From the New York Daily News: "Z100, KTU, and Power 105 are getting ready to hunt down listeners and ad bucks -- on the Internet. "With the radio biz in the dumps, radio titan Clear Channel, which owns all three New York stations, is looking for fans elsewhere. And it's hoping to grab them online starting with Stripped, it's first original online concert series, sources told the Daily News... "The shows are set to air for free on Clear Channel's 1,000 radio station Web sites starting in May, the sources said. Big names like John Legend, Gavin DeGraw, and Jesse McCartney also have signed on... "Clear Channel plans to find one national and one local advertiser for each event and is said to be close to inking its first deals... "Hit hard by competition from iPods and satellite radio, radio stations are being forced to chase listeners where they can find them... "Radio companies see big cash online at a time when their own sales are flagging. While the radio biz is set to grow just 2% to 3% this year to $22 billion, Internet ad sales are expected to surge by 30% to $11 billion. "Clear Channel recently got serious about the Internet, stealing away online music guru Evan Harrison... Clear Channel's banking on Harrison to reinvent its Web sites, which now do little more than collect contest entries and rebroadcast radio programing from its stations... Harrison is already playing hardball. From now on, Clear Channel -- which has a reputation for strong-arming competitors -- will no longer promote the events of AOL and other music sites on its radio stations, sources said." Read this entire column in the New York Daily News here.

Dave Van Dyke at Bridge Ratings, in an "open letter to broadcasters" press release, says his studies show that satellite radio technology doesn't pose a real danger to traditional radio.

He says the eventual ubiquity of wireless broadband Internet will both make Internet radio more of a threat, and marginalize satellite. He recommends broadcasters stay focused on what they do and have always done.
 

BY PAUL MALONEY Arbitron announced yesterday that it has found that 11% of Americans are what the research firm calls "heavy" on-demand media consumers (owning more than one "on-demand" device, like an iPod or TiVo), with an additional 25% who use on-demand media but don't necessarily own any devices. The results of Arbitron's joint study with Edison Media Research, "Internet and Multimedia 2005: The On-Demand Media Consumer," were presented yesterday via live webcast. Increasing Internet access among Americans, and especially the growth in broadband access, seems to be a factor drives a lot of on-demand media use. 81% of consumers have access to the Internet from any location, and as many Americans now have broadband access at home as have a dial-up connection (As recently as January 2001, only 12% of Americans with Internet access at home used a broadband connection.). The study also examined Internet audio and video usage, satellite radio, and the use of traditional broadcast media usage among on-demand users. Radio, the Internet, and Stern According to Arbitron, 37 million Americans a month listen to Internet radio, with a weekly audience of nearly 20 million Americans. That's 15% and 8% of Americans, respectively. The comScore Arbitron Online Ratings January 2005 survey -- which estimated listening for America Online's AOL Radio Network; Yahoo! Music; Microsoft’s MSN Radio / WindowsMedia.com and Live365 -- showed the services reached a combined weekly average of 4,892,300 listeners, 12 or older, between 6AM–12Midnight Monday through Sunday. Thus, by Arbitron's estimate, these four services account for just under 25% of the 20 million weekly Internet radio listeners (with the Yahoo! and AOL properties accounting for over 4 million of those listeners). The ability to "listen to content not found elsewhere," topped the list of reasons respondents chose as to why they listen to Internet radio. Following that were "to control/choose music played,” "fewer commercials"and "more music variety.” These reasons aren't compelling enough for listeners to abandon broadcast radio, however. Heavy "on-demand" consumers (iPods/portable MP3 device-owners, satellite radio subscribers, or Internet radio listeners) spend just slightly less time -- about 15 minutes -- with traditional radio compared with the average radio listener. Arbitron says 16% of Americans say they listen to Infinity (and soon-to-be Sirius) personality Howard Stern [pictured]. But less than a fourth of them say they're even "somewhat" likely to subscribe to satellite radio just to listen to him. (Remarkably, though Stern's top three topics of discussion lately seem to be his move to satellite when his contract ends, an astounding 31% of his fans told Arbitron they didn't know he was moving!) The slides from yesterday's webcast presentation can be found online here. The study report itself is here.