Radio is dead-Long live the Radio.pdf - Universidad del País Vasco

1. Radio’s present
The Radio is dead. Long live the Radio!
Welcome to the third age of radio: understanding radio's present from radio's past
In 2007, when the US corporation CBS bought the relatively new online radio-like
service, and music fan website, Last.fm for $ 280m, something of the significance
of the shift from traditional over-the-air radio to new technologies for distributing
audio became apparrant. When Last.fm was founded in 2002, its very name set it up
in contest with over-the-air radio. It rhetorically signalled its claim to be the ultimate
radio station, both as the end point of music radio’s evolution, and as the only radio
station listeners would need. The .fm suffix suggested music radio’s origins in overthe-air
radio and a future on the internet.
Of course music radio stations have continued to broadcast on FM frequencies, and
more over-the-air stations have joined them on the digital systems introduced in most
countries. Over-the-air services continue to capture over 85% of radio listening hours
in a country like the UK (RAJAR, 2011; RAJAR, 2011b). However, as the young
entrepreneurs who established Last.fm understood very clearly, the global reach and
interactive nature of the internet could enable a different relationship between listener
and music than the one on which the century-old broadcast model was based.
When I first researched internet music radio between 2000 and 2003 (Wall,
2004), , I had neglected the fl fledgling edgling music service, and instead focused my analy- analysis
on Live365.com ‘crowd-sourced’ radio and AOL’s portal radio service, then
called AOL Radio@Network. Nevertheless, I interpreted the development and
dominance of these ‘networks’ as evidence of an emerging model within onlineonly
radio services. On the basis of a comparison of internet radio’s lower fixed
and higher variable costs relative to over-the-air radio, I revealed a number of
important developments: more new entrants in ‘broadcasting’; a move to niche,
streamed programming, often bundled and heavily branded; greater emphasis on
automation and ‘amateur programming’. I also suggested that the technology enabled
even more opportunities around.
While both Live365 and AOL services continue today in modified form, the
most notable innovations have been in the development of the radio-like music
services, of which Last.fm has been the most successful. However, this emphasis
on innovation can disguise how important over-the-air radio remains. Statistics for
the UK, to take one example, are instructive here. Throughout 2011 radio listening
continued to grow, both in terms of reach and listening hours. Although there have
been significant increases in listening through digital platforms like DAB, digital
television, computers and mobile devices, FM and AM listening still accounts for
over 60% of radio consumption. And notably, 85% of consumption is of over-theair
services (both analogue and digital) (RAJAR, 2011).
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