Today Pandora released the final edition of its monthly audience metrics report, bringing to an end a two-year series of disclosures. Audience metrics were essentially flat month-ever-month, with year-over-year gains. Pandora stock (P) opened sharply lower this morning, and remains down about 2.5% as of this post. Continue Reading
Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) released its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014-2018, in which it forecasts growth drivers in the music business. “Music streaming explodes” is PWC’s characterization of streaming’s role in industry growth. Continue Reading
Edison Research has spun out a new segment of The Infinite Dial 2014 survey, co-produced with Triton Digital. The Infinite Dial main report was issued on March 5, and deep dives have been released periodically since then, revealing details of certain demographics and consumer segments. This week, Edison put up some interesting insights about Public Radio P1’s (frequent listeners). Continue Reading
Items of interest in the music-app realm: Google Play Music updates its Apple app, Rdio gives smoother listening to Android users, and iTunes Radio is rumored to go local. Continue Reading
The Commotion social platform provides a breakthrough and (to date) unique platform for encouraging real-time conversation among radio station listeners, while owning and shaping the experience. We spoke to CEO Ryan Burgoyne, to learn more about Commotion. Continue Reading
Hooking into the emerging trend of longer subscription trials, Spotify today announced a “Super Summer of Music” deal — three months of Spotify Premium subscription service for the one-month price of $9.99 in the U.S. Spotify Premium includes unlimited commercial-free, on-demand music selection, and unlimited track downloads. Continue Reading
Financial services firm Canaccord Genuity released its monthly audit of Pandora ads for May, showing that as listener hours increased, average ad load dropped incrementally. The company uses a methodology that tests within several registered identities in different demographics, across four geographic markets. Continue Reading
Apple kicked of its annual Worldwide Developer Conference today with the main event for non-professional Apple-watchers: the keynote. Anchored by CEO Tim Cook, supported by departmental leaders, the keynote traditionally previews Apple’s future products related to its operating systems. Continue Reading
Spotify, Pandora, and some other big players in streaming music cannot make a profit, partly because of the high cost of music licensing. Solution? Just play bird songs. Brazilian Birds Radio does just that, although this station is a small sideshow in the sprawling 1.FM array of Internet radio stations. Continue Reading
This morning Abacast announced a new partnership with radio group Entercom, which will switch to Abacast’s Clarity platform to handle ad insertions, campaign management, and analytics. Abacast markets Clarity as the only cloud-based ad-insertion solution for online radio, available to terrestrial webcasters, pureplay Internet radio, and podcasting. Continue Reading
Apple’s acquisition of Beats brought out more anticipation, speculation, and commentary than any business or product news story since the launch of iTunes Radio in September. It’s as if a unique two-headed creature rose out of the earth for all to wonder at. As the dust settles, a few points are worth noting. Continue Reading
Welcome to Internet Radio Rewind, an audio recap of top stories, quick and concise. This week’s podcast: Apple and Beats … YouTube infuriates Indie labels … Amazon’s music service takes shape … Billboard and Twitter … and Project72. Continue Reading