Pandora yesterday reported it streamed 1.35 billion listener hours in August. That’s a 16% increase from August of last year, and 5.5% higher than July 2013’s 1.28 billion. June ended a brief slide in the webcaster’s total listening hours after… Continue Reading
To celebrate its tenth year of broadcasting from the IFA Consumer Electronics & Home Appliance Show in Berlin, “Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline” has brought on a new reporter, Kameron Graveline. Sixteen-month-old Kameron Graveline (Dave’s grandson)! The IFA show itself… Continue Reading
In just two weeks, we’ll present the fourth-annual RAIN Internet Radio Awards at RAIN Summit Orlando (September 17). This week, we’re happy to reveal the semi-finalists in each of the Awards’ five categories, beginning today with the “Best Single Stream… Continue Reading
The Media Audit took a look at radio station websites in over 80 U.S. cities, and have named those stations and clusters that regularly reach the highest percentage of their metro adult population. “The latest figures suggest that radio websites… Continue Reading
Pandora’s stock has taken a big hit in recent weeks due to rumors that Apple is considering entering the Internet radio space. Similar concerns have been raised about Microsoft recently “reentering” the space of Internet radio (actually, it’s already in and has been for years — it’s simply rebranding its less-than-stellarly-successful “Zune Music Pass” as “Xbox Music Pass”), about the fact that Spotify is offering radio channels, and about the possibility of Google competing in the music space.
In all of these cases, I think the alarm is over-exaggerated.
Here’s why: Each…
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One of the big lessons I picked up from the marketing books of Al Ries and Jack Trout — “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” “Marketing Warfare,” “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” and several others — is the importance of having a color associated with your brand.
A great example is the world of rent-a-cars. The original leading firm in the space, Hertz, has used yellow (with black highlights) for decades. The “#2” firm (and I’m using quotation marks because they’re actually #3, but their marketing angle is that they’re #2 (so they try harder)) is Avis, which picked red…
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If you’ve been to a RAIN Summit in 2012 (Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Dallas, or Berlin), you may have seen my “State of the Industry Address,” in which I discussed the theories of author/consultant Clayton Christensen (“The Innovator’s Dilemma”) and argued that Internet radio is a “disruptive innovation.”
(By the way, the term “disruptive innovation” is thrown around pretty freely nowadays, but, as Christensen uses it, it has a very specific meaning: It’s a type of innovation that starts out worse than existing products in its category, and thus is experimented with but subsequently…
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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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Pandora touts its growing mobile audience, but one advantage to the desktop experience is the larger canvas for advertisers. It’s arguably an advantage for users on the receiving end, too, if the commercials are contextually relevant. In November, Definitive Technology… Continue Reading
According to comScore, about 20% of your listeners now own smartphones. One implication of this fact is that those listeners could theoretically listen to on-demand streams of your programming during their commutes.
This opens up a plethora of potential new opportunities for you!
One possibility, for example, derives from my long-held observation that morning and afternoon drive air talents (on a music station) are doing a four-hour show, yet your typical listener only tunes in for a half-hour or so of it, which means that a…
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