne's data and markets it to radio companies and stations for a fee. The market research firm would not disclose how much they charge, but they've signed up more than 100 stations so far. Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne's vice president for sales and marketing, says the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into peoples' taste. The data is also far easier to collect than the industry standard "call-out" research, in which people are asked to listen to clips of songs and rate them. | Read full article