RAIN’s Weekend Perspective summarizes the week’s important events for a weekend catch-up, and revives your weary neurons for coming week. ILLUMINATION Digital revenue will dominate: BIA/Kelsey releases its Annual U.S. Local Media Forecast, indicating a bullish picture of ad-revenue growth,… Continue Reading
WQXR-FM in New York has been a pure classical-music station since starting in 1939. It’s harder to find classical music on the dial than it used to be, but after decades of decline the public radio sector is grabbing an… Continue Reading
A raft of new music services is heading to market in the next few months: YouTube, Beats Music (“Daisy”), Deezer in the U.S. Another might might join those ranks: Baboom, founded by notorious entrepreneur and hacker Kim Dotcom. New… Continue Reading
Rdio, competing for audience in a crowded online-music market, made significant workforce reductions to lower costs. Layoffs are reported to have carved out about a third of the company. In the wake of the layoffs, Rdio made confident noises about its future destiny, but it looks like a rocky road from here.
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Spotify has partnered with Vodafone Ireland, one of many country-specific branches of the international telecom giant. The deal is another instance of a music service joining a telecom carrier in a synergy that benefits both companies. Continue Reading
RAIN spoke with CEO John McLeod about the upcoming H2 mobile app, which will be released to Apple’s mobile platform in about two weeks. He described how it works, the proposition for advertisers, and the 2014 distribution roadmap. Continue Reading
New York classical station WQXR started an experiment, launching an Internet-only offshoot called Q2 Music. The Q2 Music pureplay, which concentrates on less mainstream and more modern classical, averages over 82,000 stream sessions per month. RAIN spoke with Graham Parker, general manager of WQXR, about Q2 Music’s mission, programming, audience makeup, and affiliation with flagship WQXR and cousin WNYC. Continue Reading
A raft of new music services is heading to market in the next few months: YouTube, Beats Music (“Daisy”), Deezer in the U.S. Another might might join those ranks: Baboom, founded by notorious entrepreneur and hacker Kim Dotcom. Continue Reading
BIA/Kelsey today released its Annual U.S. Local Media Forecast for the next four years, with data covering 2012-2017. In it, two pillars of local-media revenue growth are identified: digital, and mobile. Traditional revenue (such as over-the-air and print) are forecast to remain essentially flat. RAIN spoke with BIA/Kelsey chief economist Mark Fratrik. Continue Reading
Today’s POTD spotlights pureplay aggregator LoudCity (www.loudcity.com), which, like larger players RadioTuna and Live365, enables and hosts personal Internet radio stations. Continue Reading
NASH FM is a country-music broadcast cluster operating in several markets, extending onto the web with a unified website template that accomplishes basic goals more cleanly and attractively than many others. NASH FM’s site design is better organized and more pleasing to the eye than some radio group templates that are applied to dozens or hundreds of stations. Continue Reading
In a press release this morning that serves as an advertisement for its holiday music stations, Pandora revealed some Christmas-season listening statistics.
We’ve been tracking the early rollout of Christmas music on terrestrial, subscription, and pureplay platforms, noting that there seems to be significant demand for holiday music in early November. Commenters in iHeartMusic’s Christmas stations jubilantly greeted their appearance a couple of weeks ago. Continue Reading