Weekend Perspective: Week of Feb. 24 – 28

Weekend Perspective: February 24 – 28


Research dominated the news this week. The Generator Research study, which bluntly asserted that the streaming-music business model was fiscally broken, continued to attract strong interest 10 days after we posted our write-up.

In fresh research, Borrell Associates released a study of local digital revenue to radio, finding double-digit growth in 2013, and even higher growth projected for this year. It’s not all advertising — radio stations are getting into web services such as SEO and web design for small businesses.

Meanwhile, Edison Research and Triton Digital unveiled a tiny preview of their Infinite Dial 2014 report, in its 22nd year under the stewardship of Edison, with Triton partnering in this edition for the first time. The full report will be unleashed this Wednesday.

Net Neutrality is taking a beating. First, the FCC lost its recent court case through which it hoped to regulate Internet service providers, preventing them from selling favorable bandwidth to streaming content companies willing to pay. The agency announced it would try again with a new legal strategy, but mere days later Netflix and Comcast announced a deal of the very type that net-neutrality advocates fear.

In the connected-car realm, ABI Research predicted that nearly all new cars would have digital dashboards in five years. ON the business side, Ford was reported to make a dramatic decision: the automaker ditched Microsoft as the operating system built into Ford’s SYNC dashboards, in favor of BlackBerry’s QNX system.

Music service news of the past week: 8tracks lnaded on Xbox’s short list of music apps. And Dave Allen, iconic founder of Gang of Four, joined Beats Music as official evangelist.

Radio station groups named in the HD Radio patent lawsuit got a reprieve from the deadline to file a defense response. Settlement talks are apparently in the works.

Brad Hill