BY KURT HANSON
Please help spread the word! Continuing a months-long tradition, RAIN readers attending this week's NAB and/or Gavin.com conventions are invited to get together for cocktails and socializing tonight from 5-7PM at the stylish W Hotel, adjacent to the NE corner of the Moscone Convention Center.

Our last RAIN reader cocktail parties -- at the spring Radio Only conference in Boston, and the summer R&R Convention in Los Angeles -- were big successes and lots of fun. (The R&R event even featured a surprise guest appearance by legendary air personality Gary Owens.)

Because many of us here aren't checking our e-mail as regularly as we should, it would be great if you could spread the word about this event to your friends and colleagues. Even if they aren't RAIN readers yet, we'll buy them a drink and convert them!

Because we haven't completely figured out how to monetize RAIN yet, we're buying the first round of drinks only.

Note: We don't have any reservations at the stylish W Hotel; we're just going to converge on the bar. Hope to see you there!


From Radio Ink: "After many months of delays and anticipation, the LMIV was announced by Emmis' Jeff Smulyan yesterday.

"The industry-owned Internet initiative will create and sell radio station websites, much like a network would. If successful, the group could render many of the vendors on this years NAB floor useless once the it chooses its 'back end' partners. The five founding members on board bring with them an aggregate audience of more than 37 million, although that figure is not a number that can be translated into website visitors just yet.

"The new company will be 100 percent owned by the media companies that invest in it. Every radio station that wants to participate in the network will have the opportunity to do so; there will not be any exclusivity based on market, format or size."

...	... RAIN's Kurt Hanson attended the launch/presentation. Look for a full report in Monday's RAIN. ...

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BY PAUL MALONEY
With the NAB Radio Show (check here) happening in San Francisco this week, we thought that RAIN readers would be interested in what some of the experts on various panels had to say.

One pre-show panel featured Robert Kozinets of the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Titus Levi of USC's Annenberg School of Communications, and MIT professors Barry Vercoe and Youngmoo Kim. They suggested consumers' need for new technology is an extremely important factor for change, and that "technocultural" advances will be made as time goes on. Vercoe advises broadcasters to embrace New Media and new technologies before it's too late: "The emergence of technology like MP3...showed the two traditional models (broadcast and recorded music) were converging."

"The trick for U.S. radio broadcasters," he continued "...is discovering how to take advantage of this quickly -- or risk ending up like the recording industry, which is playing catch-up in the courtroom after taking too long to adapt to technology that spawned firms like Napster."

The panel predicted that Internet radio will become as common as traditional FM and AM broadcasting, evidenced by the fact that 37% of AM and FM stations now stream on the 'Net, which is well over the 25% mark many researchers consider a critical "tipping point" for mass adoption.

In fact, there are now 4,271 radio stations streaming on the Internet, up from 2,615 last year, according to statistics released by BRS Media's Web-Radio at the NAB. And that's from a grand total of only 56 back in 1996. The study says that while half of the radio webcasters are still US or Canadian-based stations, the ranks Internet-only and international broadcasters are growing the most quickly.

Elsewhere at the NAB, Arbitron released its Internet Study V Internet radio survey at the NAB today. The firm's vice president of communications Thom Mocarsky had advice for broadcasters making the leap to the Internet: "If you're in the Internet radio business you have to differentiate. The Internet is the ideal place to get something you can't get locally," he said. He suggests that commercial broadcasters can increase the value of their brand online with "subchannel" stations aimed at a specific portion of their listening demographic, such as a "younger, edgier" version of a Contemporary Hits station.

Mocarsky warned that a big stumbling block to the growth of Internet radio is consumers' frustration with the complexity of downloading various different streaming software players, and the difficulty of finding radio stations.

There was some optimism in the light of the pending arbitration to set rates webcasters will have to pay record companies. Wayne Kurtzman, vice president of Coleman Research, says traditional broadcasters looking to stream on the Internet shouldn't have any of the licensing problems that Napster and MP3.com are suffering, given their long-standing relationships with music labels. "There's too much money to make," he said.

While Citadel CEO Larry Wilson agreed an Internet presence is vital to radio, he warned that broadcasters should not stretch their resources into website building -- but instead should forge partnerships with design and implementation specialists. "You can blow through a major fortune in you don't have direction in the Internet," Wilson said.

Look for more coverage from the ongoing NAB and Gavin.com conventions later in RAIN.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle: "EMarker, a key-chain-size gadget that weighs less than an ounce, will be available starting Saturday for $19.95 from SonyStyle.com, and from Amazon.com, which is taking preorders now...

"EMarker works simply by recording the exact time you press the button. When you register on the site, you are asked for your three favorite radio stations. By default, your eMarks will identify songs played on your No. 1 station. But if your eMarks were for a different station -- even one not listed in your top three -- you can change the station once you've uploaded the eMarks. You can even see what was playing just before or after your eMark. For most songs, a clip is provided, so you can play it to make sure it's the right one...

"More than 1,000 stations are covered countrywide, mostly in major cities. All are rock/pop/country/ R&B-type stations tracked by Broadcast Data Systems of Kansas City, Mo. Classical, jazz, college and National Public Radio station listeners are out of luck, largely because there is no central repository of playlists for these stations...

"Sony isn't the only company making a radio bookmarking device, although it is the first to sell it commercially. Xenote's iTag has been in trials for several months in a few cities, including San Francisco. It operates essentially the same way, although it doesn't use the BDS database. Instead, Xenote works with radio stations to give iTags away in promotions, and the iTags work only with partner stations, covering both songs and commercials. Xenote makes money from album sales, like Sony, and from click-throughs to advertiser sites.

The entire article from the San Francisco Chronicle is available here.

...

The author of this piece is obviously unaware of the recent demise of the Xenote company and its iTag product. But isn't this product nearly the same thing? And if Xenote's model failed, is the eMarker's use of BDS going to make the difference? Why buy a product at all when you can use the recently-launced ConneXus Corporation's *CD (pronounced "star-see-dee") service to identify, listen to a song clip, and buy the CD -- using the phone you already own?

Ed Tomechko of NetRadio is responding to Tuesday's article (here) on Internet radio's less-than-impressive ratings performance in Arbitron's July study.

"We evaluate our performance at a genre level..."

As you know terrestrial radio faces seasonal traffic patterns during various months of the year. As the vacation season (July-August) takes people out of their normal day-to-day patterns, (Internet) traffic patterns change/decline. We can't just look at a snapshot of February and July "comp" data without factoring in seasonality.

In addition, Internet radio is delivered primarily to relatively fixed desktop devices (for now) and does not enjoy the portability that traditional radio has through transistor and walkman-type devices, as people spend more time outdoors during the summer months. There is a potential for a tremendous ramp-up in Internet radio as mobile and wireless devices begin to proliferate the market.

The NetRadio properties reported only include traffic through the Real Player and does include our audience served through the Media Player,approximately 20% of our traffic.

When we compare the audience statistics at NetRadio to terrestrial properties, we evaluate our performance at a genre level rather than at specific channel level. We have chosen to provide multiple channels within a genre to deliver a deeper and broader experience for our listeners. For comparability, we aggregate our multiple channels (ie. our eleven jazz channels) to measure our market presence relative to traditional stations that provide a more generic product to attract as much of the fringe geographic audience as it can for advertisers.

Internet radio provides more flexibility and marketing power than the traditional model. With today's technology we can market through narrowcast by channel or aggregate by genre or across the site to advertise through webcast. Add portability in the very near future and you have a very powerful medium.

Ed Tomechko President & CEO, NetRadio Corporation

Ed's points are well-taken. I agree totally. -- KH ...

September 20-22	Gavin.com: Music on the Net, San Francisco
September 20-23	NAB Radio Show, San Francisco
Sept. 29-Oct. 1	MOBE/Internet & Technology, Chicago
October 5-7	Billboard/Airplay Monitor Seminar, New York
October 9-12	QuickTime Live! Conference, Beverly Hills
October 10-12	Streaming Media Europe 2000, London (NEW!)
November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
November 12-14	Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) "Broadcasting 2000: On-air / On-line," Calgary (NEW!)
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA, featuring a brand-new national study on Internet radio usage presented by Eric Rhoads & Kurt Hanson