EVERYONE'S ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH NOW No regulatory restrictions, no limited space on the dial; Web radio may be the biggest threat to radio since the advent of TV Grant Robertson – Globe and Mail When Jonas Woost took the microphone at a gathering of the Canadian music and broadcasting industry in Toronto this week, the manager of last.fm looked more like a rock star than an industry executive. He practically had his own groupies.
The audience, composed of record label representatives, music fans, broadcasters and a smattering of artists, many at least a decade older than Mr. Woost -- were all ears as he described how the London-based Internet broadcaster is amassing millions of listeners around the world each month.
It's all in the name, Mr. Woost explained. "Last.fm is the last radio station you need."
As he stepped off stage, a small crowd of admirers gathered, some to shake hands, others to lob technical queries about last.fm's music recommendation engine. Others just wanted to say they are fans.
The excitement generated by Mr. Woost's appearance is indicative of a growing momentum in the industry. Without facing regulatory restrictions or a need to fight for space on a fixed radio dial, the Internet may just be the biggest threat to the radio industry since the advent of television -- and the established players, faced with a challenge to their business model, have stood up and taken notice.
Just as telling as Mr. Woost's popularity at the conference is the fact that Internet radio has new enemies -- in particular the U.S. recording industry, which this month proposed aggressive royalties many feel could be the death knell for the industry.
For now, there's no question Web radio is taking off. With the proliferation of WiFi as a catalyst, companies have been quietly pumping millions of dollars into developing new technologies. Some of the industry's key players are upstarts, such as last.fm and Oakland-based Pandora. The bigger sites are better-known Web portals, with Yahoo Launchcast and AOL Music topping the global list. Even they started small, but Yahoo Launchcast now draws enough listeners to equal the largest FM stations combined in a major U.S. city like New York.
"If you look at the past 12-18 months, certainly there has been a proliferation of sites that cater to a personalized music experience . . .," said Andy West, manager of Yahoo Music Canada. "People have finally caught on to that."
Its a strange fate for an industry that has been around for more than a decade and was nearly forgotten after the dot-com bubble burst.
In the mid-1990s, Web entrepreneur Mark Cuban started streaming a Dallas AM radio station signal over the Internet to allow sports fans to follow games from other parts of the country. Web companies liked the idea. Yahoo gave Mr. Cuban and his business partner $6-billion in stock for Broadcast.com, crowning him one of the first Internet broadcasting billionaires.
However, as quickly as Web radio took off, people recognized its limitations. The technology of the day resulted in scratchy sound, and listeners were essentially anchored to their computers. When the tech crash hit, the upstarts saw their values plummet. In 2002, Yahoo bought another Web streaming company, Launchcast, for a paltry $8-million.
In the years since, remarkable growth in bandwidth and technology has transformed the industry. Broadband has allowed companies to stream better-quality music files, while music recommendation engines (which stream songs based on a mix of the listener's own picks and suggestions from other users), pioneered by the likes of Pandora, have distinguished the industry from traditional radio. The proof is in the numbers: Yahoo's music service has amassed 3.5 million unique users each month, while smaller operations such as Chicago-based AccuRadio, which started with a few computers and a stack of CDs, claims one million visitors a month.
"Pandora or last.fm, any broadcaster could have built that a couple of years ago, or acquired either of them for the price of a tiny little AM radio station in a small U.S. market," said Kurt Hanson, AccuRadio's CEO. "Some day, a few years from now, the biggest brand of Internet-delivered radio in Canada will have an audience size bigger than all the radio stations in Edmonton or Toronto put together, assuming that somebody establishes a leading brand." |