There’s a new streaming service on the horizon and it’s already attracted lots of buzz and lots of scrutiny. Aurous is a free and ad-free music platform that pulls its tunes from licensed third-party sources such as SoundCloud, YouTube, and Spotify. Within days of its official alpha launch, the service was hit with a lawsuit by the RIAA alleging massive copyright infringement. Continue Reading
Spotify’s UK subsidiary published financial results for 2014. Both subscription revenue and advertising revenue grew in 2014 from the previous year, in Spotify UK. The disparity in growth rates is interesting. Continue Reading
New York Public Radio has announced plans for a new division that will focus on creating podcasts. WNYC Studios, which is slated to launch this week, will both develop and distribute new shows. It plans to raise $15 million to support the new programming. Podcasting has been a growing topic of interest for audio companies of all sizes. Continue Reading
The Music Managers Forum released a new report titled “Dissecting the Digital Dollar” that examines the industry’s income from digital sources. The UK group used the report as a chance to push for more transparency in the business of online music. It posed seven key issues for the industry to address and closed with a survey of managers. Continue Reading
Parks Associates conducted market research into the connections between broadband Internet and streaming music. The results showed that of the 97.64 million U.S. households with broadband access, 66% use a streaming audio service. That figure could grow as more home audio technology adapts to keep up with the shifting preferences to digital music. Continue Reading
Research company Wristly conducted a survey of 1,350 Apple Watch owners about their use of Apple Music now that the streaming platform has ended its initial free trial period. While Apple Watch owners represent just a sliver of the Apple Music audience, it’s worth examining the figures since the people buying the debut model of the smartwatch are likely heavy Apple brand devotees. The results showed that more than two out of three respondents tried the streaming service. Continue Reading
Audio ad sales company AdLarge has announced its latest podcast-repping deal, this one as exclusive representative for So Money with Farnoosh Torabi, a Millennial-targeted finance show currently ranked at #5 in the iso money farnoosh torabiTunes Podcast Business News category. Continue Reading
Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web: Grantland editor exodus to HBO; measuring community radio participation. Continue Reading
RadioWorks, a London Specialty firm for marketers planning and buying campaigns on radio, has launched DigitalAudioWorks, bringing a similar scope of service to streaming audio advertising. Continue Reading
Many streaming platforms promise tools for personalized listening, but few radio services have explored programming that crosses genre boundaries. The latest to explore this space is iHeartRadio, which launched a new feature called My Favorites Radio. This station collects all of a given user’s favorited and thumbs-upped tracks and artists across all genres to create a single personalized playlist. Both Brad Hill and I took a spin through this feature to hear how things worked. Continue Reading
James Cridland Weekly Links is a column by the U.K.’s radio futurologist. THIS WEEK: Review of Fun Kids Radio; several items on podcasting; key traits for radio presenters. Continue Reading