Radio Leads In Music Discovery

FMQB: Paragon Media has released the third and final part of its study on new media's effects on radio. The latest findings show that terrestrial radio is the #1 source for listening to music..Purchased CDs were next with 30 percent of the vote, and radio also beat out television, personalized CDs, music downloads, satellite radio and Internet radio.
The full series of reports, here...

GCap To Offer Instant Radio Downloads

MediaWeek: In UK, GCap Media has signed a deal with Microsoft to enable online listeners across its portfolio of local radio stations and Classic FM to download music as it being broadcast. The 12-month deal, valued at around £750,000, will give listeners of any of the 34 stations included in the Musicradio.com suite or ClassicFM.com the option to download a song or piece of music, alongside a database of an additional 500,000 track.

Clear Channel Issues RFP for New Ratings System

Yahoo: A number of recent independent studies have shown that radio offers better performance and more value for advertisers' dollars, which is in direct contrast to  numbers collected and reported by Arbitron. As a result of this continuing discrepancy, Clear Channel Radio issued a request for proposals yesterday to create a new state-of-the-art radio ratings system for measuring terrestrial radio audiences that will credibly represent radio's true performance and value to advertisers as well as accurately determine listener levels.

"Radio is a powerful, effective medium whose influence and reach have been underreported and diluted," said John Hogan, CEO of Clear Channel Radio..."But as an industry, we need to make quicker progress. Advertisers and media buyers deserve credible, accurate information on radio's value. Something as powerful as radio needs powerful, technologically current evaluations."

Up till now, Arbitron's Personal Diary System (where listeners manually recall and record what they've listened to) has been the only ratings-system research method available to media buyers to measure the effectiveness of radio for nearly 40 years and is quite antiquated in the ubiquitous internet era...An inefficient or inaccurate system can lead to underreporting and skewed data...Even worse, the diary system results can take up to a month before they're made available, which can seem like an eternity when compared to realtime statistics. The accuracy and credibility of the diary method has come under increasing skepticism over the past several years and an upgrade or replacement is long overdue...

Consumers Favor The Internet Over FM Radio

InformationWeek: According to market research firm analyst Constantine Kambanis from TechnoMetrica, "Young adults are more inclined to go to the web than to traditional radio, but we're also finding that the whole U.S. population is starting to prefer the web. The shift is going up the age brackets and down the economic ladder...Currently, about 1 in 7 adults, representing 15 million households, say they listen to music from the web, rather than on the radio... Among young adults, that number jumps to nearly 1 in 3, or about 9 million people...There will always be people who want to listen to radio, but the numbers will be getting smaller."

The article also states that a major attraction of online music is its "customization" and that's what's really hurting traditional radio. Downloading music to a PC or digital music player gives a sense of ownership and permanence to the music that will be hard to compete with in the future...

Interview with WFMU FM

RockAndRoll Report: Mark Boudreau interviews Ken Freedman of independent freeform radio station WFMU out of Jersey City - covering topics such as podcasting, satellite radio and running a non-commercial radio station in the U.S. in this day of increasing FCC "indecency" crackdowns...

Yahoo Executive Sees Radio Losing Music In Near Future

RAIN:  At RAIN's Las Vegas Summit last week, David Goldberg (VP/GM for Yahoo!Music) delivered a pretty thought provoking keynote..."The future of music presentation will be services that not only effectively combine "programming" (music presented with no input from the listener) and "on-demand" (the listener selects exactly what he or she hears) -- but shift the experience to platforms other than the PC and broadcast radio." The article further states that Goldberg's ideal of a completely digital music world, the PC -- and broadcast radio -- will be left behind. Wow....that's pretty forward thinking stuff and I'm sure it woke up a few people in the audience, but it is entirely possible...Goldberg claims Terrestrial radio will continue as a very successful, profitable business -- but it will be mostly talk...What do you think??