Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web: Westergren replies to Byrne; Bluetooth — magic for streaming audio?; brand storytelling through programmatic advertising. Continue Reading
Columbia House, the company of 1980s mail-order music and movie fame, is no more. Parent company Filmed Entertainment filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy this week and is looking to sell off the parts of its business still in operation. Continue Reading
UK Minister of Culture, Communications and Creative Industries Ed Vaizey spoke recently on BBC 4 about the potential FM radio switch-off in favor of DAB. “When we reach a certain target of listening on digital—and we’re very close to that target at the moment—we’ll take a view on what the appropriate next step will be,” he said. Continue Reading
Korean consumer electronics manufacturer LG has announced a new online music service that will operate exclusively on the company’s premium smartphones. Contrary to some reports, the announcement makes no mention of streaming, and instead describes a hi-fidelity music download store. It might be good strategy. Continue Reading
NextRadio is pushing to get T-Mobile to unlock FM chips on its phones. The company has launched a campaign with the tagline “Help Get NextRadio on T-Mobile.” It asks people to turn to social media and voice their support for unlocking the chips for phones on T-Mobile plans. Continue Reading
On-demand music service Rdio announced the addition of Live Radio to its feature set. It combines dynamic pureplay listening with live broadcast radio, plus the ability to save songs played on the radio directly to personal playlists. It is meaningfully competitive, and we review the new app. Continue Reading
The hi-fi streaming club has another member. Aud.io bills itself as the world’s first high-fidelity Internet radio service. It offers ad-free listening to stations grouped by genre for $7.99 a month. The service uses a Pandora-like system of personalization based on likes and skips. But unlike the online radio standard, there’s no way to add other seeds or artist preferences or new stations. Here’s what I thought. Continue Reading
Next Big Sound released its summer report, and the focus for this season was streaming and social media. Even though Pandora purchased the music data specialist this spring, the company is still able to provide compelling insight across several streaming platforms. In fact, Next Big Sound has already tracked more than 1 trillion online plays in the first six months of the year. That covers activity from YouTube, Vevo, Vimeo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, and new owner Pandora. Continue Reading
The Download on Podcasts is a weekly feature sponsored by PodcastOne.
The IAB announced a podcast “upfront” where several content and ad-repping compnies will present their shows to advertisers and agencies. Another mile-marker in an evolving industry of on-demand audio.
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SFX Entertainment reported revenue of $121.1 million in the second quarter, up 48.3% from the year-ago period. However, the parent company for online EDM specialty platform Beatport also posted an increase in net losses, up 36.2% to $48 million for the quarter. Continue Reading
Juniper Research released new data examining the outlook for ad-supported streaming revenue in subscription services. the report does not include non-interactive services like Pandora, which by itself exceeded $1-billion in total revenue over the past 12 months. Continue Reading
Slate Group-owned Panoply, a podcast network launched in February, has acquired Audiometric, a podcast publishing platform that includes ad insertion and analytics. The deal positions Panoply for expansion and more effective management of its portfolio of shows. We spoke to Andy Bowers at Panoply. Continue Reading