Inside Radio notes that radio stocks did well this year, with each of the publicly-traded broadcast groups enjoying double- or triple-digit growth in 2013. The Inside Radio stock basket includes companies with significant television operations (e.g. CBS), as well as Nielsen, which in only tangentially a radio company. Removing Nielsen, and plotting the remaining portfolio in a 2013 chart, you can see the impressive 2013 growth:
For a more concentrated radio view, we removed broadcast groups with TV ownership (but left companies with magazine and web publishing operations). That left us with a pure-radio group of Entercom, Beasley, Cumulus, Emmis, Journal, and Salem. (Clear Channel radio is not publicly traded, though its outdoor media subsidiary is.) In that view, the growth is slightly reduced but still impressive, compared to the S&P 500:
What about Internet radio? Apple, Google, and Microsoft are in the Internet radio game, but their streaming brands are merely features of much broader business strategies. Pandora offers a publicly-traded pureplay proxy — here is the previous chart with Pandora (orange line) added:
