Author: Kurt Hanson

Friends are good to have. Facebook is a fun way to connect with friends. “Social media” is an excellent channel for brands to communicate with their customers.

But sometimes is enough enough? On my way to work this morning in Chicago, there was a poster at the “el” stop for a local bakery, Turano, that primarily serves the food service industry. (I guess some of the restaurants I patronize purchase their bread and rolls from Turano, although since bread and rolls served in a restaurant are an unbranded product (as opposed to, say, ketchup), I would have no way to know which.)…
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There have been a lot of references in the trade press recently to the anticipated U.S. debut of Spotify that call it an “online radio service.” I believe that’s a misnomer. Here’s my rationale:

For many decades now, consumers have listened to two forms of audio entertainment. To make the discussion easier, let’s focus on music. Basically, you can listen to the music you own, or you can listen to the radio. Continue Reading →

Before we begin today’s regularly scheduled blog post, I would like to point out something important about the Pandora IPO situation that no one seems to have noticed: Except for costs associated with the process of going public, Pandora is profitable — and has been for the past year and a half!

According to the quarter-by-quarter level detail in their most-recent S-1 filing, Pandora was profitable on an operating basis (i.e., approx. EBITDA, and…
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Now that I think about it, a better way to do the math in the “RAIN Analysis” in our June 3rd issue might be, rather than looking at market capitalizations, to look at the “enterprise values” of radio station groups — how much the stations themselves are worth, as represented by the sum of what the shareholders own (i.e., the market capitalization) and what the banks own (i.e., the company’s debt).

Example: At the moment, the stock market thinks that Emmis’s assets…
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Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re giving up on their well-reviewed iPod competitor, the Microsoft Zune — one of the most-prominent selling points of which was its inclusion of FM and HD radio.

This is telling. Even though the Zune was an attractively-designed, well-priced device, with what would seem like a valuable selling point in its radio feature, Apple’s iPod is maintaining about a 75% share of the MP3 player market and Zune is rumored to be somewhere around a 2% share. (Cumulative sales to date tell a similar story:…
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Wow, when business journalists write about a topic you know about, you can see how wrong they often are… and thus get worried about what you read on every other topic!

The Pandora IPO story over the weekend was a great example. Some well-known, well-respected publications made the following mistakes:

One top business magazine wrote about Pandora’s “$100 million in profits last year,” because they confusing “revenues” with “profits,” which are actually…
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In the Wall Street Journal’s popular “Heard on the Street” section today, on the topic of Amazon’s “Prime” free-shipping program (which we use regularly here at RAIN and AccuRadio), business journalist Martin Peers points out that Amazon’s gross margins have eroded from 24% in 2005 to 22.3% last year. He then writes:

“[Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos told analysts a few months after Prime’s introduction that he expected it would generate long-term…
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Despite what several industry pundits are saying, I believe that the NAB may be on the brink of a superb deal with musicFIRST regarding performance royalties — with a proposed term sheet that should be ratified by the NAB Joint Board today as expeditiously as possible.

NAB President/CEO Gordon Smith is no doubt correct when he says that if the radio industry doesn’t negotiate something with the music industry, it will have no…
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As we announced in RAIN a few days ago, this year’s RAIN Summit East will be, for the first time ever, an officially co-located event with the RAB/NAB Radio Show… and it’s scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, September 28th, in Washington, DC.

That means, of course, that if you’re making…
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