Even before Wednesday’s announcement that Chrysler would make its 2009 US models Internet enabled, terrestrial broadcasters faced multiple challenges in securing their place on The Infinite Dial: the WiMax car radio of the future that would make every station stream in the world available to motorists.
The first is creating a unique selling proposition for their stations in a space with scores of Top 40 “Kiss FMs” or multiple Jack-FMs. That situation exists already, as it happens, on Clear Channel and CBS’ respective media players.
The second is being located among thousands upon thousands of choices — current terrestrial brands, Internet-only stations, repurposed satellite radio channels and likely hybrids of all of the above. Page through the offerings of even the best organized stream-aggregators now, and you’ll see what a challenge this represents for a potential listener.
And now we can add the issue of whether the Infinite Dial is even offered to consumers. It has long been believed that the automakers would regard streaming audio as only one aspect of a broad package of in-car options, and would probably offer a heavily culled list of radio choices. And so far, mainstream terrestrial radio’s track record in that environment, while improving, is spotty.
Some of the new tabletop Internet radio devices give special prominence to Webcasters like Slacker’s showcase on RCA’s Infinite Radio and presumably Pandora’s just announced deal with Grace Digital. Some stream aggregators, like iTunes, have long emphasized Web-exotica over mainstream terrestrial stations. Others rely heavily on fans as curators — wikiradio, essentially — and on even the well-tended sites, “W” and “K” call letters sit in the middle of an dizzying list of available choices.
Recently, the large groups have become more aggressive about securing their place among the stream aggregators. CBS Radio stations are now available on iTunes — practically the only mainstream commercial stations that are. Clear Channel got a lot of press for announcing it would make its streams compatible with the Receiva radio guide, but it had already done the same for RadioTime.
The majors are doing what they ought to be doing, but in their doing so, there is now a particular challenge for those stations that are neither major-group-owned or Webexotic in a curator-friendly way. Mark Ramsey correctly points out the distinct possibility of an automaker plugging in Slacker, Pandora, AccuRadio, or CBS/AOL radio, to which he could add the 750-plus stations now available in one place on Clear Channel’s player or Citadel’s stations, which have all been available on a single player for more than a year.
So what then can radio as a whole do to take control of the Infinite Dial?
1) Radio, as an industry, must assert itself into any dialogue now taking place on the architecture of the WiMax car radio of the future or any of the devices that precede it to ensure both ease of use and representation of as many voices as possible. Part of NAB’s job must be ensuring that smaller and standalone operators are not squeezed out.
2) Radio, as an industry, needs to redirect the effort that has gone into interesting Detroit in HD Radio into selling the value of 12,000 stations with an established listener base — not merely a less developed handful of “stations between the stations.”
3) Radio is already in the business of providing news, traffic, weather, and (in the case of most Rock radio websites) adult content. If streaming audio is going to be one of multiple applications offered by an in-car or tabletop device, radio should be offering one-stop-shopping. The only thing wrong with the multi-group initiative to offer traffic through HD Radio is its apparently limited scope.
4) To that effect, more broadcasters need to stay in the business of providing other services. Broadcasters’ willingness to let news, traffic and weather come through a relatively small number of pipes has given the advantage to the major groups to whom broadcasters already handed those functions on a local level.
5) Part of the job of every marketing director in radio should today become the on-line presentation and search optimization of their stream. Radio people know that Chicago’s Jack-FM rocks harder and L.A.’s Jack-FM plays more ’80s alternative. Nothing on the good-looking CBS Play.It tuner would yet convey that to a listener.
6) Part of the job of every program director must be honing a station into a franchise that has a reason to exist among thousands of others. Broadcasters cannot count indefinitely on the affinity that listeners currently show to their local stations, even on-line. (That said, the franchise for a station among thousands of others may indeed lie in being “New Jersey 101.5″ for their market, and broadcasters who want to own that franchise must now reassert their sense-of-place among hours of jockless content and syndicated shows that may not even be available on their own stream.)
There’s no intended bias toward mainstream terrestrial broadcasters here — they’re the emphasis of this article because, if anything, there’s been some bias against them in the early days of stream aggregation. On my fantasy WiMax car radio, there are already presets set aside for WHTZ (Z100) New York, Radio IO’s R&B Oldies channel, eclectic suburban Phoenix Classic Rocker KCDX, London’s Capital FM, Sirius Hits 1, and a few hundred others. I’m not going to be happy if every one of them isn’t readily accessible. Consumers shouldn’t be happy if their current choice of two dozen locals is replaced with somebody else’s limited slate of options. And the industry as a whole should be ashamed of itself it lets that happen.
