On-demand music service Rdio announced a new affiliation with Musicians for Audio Quality, headed by The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. Putting its product where its affiliation is, Rdio is dramatically upgrading its entire 25-million-track library to hi-fi … or at least higher-fi. Hi-fi mobile music is a somewhat controversial concept, but is building momentum as a trend. Continue Reading
Brian Lakamp is the President of Digital at Clear Channel, and is the product owner of iHeartRadio, which he characterizes as “the national consumer brand” of Clear Channel. In a wide-ranging phone conversation, we spoke with Lakamp about iHeart’s digital strategy, listening to radio in the car, Clear Channel’s partnerships with record labels, and operating in a “six-screen world.” Continue Reading
Welcome to Internet Radio REWIND, an audio recap of the week. This weekly program is a quick and concise catch-up of the week’s top stories. Click the Play button, refresh your neurons, and be ready for the coming week. This week: CarPlay comes out to play; a field day for earnings; Samsung spills its marketing for Milk; the Electronic Frontier Foundation tries to rescue podcasting; and a birthday of the man who probably didn’t invent radio. Continue Reading
Spotify’s European head of label relations, Kevin Brown, told a British music publication that Spotify has gained one-million listeners in the U.K. over the past four months. This data point is spawning headlines that Spotify is bigger than iTunes in Europe. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Continue Reading
RAIN Summit West: Fourteen knowledge-packed sessions in a full day of panel discussions, research reports, and two keynote addresses. It all happened on April 6 in Las Vegas. Click through for a video playlist of all sessions, for reliving, or post-event attending. Continue Reading
HEADLINE: Pandora met Wall street expectations in Q1, and grew key usage and revenue metrics.
HEADLINE: Pandora stock (P) is savagely down 15% as of this writing.
Why? The answer might lie in the company’s future guidance Continue Reading
Born in Bologna, Italy, Guglielmo Marconi would have been one-hundred-forty years old today. Widely recognized as the inventor of Radio, Marconi may have actually set out to perform a different task solving a different problem. A guest column by Patrick Reynolds, Chief Strategy Officer of Triton Digital. Continue Reading
Last month we noted real estate site Trulia’s launch of a $45-million ad campaign promoting its mobile house-seeking app. Since then we’ve had an eye out for the ads, curious about what sort of placement Trulia would occupy in Pandora’s portfolio of ad units and rich-media options. We got one answer this week. Continue Reading
As in the car, so on Wall Street … today. SiriusXM and Clear Channel (including iHeartRadio information) released quarterly earnings reports this morning. Pandora comes to bat at 5:00pm EDT. Here are two summaries and one preview. Continue Reading
XAPPmedia announced its acquisition of a $3-million round of venture funding, led by Frank Raines, a co-founder and current Executive Chairman. The money will be invested in developing and distributing the company’s flagship product, XAPP Ads. Continue Reading
RAIN Summit West, held April 6 in Las Vegas, featured two major “State of…” addresses. Celebrated entrepreneur Jason Calacanis presented his annual “State of Media” deep dive, comprising 132 fact-packed slides surveying the entire media landscape. Later in the day, RAIN founder Kurt Hanson delivered his State of the Industry Address, focusing on Internet radio and online audio. Continue Reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a kind of sheriff’s office for civil liberties on the Internet, has received an encouraging ruling from a government office that regulates patent reviews. The judgment clears the way for the EFF to challenge the validity of a controversial lawsuit against podcaster Adam Corrola and other podcast publishers. Continue Reading