There are ads on Spotify too unless you pay $14 a month.
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There are ads on Spotify too unless you pay $14 a month.
It's actually $10 (which makes it cheaper and better than SiriusXM). The service is also supported by so many devices, so listening isn't restricted to a single device.
And even if you use the free service, you still have the option of building your own playlists. So if you're tired of hearing that un-creative, lazy, one-hit wonder song called "Old Town Road", you can just remove from your playlist and never hear it again.
Can't do that with FM radio.
Radio is not a personal music device. You're comparing two different things. Thirty years ago, you made cassettes or CDs. Now you stream personal playlists.
But there IS a fee for Spotify, and there isn't for radio. If you don't like a song, you change the station. But no monthly bill. As I said if you take the free service, there are commercials. Given that Spotify is losing money, I expect you'll be hearing more commercials soon.
Yes. Two different things, with one being much superior to the other.
Except that with cassettes and CDs, you were limited to whatever you had with you at the time. If you didn't have any Snoop Dogg CDs with you, you were SOL. But with Spotify and other streaming services, all of his albums are there.
That's the big difference between modern day streaming services and older CD/Cassette players.
Yes, but the free Spotify service is still way better than FM radio (with less ads as well). There's just no denying that. And just like FM Radio, you can change the playlist whenever you grow tired of it as well.
Spotify isn't the only player in town. That is what makes OTT media content so great. It's much superior to FM in every imaginable way. Cellular networks in Houston are very expansive and cover just as much real estate as most Senior Rd. Tower stations.
I can travel with YouTube Music on from Houston to Dallas without any hiccups. KRBE on the other hand starts experiencing trouble as soon as you leave Conroe.
Streaming is the future and companies like iHeart know this. They are getting in on the action as we speak.
Most radio companies are streaming their signal. Entercom (radio.com) Cox, and even KRBE are all online. Once again, the difference is free vs. subscription. A lot of people don't like the idea of giving up credit card information and all the privacy issues involved in subscribing to services, even free services. Just last week, I had an issue with Amazon Prime about my account. I've never had that kind of issue with a local radio station. I turn it on, and it's there.
They're doing more than that. You may want to take a gander over at iHeart. They now offer personalized radio (ala Pandora) where you can choose what to hear in your rotation.
Can't do that with FM radio.
Now you're just making up excuses as you go. Spotify Free accounts only ask for your email and name. Heck, you can even sign in via Facebook if you're too lazy to make an account.
Face it, streaming is the future. You can fight it, but you'll lose. Radio will continue to see more cuts until it is 100% automated. Advertisers are waking up to the idea that there are better and more efficient ways of targeting people. The future in radio advertising is in OTT content that offers interactive ads. You can't do that in radio.
OTT > FM Radio.
No one's "fighting" anything here. This is, after all, Radio Discussions.
You're just making up so many lameduck excuses to make OTT content seem like too much of a hassle and sacrifice. But the reality is that it's not. Everyone is slowly embracing services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify. I've seen more new cars with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay than I have with HD Radio.
At the moment, terrestrial radio still holds some value. But that will soon come to an end. It's all downhill from here for FM radio. Companies like iHeart, Entercom, and Univision will have to continue to push their online content. The golden years of radio are behind us. Radio jobs will soon be a thing of the past.
Actually, advertisers are waking up to the idea that radio is a magnificent reach medium.
The term "radio" is used by consumers to signify any audio service without accompanying video. That means OTA, satellite, streaming; your definition is wrong. So as station groups add multiple platforms, all the options available with pure-play steaming will also be offered by traditional radio stations on the newer platforms.
As royalties increase, the streaming only services will have to increase the commercials on the free services and increase the cost of paid services. That has the potential of bouncing the ball back to traditional broadcasters with multi-platform delivery.
The fact is that streaming has not yet found a profitable revenue model. And with royalties increasing, look for an eventual fallout and upheaval in that area.
Your definition is my definition. "Radio" is audio-only entertainment no matter the method of distribution but there doesn't appear to be a consensus on that. A lot of traditional radio folks seem to cling to the idea that "radio" means terrestrial transmitters. From my point-of-view as a consumer, since I'm long out of the business, is that we're in the golden age of radio today. I've got AM and FM, iHeart, Radio.com, Tune-In. It's great! I just tell Alexa or Google assistants (we have both). "Play Kiss FM Los Angeles on all speakers" or "Play WABC radio" or just about any station in the country and it plays on one speaker or throughout our house. Or in my car I might punch up a local station. What I don't see is why radio companies are good investments. If iHeart could buy music libraries the way video companies buy movie libraries then maybe. But they don't own their content. What they own, FCC licences, are rapidly declining in value and local radio station brands are mostly weak. It seems to me that the value in Entercom et al is the present value of their future cash flow which I can't forecast so I don't know what they're worth. In the 1990's an investor was asked why he was buying newspapers when they were going downhill and he said "It took a long time for the dinosaurs to die" which makes sense to me. Terrestrial audio distribution today looks to me about as healthy as newspapers 15 or 20 years ago. Lots of usage but in the middle of a long decline. There's still value there but I don't know how much.
Really? Depends on what you mean by "radio jobs." There are radio jobs at Spotify. Or maybe you think the music just appears. There are radio jobs at Pandora, Apple, Sirius, and all the other digital companies. How do I know this? Because I know people who work there. It takes people to make radio, regardless of the platform, and those people will get work. Don't worry about radio jobs.
Radio is and will continue to be healthy.
Listener preferences totally aside, virtually all streaming services suffer from the same fatal flaw in the car - deficient cellular infrastructure.
The same crappy cellular networks that drop the call when you're on the phone during rush hour also choke when people are using online services in the car. I sit at stoplights in Sugar Land and marvel that my iPhone can't download an email fully from the server during afternoon drive.
My wife's Sprint iPhone has no service at all in wide swaths of the 'burbs, including at our house. We actually have to use an internet connected femtocell that Sprint provided us with in our home for her stupid Sprint phone to work at all here. I have one bar on my Verizon phone, and it's usually solid enough, but seriously - one bar? It automatically switches over to "VZW WiFi" in our home in an effort to be semi-reliable.
And do you know why? NIMBY. People in the 'burbs HATE cellular towers and they'll fight tooth and nail to keep them out of their neighborhoods. They'll then bitch and moan endlessly about having no signal, never putting 2 and 2 together.
I've been reading this board for what feels like 10 years now, and every year it's the same old thing "Oh, but cellular is coming out with X and it's going to KILL radio!" B.S. Every single year the same thing. Think it will be 5G? Think again. Verizon isn't interested in improving your cell signal. They're interested in competing with Comcast for home based services. Cell phones are an afterthought when it comes to 5G.
Ever try using mobile data in a smaller city where the wireless providers don't try very hard, and instead all suck equally in that oligopoly way cellular providers do?
Until the cellular industry gets serious about mobile signal quality AND suburbs get real about the necessity of cell towers, radio has absolutely nothing to fear.
stan
Star Participant
With gigabytes of storage on my smartphone I can carry plenty of music and podcasts on it if I’m in a poor cellular service area.
That said, on our summer road trip I listened to radio one time around Memphis and the rest of the time streamed Great Big Radio. No complaints at all, and no commercials. The business of radio is something much different today and with the debt service to carry will continue to be challenged for years.
That said, on our summer road trip I listened to radio one time around Memphis and the rest of the time streamed Great Big Radio. No complaints at all, and no commercials. The business of radio is something much different today and with the debt service to carry will continue to be challenged for years.
Traditional radio jobs like the ones we grew up in.
You mean where you edit tape with razor blades and jockey discs? Yes, those jobs don't exist any more.
Today you need to know digital editing, music scheduling software, and social media. Those are the radio jobs now.
Outside of Sprint, you'd be hard pressed to find an area where there isn't enough bandwidth to stream audio with Verizon, At&t, or T-Mobile inside the metro area. And even if I hit a deadzone, I have absolutely no problems streaming since entire songs are cached as soon as you start playing them. I usually just drive past deadzones and never notice them because of this
Sprint's problem is that they have not deployed their spectrum properly (and probably never will). They rely one three 5 MHz carriers to carry their weight. And with so many of their phones not able to do low band and midband CA, this usually means slow data for everyone. They have the spectrum to compete, but not the money to deploy it everywhere.
As far as 5G, we will eventually see all current LTE spectrum get repurposed to NR. 5G to homes is just something carriers are playing with. The reality is that the mmW spectrum they hope to use for WISP will never work for cellular usage. It's just not practical.
I have never heard anyone refer to podcasts as "radio". But we are just splitting hairs now.
I recall the same thing being nsaid about terrestrial radio and royalties.
We'll probably see consolidations of streaming services, but the option won't go away.
I probably should have said "real time audio without pictures".
I don't. The royalty structure for terrestrial radio is very different from that which applies to streaming.
And surviving services will need to have higher prices and lots more ads on the free portion of the service... if the free portion is sustainable at all.
Those jobs won't exist the further we go down the road of shifting technology and increased IP based competitors. Traditional FM and AM radio jobs like the ones you mentioned can be completely outsourced or consolidated to a corporate office. You don't need an editor, social media team, or even a program director in every market. You don't even need a studio in the market you service anymore. As radio sees more challenges in the future, the more cost cutting measures it will implement.
The only thing you will see in the future is a local sales office and that's it.
You are talking geography, not logistics. The jobs will remain but they may be centralized in hubs.
That has been going on for many years at many companies. It's nothing new, and goes back to the 60's when companies had group program directors and a single person responsible for national sales and even a corporate chief engineer.
What has changed is technology. Programming that came on tape was later delivered by satellite and now comes by FTP or stream or off the cloud.
It's all changing technology. But it still takes people to do logs, produce spots, select music and all the other tasks.
Technology and systems change. There was a major change in employment when the FCC eliminated the First Class license requirements for many station functions and then eliminated the license totally. Like this, there have been many changes affecting traffic, billing, studio operations, logging, and more. All have changed employment in some way.
Nothing new.
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