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AG News:
Monday - 8/2/2010
Reason to Visit Broadcast Radio Web Sites
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It's not too difficult a concept to grasp. People like to be introduced to new music, slowly. The data I follow that helps form this opinion is based, in part, on stats from Audio Graphics' RadioRow. Of the 25 format categories featured there, "independent artists" receives the second-lowest monthly visitor count. The inference may be drawn that although seeking new artists has thrust Pandora and LastFM into the top slots, to feed an audience a strict music diet of independent "new" artists is detrimental to a station's growth. (Both of these internet radio industry giants succeed by weaving new songs with established acts.)
Before getting into why you should add new music to your playlist, let's look at the “Music Influencers: Marketing to an Audience of Trend Setters,” a JupiterResearch report from late-June 2008. It's the most recent study I could find on this subject, and it touted that "59% of 2,134 online music users" rated radio as the #1 source for discovering new music.
Of course, the radio industry pounced on the statistic, featuring it as the leading line for the "Radio Heard Here" "New Music Series" This leads to two observations, however. 1) After being heavily promoted by the radio industry last year, "Radio Heard Here" seems to have dropped off the map. 2) The JupiterResearch report reflects the opposite of a recent Audio Graphics/Borrell Associates survey of online radio listeners.
Won't spend any time on the first comment. "Radio Heard Here" is as dead as the positioning of "HD Radio: The Stations Between the Stations." But that second observation, in which 59% of online music users rate radio the #1 source for discovering new music, needs to be looked at again.
Two years later, the following ratios were uncovered when 1,021 internet radio listeners completed the statement "Lately, I've been finding most new music on...."
Now, I won't try and explain the discrepency between the JupiterResearch and Audio Graphics data, but I will emphasize that our survey is just completed and comprised of response from online radio listeners.
If the JupiterResearch report reflected a true disposition of "online music users" in 2008, we need to ask what has changed in two years that could so dramatically effect the 2010 Audio Graphics report. Perhaps a more important question concerns what it is the broadcast radio industry is doing to keep itself in the "new music" arena.
Here's the second question asked in the Audio Graphics survey: "Would you like it if your online radio station played fewer/more new artists?" Buckle your seat belt, as these graphs give a clue to what the radio industry should do.
In the next few days I'll reveal how Audio Graphics is responding to the public's appetite for new music, and the speed at which internet radio is picking up on the solution.
For today, though, digest these figures. They represent a call by people who listen to radio online. The request is to get away from the repetitive playing of a small group of "hit" artists and to expand playlists for inclusion of fresh music - a significant reason people are moving to internet stations for their "radio."
If the broadcast radio industry insists on maintaining the status quo, it will soon find itself on the short-end of the stick again in its fight against flight to radio online.
Adding more "new music" to a terrestrial station's online stream may just be the answer to attracting a larger part of this growing online radio audience. And it would give the over-the-air radio industry a bona fide reason to promote "why" the audience should "listen to us online."
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