Does AOL Radio Mean The Extinction Of FM Radio?
Online radio services such as AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm have become fairly popular lately and are even available on various mobile cordless devices like mobile phones. Does this indicate the end of conventional radio stations? I will look at the influence of online radio on the radio landscape.
Local radio seems to be having a hard time in today’s radio landscape with competing satellite and online radio providers taking away listeners by offering commercial-free music and entertainment. In particular, online radio has turn out to be fairly popular by providing a virtually infinite number of radio channels.
A lot of online radio services such as Pandora are nowadays accessible on portable devices such as mobile phones and other wireless audio devices via suitable apps. This adds mobility to online radio which has still been the trump card of local radio stations.
AOL Radio provides in excess of 200 music channels and in addition 150 national CBS radio stations because it utilizes CBS radio as its platform. The underlying CBS radio platform “play.it” also permits 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 offering similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm permit listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by arbitrarily selecting titles by these artist along with other titles which are similar in genre or character. However, most online radio broadcasters lack the ability to create fully customized radio stations such as the “play.it” platform.
Are conventional radio stations destined to become extinct by the continuous reduction of market share due to online radio? Particularly niche broadcasters have found online radio very valuable. The main reason is the low broadcasting cost of online radio compared with terrestrial radio. Another reason is the difficulty acquiring frequency space licenses from the FCC. Nonetheless, increasing royalty fees have made the life of online broadcasters more difficult lately.
As the multitude of stations is a benefit to listeners, it is at the same time diluting market share and online radio broadcasters are finding it tough to draw a reasonably large number of listeners and be profitable. At the same time, however, there is less pressure to insert commercials because of the lower expenses of broadcasting compared with conventional stations. This has made online radio content more interesting than terrestrial radio.
However, local radio has one big advantage over satellite and online radio. That is local content such as local news and events. Furthermore, local radio is now improving the audio quality by using digital transmission technologies versus traditional FM broadcasts which has been a big plus of online radio so far. Content and mobility will be vital in deciding the fate of online and local radio. Online radio offers a huge number of alternatives 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.
Tags:aol radio, online radio, streaming radio, wireless audio