subject: Does AOL Radio Mean The End Of FM Stations? [print this page] Does AOL Radio Mean The End Of FM Stations?
AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are a few of the online radio services that have become popular these last few years. A lot of of these are also accessible on portable devices including mobile phones. Are local radio stations doomed? I will take a closer look at online radio to attempt to answer this question. In particular I will study the impact of online radio on local broadcasters.
Local radio stations do appear to have a hard time nowadays. Satellite radio has been cutting the market share of conventional radio stations severely in the past few years by offering mobility, a large number of commercial-free music channels and news and entertainment channels. In particular, online radio has turn out to be quite popular by offering a virtually infinite amount of radio channels.
Pandora in addition to other online radio providers have become available on mobile products by installing the appropriate app. This raises convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has thus far been the biggest advantage of local radio.
AOL Radio which features 200 plus music channels of 25 genres utilizes CBS radio as its underlying platform. It also offers access to 150 national CBS radio stations. Listeners can also create their own customized radio stations at the CBS radio "play.it" website and save each track for playback on an iPod by using 3-rd party software iGetMusic.
Other online music services have followed suit and are offering similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm permit listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by arbitrarily choosing titles by these artist along with other titles which are similar in genre or character. Up to now, however, competing music services have fallen short to offer similarly fully customized radio channels.
Are traditional radio stations destined to become extinct by the constant reduction of market share due to online radio? Online radio has proved useful in particular for niche broadcasters as a result of the inherently lower broadcasting expense in comparison with local radio stations.
As the variety of stations is a benefit to listeners, it is at the same time diluting market share and online radio broadcasters are finding it difficult to draw a reasonably large number of listeners and be lucrative. At the same time, however, there is less pressure to insert commercials because of the lower expenses of broadcasting in comparison with conventional stations. This has made online radio content more interesting than terrestrial radio.
Local programming such as news and local events, nonetheless, will remain one of the big benefits of local radio. One disadvantage of local radio has been the inferior audio quality of FM broadcasts. On the other hand, that is being remedied by the recent introduction of digital radio broadcasts such as HD radio. It is hard to predict a clear winner in the battle between online and local radio as both offer their own exclusive content and high mobility which are the vital aspects that will decide the destiny of each service.
