The San Antonio News Express, paraphrasing Edison Research president Larry Rosin, says streaming radio to moblie phones is "the biggest challenge to commercial radio that the technological revolution has wrought."
The paper also spoke to Paragon Media senior research consultant Larry Johnson, who explained that while traditional radio's reach has held steady over the last ten years, "time spend listening" has consistently fallen by about 15 minutes per year for the last 20 years.
Rosin, whose company partnered with Pandora in 2011 to measure the webcaster's listening in local markets (here), said, "(Pandora) is clearly stealing time from commercial radio music stations, primarily among people under 35 years old."
Of course, major broadcasters also offer streaming services, which they say complement -- not cannibalize -- traditional radio listening. But as Rosin points out, "Pandora is more than two-thirds of all Internet radio all by itself." In other words, broadcasters' complementary digital listening can't itself account for terrestrial's TSL drop.
For more on this topic, see our article "Radio faces falling TSL, but how much is due to digital competition?" in RAIN here.
Read more at MySanAntonio.com here.
Automaker BMW will integrate
Automaker BMW will integrate dashboard/steering control for Apple iPhone apps that include TuneIn, Rhapsody, and Audible.mapquest
Radio Listenership Continues to Increase Despite Pandora
What Rosin misses, perhaps intentionally, is that according to Arbitron, radio listenership continues to grow despite Pandora's increases.
The key point that Rosin may be missing is that Pandora has a real cost to the listener. Not only must the listener pay the rather reasonable $36/year (to get around the advertising and the time limits) but they must also pay for the mobile data if listening on a mobile device. With the end of unlimited data on AT&T and Verizon, and the increase in the number of smart phone users on plans with relatively small amounts of data, the streaming services can no longer piggyback on free unlimited data.
One way to use Pandora is to cache the content at home, while on broadband or DSL, and transfer it to the smart phone (or iPod) for later listening. Pandora's own app doesn't have this feature but there are third party apps that offer this. On Linux, "pianobarfly" records every track you listen to, and on Windows there are several programs that offer recording.
That said, Pandora is disruptive technology. Unfortunately the Pandora stockholders are subsidizing free content since Pandora has no business model that will allow it to make money. The only hope is a radical change to the royalty structure.
The big change for terrestrial radio is the huge increase in HD Radio receivers and the realization by stations that there is a way to monetize HD Radio. This took longer than expected, but now virtually every automaker is offering HD Radio, and it's becoming a standard feature not an extra-cost add-on.
Edison's comments and San Antonio article on Radio
First, the data quoted in the article is incorrect, or at least, incomplete and misleading. The KRG study from which Paragon and the article quoted separated PPM markets and Diary markets and tracked the changes from 2009 to 2011. The CHART they used from the study was only for DIARY markets, it did not include PPM data. The PPM markets had no changed in TSL for 18-24 (11:00 to 11:02)and less than a 1.3% change up or down for any demo. Both the reporter and Paragon chose to overlook the slide that represented the majority of the people. I've asked them to correct that online, but good luck getting false information removed from the internet.
I'd be glad to send you 11 studies from 2012 that prove that Pandora is not taking listening time away from radio -- including one from Larry Rosin's Infinite Dial 2012 for Arbitron.
I'm not saying people aren't listening across many more devices (they are), I'm saying that what Pandora offers does not replace what a favorite radio station/personality offers in the lives of listeners. Vision Critical's Nov 2012 study showed that Pandora listeners spent 50% MORE time listening to AM/FM than non-Pandora users.
Make whatever claims you want, but please back them up with facts that are properly sourced and properly interpreted.
While radio listenership
While radio listenership continues to grow, I think that it's safe to say that it would be growing even faster if not for Pandora, Spotify, etc.
Pandora is more of a replacement for CDs and stored music on iPods and smart phones than it is a replacement for radio.
Radio stations that are not terrified of new technology are already competing against the streaming services by using their HD sub-channels to offer genres that they can't or won't offer on their analog channel/HD1. Plus the radio stations aren't paying royalties like Pandora has to pay.
The biggest difference between radio and Pandora is probably that radio stations continue to make money, while Pandora continues to lose money. It's rather unfair to radio stations to have to compete against a service where the monetary losses are being subsidized.