The Senate Commerce Committee has announced it will hold a full-committee hearing called "The Future of Radio," Wednesday, October 24. No witnesses have yet been announced. According to the Committee web site, members "will assess the state of innovation and competition in the radio market." The Committee is chaired by Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and members include Ted Stevens (R-AK), John Kerry (D-MA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), John McCain (AZ) and Trent Lott (R-MS). Look to RAIN for further coverage.

From today's New York Times: "Media companies are often criticized for not taking enough risks in choosing television shows, authors, movies and musicians. But when it comes to technology start-ups, their appetite for risk appears to be on the rise.

"A growing number of media conglomerates have established divisions to take minority stakes in small Internet and technology companies. Other media companies that already have such venture capital arms are expanding...

"Media companies say there are significant reasons to develop expertise in early-stage investments. The media business, they say, increasingly revolves not just around developing content but keeping pace with delivery technology and new media. In most cases, the media companies are measuring success not just by the financial return but also by the chance to better understand and establish partnerships with emerging technology leaders...

"NBC and another division of General Electric announced a $250 million investment fund last spring. There are venture investments from the Warner Music Group, the Hearst Corporation, Reed Elsevier, Comcast, The New York Times Company, Universal Music, Reuters, ABC and Disney and Sports Illustrated. Bertelsmann announced last October that it would expand the venture program across its entire company and now has offices in New York, Beijing and a couple of cities in Germany...

"But challenges abound, notably because venture profits in recent years have been as difficult as ever to achieve. Even seasoned venture capitalists have struggled; only a few consumer-oriented Internet companies have gone public, and many continue to languish on shoestring budgets, striving for a profitable exit.

"In addition, media companies — and corporations in general — tend not to have the patient culture that venture capital demands, said Fred Wilson, managing director of Union Square Ventures in New York. Many media companies and other corporations had venture arms in the late 1990s, only to downsize or eliminate them when the going got tough."

Read this entire New York Times story online here.

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From AdAge.com: "The proliferation of new media has made tracking consumer behavior more difficult than ever, but ESPN and Nielsen Co. are joining together to do just that.

"Hoping to help TV advertisers understand how commercials on TV and various digital platforms drive consumer behavior and marketing results, the two parties are working to develop a new audience-measurement model that will stretch across online, mobile and other emerging media...

"The initial goal is to monitor audiences and measure reaction... The panel aims to measure the impact of TV promotions in driving people to the internet and of web promotions driving people to ESPN programs, and examine new kinds of media use, such as viewing TV and web-streamed content at the same time...

"The system should eventually give ESPN -- and other media outlets, presumably -- the ability to measure unduplicated audience reach of its properties, measure the overlap across the different media and break down demographic and market composition of audiences."

Read this entire article from AdAge online here.

From a Lycos press release: "Lycos, Inc... today announced its seventh annual list of the most popular talk radio personalities with web users, based on Internet searches...

"For the seventh straight year, Howard Stern continues his reign as the most-searched talk radio personality with web users, generating more searches than Tom Joyner and Opie & Anthony combined. Stern's online popularity remains strong, with search activity increasing 44% since making the move from terrestrial radio to Sirius Satellite in Jan. 2006...

"For a complete list and commentary of The Lycos Top Talk Radio Hosts of 2007, go to http://50.lycos.com."

Read the press release here.

"This is about an industry that can't adapt..."

I would like to take issue about one aspect of the Skip Pizzi article ["Platform equity, substitution still clouding radio royalty issue," here].

Internet radio, much more than traditional radio, truly offers more promotional opportunities for music sales than any other medium. This is accomplished through the very format being online and offering more interactivity such as online playlists, "Buy Now" buttons and artist links. All of this right in front of a listener while the song
is playing. We sell lots of CDs via Amazon through our site, and the clicks almost
always come from the now-playing pages.

Secondly, by playing more than one track from a CD you give the listener the chance to hear more of a CD before purchasing it, rather than limiting them to only one song that they may fear is the only good track. More songs encourages more bundle rather than single sales. If that was not the case than record shops wouldn't have whole CDs in their headphone listen stations.

This type of structure in fact provides greater promotional value to an artist, not the opposite. As Skip stated, radio is something structured for a listener (outside of custom programmable services, which I feel are a different class) and no matter how good you make it, the true music fan who buys CDs and digital tracks will always need variety.

We might be soon adding track links to iTunes to buy through there, as well as the album through Amazon or whatever. This lack of bundle increases sales opportunities on the whole. These options negate the bundle argument as the whole reason for this battle. A greater reason is that the labels who control the recording industry's lobbying efforts are not happy with the amount of revenue going to the "long tail" of the industry. The diversity of music on satellite and Internet radio is what is feared here along with the diversification of the pipeline to consumers. Not the lack of bundle. More of our sales (by a significant percentage) go to Indie bands than major label artists. I'm sure many other stations could speak similarly.

This is about an industry that can't adapt and has chosen to direct its efforts to protecting their no longer sustainable business model rather than evolving with the times.

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From Radio Online: "ABC Radio Networks appoints Dave Van Dyke as VP/Affiliate Relations, overseeing News/Talk affiliate relations for all products which include ABC News Radio. He formerly served as VP/General Manager of CBS Radio's KCBS-FM/Los Angeles, and most recently operated Bridge Ratings, a research firm...

"Van Dyke's management experience includes stations in Dallas, Denver, Portland and Boston where he also acted as corporate programming consultant for group stations... In August 2001 Van Dyke founded Radio Mentor, a broadcast management consulting company and in 2002 he launched Bridge Ratings."

Read Radio Online's entire article here.