 |
 BY
KURT HANSON
 If
you've got any interest whatsoever in music on the Internet,
you need to pick up a copy of today's Wall
Street Journal to read its major, multi-part series of articles
titled "The Battle Over Online Music." (See outline at
right.)
One of the most interesting aspects of the series is this:
While the articles list numerous categories of players that may
be involved in getting music to consumers in the future, terrestrial
radio broadcasters are ignored entirely. (Radio seems to be not
even considered as a possible player in the field!)
And it occurs to me that that may be a fair observation,
based on the behavior to date of most of the major broadcast radio
operators.
At the various radio conferences I've been to this
spring, those radio operators  have
talked about using the Web to add e-commerce revenues (e.g., grabbing
a piece of newspapers' classified revenues), about using websites
as a branding tool, about e-mail as a marketing technique -- in
other words, they're talking about almost everything except the
music!
Today, consumers are still using radio as their primary
means of listening to music -- spending signficantly more
hours per week with radio than they spend listening to CDs or downloading
tunes or watching music video cable channels or listening to Internet-only
radio.
But there's no guarantee that  situation
will continue forever.
As shown in the chart at left, consumers are going to have lots
of options for getting music, many of them are going to be advertiser-supported,
and at the moment -- according to the WSJ's chart, anyway -- America's
radio broadcasters aren't getting involved in any of them.
Highlights from today's WSJ articles
"'At the
end of the day, the music industry as we now know it is over,'
declares Avram Miller, a former Intel Corp. vice president with
close ties to the entertainment industry...
"'This isn't a question of survivability,' insists Strauss
Zelnick, chief executive of Bertelsmann AG's BMG Entertainment unit.
'It's a question of the market for our products vastly expanding'...'The
Internet allows you to reach people in so many new fresh ways,'
says Ken Berry, chief executive of EMI Recorded Music, a unit of
EMI Group PLC. 'That's a huge opportunity...'
And one WSJ reader writes on the site's discussion board, "Imagine
if the RIAA took the resources they have put into trying to shut
down this sharing and instead used it to create a super web site
for selling music. Now I may not be a sophisticated record executive
but I would bet my farm that they would be many millions ahead."
If you're a WSJ.com subsciber, click here
to read the full series of articles. Otherwise, you may want to
pick up a copy on your lunch hour.
Contribute your thoughts on this subject using your own e-mail software
here or the
form below. We'll post selected reader comments this afternoon and
tomorrow in RAIN.
Jim Duncan projects 9.7% growth
for radio in 2000
From Radio Ink: "Analyst James H. Duncan [in Duncan's
American Radio] predicts that radio industry revenues will increase
by another 9.7% in 2000. The projection is based on Duncan’s
market-by-market revenue analysis factored with radio’s strong year-to-date
performance. Overall industry revenues grew by 12.9% in 1999, reaching
$15.5 billion. This was radio’s third straight year of double-digit
year-to-year revenue growth..." Read the full piece in RadioInk.com
here.
Follow-up
on yesterday's USA Today article on Internet radio -- including
its inaccurate statistics on relative broadcast vs. webcast audience
sizes.
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