From InternetNews.com: "What if you discovered a place where you could reach a well-educated, affluent audience, and there was a guarantee that your message wouldn't bump up against other dot-com ads? No, it's not a fairy tale. Increasingly, Internet companies are finding such a wondrous medium -- public radio.

"Tune in to public radio stations in any major city, and you're likely to hear something like, 'Support for this station comes from Salon.com. The 24/7 web network for news, entertainment, and ideas. Salon.com. Makes you think.' Or perhaps, 'This station is supported by Talkcity, a provider of online community services. Helping businesses establish a new dialogue with customers for the digital age.'

"'Dot-com sponsorships have become the number one category for us,' said Vincent Gardino, director of corporate development for WNYC, a public radio station in New York City. 'It's an advertising category that didn't exist a year ago. It was like the atomic bomb going off.' For WNYC, dot-com companies like CNET, Priceline.com , Salon.com, Dash.com, and Kozmo.com now represent 44 percent, or $2 million, of its local underwriting revenue. Before June of last year, only 10 percent of revenue came in from dot-com companies.

"The numbers are even higher at WQED-FM in San Francisco, which broadcasts across all of Silicon Valley. Sixty-six percent of that station's corporate underwriting dollars come from Internet companies..."

Read the full story in InternetNews.com here.



From R&R Online: "Scotts Valley, CA-based OnRadio.com has sued four recently fired high-level employees for allegedly stealing company secrets. While refusing to disclose details of the case, OnRadio VP/Marketing Rick Hensler tells R&R Online the litigation stems from OnRadio’s 'effort to vigorously defend our unique properties and to be uncompromising in the ethical expectations of our employees.' OnRadio’s business focus is on music syndication and Internet audio streaming for radio stations..." Read R&R Online here (registration required).



From MSNBC: "Some of Jim Atkinson’s colleagues thought he trashed his reputation in 1997. Three years ago he turned his back on a 25-year career in FM radio to start an Internet radio station in the living room of his St Louis, Mo., home. Atkinson doesn’t seem so crazy now. More than 150,000 people listen to his 3WK underground radio station each month.

"Thanks to sophisticated digital technology, Atkinson and his wife stream alternative rock music out to cyberspace through their Web site. Their costs are low, and their small audience is growing. “We’re looking to find a niche and to ‘overserve’ it,” said Wanda Atkinson, Jim’s wife and the station’s general manager.

"Mining niche audiences is small businesses’ secret weapon in the burgeoning Internet radio field..."

Other Internet broadcasters featured in the piece include SpikeRadio, DubLab.com and Batanga.com. Read the full story in MSNBC.com here.



From Mercury Center/Reuters Internet: It's one of the hottest new rock albums of the year. But you won't find it in stores. ``Live at the Greek'' is the recorded document of former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes' joint concerts last fall in Los Angeles, part of a six-date mini-tour that included shows in New York City and Worcester, Mass.

The album is available exclusively via the Web site www.musicmaker.com, which is selling it in a pre-selected two-CD package or allowing fans to download customized versions of the album...

The unconventional sales method hasn't dampened fans' appetite for the music. In fact, so many people tried to buy copies when ``Live at the Greek'' went on sale Feb. 29 that it temporarily crashed the site -- which also is slated to carry a live album by the Who later this spring...

Read the full story in Mercury Center/SiliconValley.com here. But note that exact sales figures aren't quoted.



From Radio Ink: "Kim Johnson Departs from Clear Channel Orlando: Johnson has resigned from her position as Vice President of Sales with Clear Channel Internet. Her last last day will be March 31st. Johnson says she will take a little time off before getting back into the net game..."

Read the full item in Rado Ink here. Note that Critical Mass Media's John Martin was recently assigned to head up Clear Channel's Web operations.




From today's New York Times: "Justin Frankel, a 21-year-old programming wizard who sold his digital music company, but perhaps not his soul, to America Online last year, did not endear himself to his new masters last week by publishing free software that enables users to find and trade music files quickly over the Internet.

"The software designed by Frankel and his team at AOL's Nullsoft unit is a variation of a popular program called Napster. College students and others have been using Napster in a frenzied exchange of music, pirated and not. The Recording Industry Association of America is suing Napster Inc. for copyright infringement.

"AOL executives directed that Nullsoft's program, called Gnutella, be removed a few hours after it was made available on the Internet last Tuesday...

Read the full story in the New York Times here (registration required).


Powerful Music Software Has Industry Worried: "'There's an incredible disconnect out there between what is normal behavior in the physical world versus the online world,' [RIAA exec Carey] Sherman said. 'There are people who think nothing of downloading entire CD collections on Napster who wouldn't dream of shoplifting from Tower Records'..."

Excellent article on issues raised by Napster from the 3/7/00 New York Times here.




Reprinted from Friday's edition:



BY KURT HANSON
Most radio stations' Web simulcasts apparently have not-very-impressive ratings -- it seems that typically they have 10 to 100 listeners at any given moment, compared to 100 to 500 times that many listeners listening to the corresponding over-the-air signal. As a result, one of the big questions among RAIN readers right now is this: How big are the audience sizes for the Internet-only multi-channel webcasters?...

But there's a tantalizing hint about the size of the multi-channel Internet-only broadcasters' audiences that was provided by NetRadio in their S-1 filing and quoted in a recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune article (here):

Citing internal numbers as audited by iPro...NetRadio claimed an audience of 1.3 million unique visitors per month in the fourth quarter of 1999...and, according to the newspaper article, "they were online for an average of 90 minutes..."

But you can't tell NetRadio's AQH audience size from the information they chose to provide in their S-1. You need to know one more fact. You need to know either (A) the number of days visited per month per monthly unique visitor, or (B) hours of listening per month per monthly unique visitor, or (C) number of unique visitors per day.

Witzig says that because NetRadio is a public company, he can't quote any other audience size numbers (i.e., those that they didn't put in the S-1).

But what we CAN do is plug in a guess...

The total I came up with is about the audience size of a .4-share station in New York City. Perhaps not stunning, but not horrible either. (And of course NetRadio has a lot more potential for growth than a bottom-rated New York station)...

Read the full article
in Friday's issue of RAIN here.

More coming soon! Contribute your suggestions here. (Suggestions already in the hopper include RadioWoodstock.com, Nerve Radio, Radio Gogaga, and HotCountryHits.)

RAIN has returned to America from a week in Tokyo, where we were reporting to you on the latest in home electronics, wireless Internet (via cell phone), station website ideas, and more.

If you missed any of RAIN's coverage, you can access it via the links below. (Each day's issue included two or three stories from Japan; the issue's lead headine is described below.)

Complete RAIN News Archives here.