Rdio announced the acquisition of TastemakerX, a music intelligence company which will effectively replacing The Echo Nest as Rdio’s song-recommendation provider. Rdio announced that it was ending its technology partnership with The Echo Nest shortly after Spotify acquired the music-intel firm. Continue Reading
Today is the 35th anniversary of the Sony Walkman’s launch. The Sony Walkman was not the first product to demonstrate the mobile potential of music — that would be the transistor radio. But the Walkman did give mobility to personal music collections, via cassette tapes. Continue Reading
Nominations are flowing into the five award categories of the Fifth Annual RAIN Internet Radio Awards. The nomination deadline, July 20, is approaching. As in previous years, broadcasting brands are included in the Best Streaming Broadcast Station category. This award is for the single broadcast station that has executed the best streaming strategy. Nominate your station now! Continue Reading
RAIN is partnering with Edison Research for 2014’s “30 Under 30,” and nominations are now open. Edison’s list highlights the most promising and accomplished young men and women representing the next generation of radio, Internet radio, and audio. 30 Under 30… Continue Reading
adStream is a journal of ad-spotting in music services. We spent an interesting hour stalking ads on Slacker Radio, to check spot load and see (or hear) which brands were extending their campaigns onto Slacker, which brands itself “the most complete music service on earth.” We found rock-steady regularity in Slacker’s ad pacing. Continue Reading
Internet radio platform Songza has built its reputation on the so-called Concierge method of music curation. The Concierge service seeks to understand the user’s mood and activity, match it to time of day, local weather, and other signals, combine all that with historical music preferences, and deliver a perfect soundtrack (playlist) for the moment.
This method of playlist discovery has been imitated, most recently by “The Sentence” in Beats Music. Rhapsody, iHeartRadio, and others have also gone down this path to varying extents.
Wanting to know more about the anatomy of Songza Concierge, and also how it ties into monetization through ad sales, we spoke with Elias Roman, CEO. Continue Reading
Lew Dickey, CEO of the second-largest radio group in the U.S., Cumulus Media, positioned his company during an Associated Press interview that is getting buzz today. Dickey is quoted as skeptical of Pandora’s audience metrics, and taking a long view of the digital side of radio. Continue Reading
Remember when Internet radio leader Pandora bought a radio station last June? The idea was to get more favorable music licensing terms, but the deal was blocked by ASCAP and remained unclosed pending FCC approval. Now, that small station in South Dakota is in the news again, as Pandora files a petition with the FCC to declare Pandora’s eligibility to acquire the terrestrial broadcaster. Broadcast law attorney David Oxenford, who is involved in the case, explains everything. Continue Reading
Audi, which recently replaced BMW as the top-selling premium car company, has included HD Radio as standard equipment in the 2015 Audio A3, which is appearing in dealer lots now. At the same time, an announcement comes from Audi that it is adopting CarPlay, Apple’s digital-dashboard operating system. Specific car models are not identified, but at least some 2015 models will have CarPlay. Continue Reading
Inside Radio noted (paywall link here) that a group of Nebraska radio stations has donated $5,000 to the Red Cross for disaster relief after storms ripped through parts of the state. This sort of radio activism on behalf of local communities ties into traditional radio values of locality and community service. More particularly it resonates with recent arguments, in press releases and government hearings, against applying music-licensing performance royalties to broadcast radio. Continue Reading
RAIN Hotspots — the five most-read articles of the week. this week: A Pandora exec talks to investors about ad revenue and his car … Kurt Hanson’s latest blog post is a tour-de-force of analysis … more copyirght hearings in the U.S. capitol … one radio station cuts its ad load in half … RAIN Poll results. Continue Reading
Nielsen Audio released a new study, the Audience Demand Landscape, during its Consumer 360 conference this week. The purpose is to dig beneath standard demographics to reveal adoption and usage characteristics of audio consumers. The result is a slate of newly-defined audience segments that relate less to inborn characteristics, and more to media-use characteristics. Continue Reading