Representing a 63 percent jump in the last year, music service Rhapsody now counts 1.7-million subscribers. Rhapsody International operates both the Rhapsody and Napster streaming-music brands in North America, Europe, and South America. The sharpest gains have resulted from Rhapsody’s distribution deal with telecom giant Telefonica Continue Reading
The “Dashboard Dynamics” panel wrapped RAIN Summit West 2014 with a robust discussion moderated by Paul Heine, Senior Editor of Inside Radio. Panelists were Ty Roberts (Gracenote), George Lynch (Pandora), Carl Rohling (TuneIn), and Scott Burnell, Ford.) Continue Reading
Just as automakers can introduce concept cars, Microsoft has unveiled a conceptual connected-car platform. First looks make Microsoft in the Car appear to be a direct competitor to Apple’s CarPlay system which is rolling onto the street in a few models this year. Continue Reading
RAIN Summit West, the premiere education and networking conference for the online audio industry, concluded late Sunday afternoon with a Dashboard Dynamics panel. Focus topics included local digital ad dollars, podcasting, mobile radio apps, curation and storytelling, differentiation among streaming services, royalties and licensing, streaming ads, and more. Continue Reading
In the keynote address at RAIN Summit West on Sunday in Las Vegas, digital-media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis wowed the audience with his State of Media presentation. Calacanis was thronged for over an hour after the speech. He expressed admiration for radio, while admonishing it to invest more in creative content. Continue Reading
TuneIn has been adding a lot of live sports programming to its online radio listening platform lately, capitalizing on the popularity of play by play programming and loyalty of fans. Thanks to a partnership with WestwoodOne, TuneIn is offering a full compliment of NCAA tournament Basketball to its listeners this year. Continue Reading
We received a couple of phone calls indicating that our event page showed that tickets to RAIN Summit West were sold out. There ARE available tickets. the error has been fixed, but if you encounter any difficulty, please call 773-701-0821. Continue Reading
Radio.com, the website portal to CBS-owned radio and pureplay content, has significantly upgraded the design of its website, adding some new functions as well. RAIN spoke to Ezra Kucharz, President of Local Digital Media at CBS, for his perspective on the changes. Continue Reading
Gracenote announced that Deezer is adding its music identification tags (called track metadata) to Gracenote’s immense repository of music data. The result will be a connection to Deezer’s music catalog for developers, who can “hack” new user interactions with Deezer songs. an interesting deal for both companies. Continue Reading
Market-leading Internet radio service Pandora released its monthly audience metrics for March today, promoting year-over-year growth in its key metrics. the most controversial statistic is “Share of total U.S. radio listening,” which jumped to more than 9%. Listening hours grew also, while audience size remained the same. Continue Reading
Bryan Moffett is VP, Digital Strategy & Sponsorship Operations at National Public Media (NPM). We spoke with him in a pre-RAIN Summit phone conversation about NPR’s approach to its audiences via archived content, and the potential of its recently-announced launch partnership with XAPPmedia for voice-activated mobile ads. Continue Reading
This week, Rhapsody and its subsidiary Napster, and Rdio, have implemented Chromecast support in their apps. Now we can look forward to a series of similar announcements of music services leaping aboard Amazon’s brand new Fire TV device, launched yesterday. what does it mean for consumers? Continue Reading