It’s informed speculation at this point, but the story goes like this: By the end of this month, Spotify is expected to make some hardware announcements, and there’s a good chance that one of those announcements will be designed to bring the platform closer to more cars. Obviously anybody with a smartphone and bluetooth can conceivably use Spotify in their cars, but the platform is notoriously laborious – indeed, that’s the whole point of Spotify: Getting exactly what you wan

I have written extensively about the challenges radio will have in cars with a dashboard which is built to sync with Apple Carplay and Android Auto. I have also written a lot about what happens to radio when cars drive themselves (hint: It gets ugly). But there’s another force out there and it’s a force in the other direction. And that force is your own voice. Ford has announced an integration between their Sync platform and Amazon’s Alexa voice control system: [Starting] thi

Now I am as pro-technology as anyone you’ll find in the audio space, but the reason to be pro-technology is to be pro-consumer. Because any technology that doesn’t serve the interests and desires of consumers is a solution that, by definition, nobody wants. And the only thing worse than not being wanted is being UNwanted. So it is with the ridiculous decision of BMW and Tesla to dispense with AM radio in some of their recent EV vehicle lines. Not surprisingly, some consumers

Every time there’s some new innovation out there which enhances the choice set available to consumers who want to hear audio entertainment or information, a chill runs up the spine of every broadcaster, because with such a large fraction of listening, radio seems to stand more to lose than to gain from the expansion of choice. Without question, new choices squeeze existing options. Indeed, given the growing number of distractions available to consumers across every platform –

There’s much interest and much consternation about the entry of Google and Apple into operating-system extensions for the car dashboard with Android Auto and CarPlay, respectively. According to BI Intelligence: By 2020, nearly 40 million cars will be using Android Auto and 37.1 million will be using CarPlay, and that will cover nearly all cars launching connected car services, according to BI Intelligence estimates. That conclusion springs from a premium-priced report from BI

Yesterday I wrote that some auto industry analysts believe radio needs to be easy to find and use on the new auto dashboard because ease of discovery and use will trump any discussion of how good or bad the actual content is. In other words, consumers are not likely to seek out great content they care about unless it’s first easy to find and use. While it’s certainly true that making anything easier to find and use promotes both discovery and use, is that even within radio’s

This past week I had a conversation with someone knowledgeable in the auto technology space: “The dash is getting crowded and complicated,” she argued, “and the harder to find a radio station is the less apt folks will be to listen to it.” “But if the content is compelling enough, they will seek it out,” I replied. “Ease of use trumps compelling content,” she argued back. “It has to be easy to find and use first, and some of these new dashboards don’t even have an FM/AM butto

All this fretting over the evolving car dashboard is so much ado about the wrong stuff. Okay…. A flood of new content is coming. Lots of it is already here. There is no way to keep it out because consumers don’t want it out. The primacy of radio on the car dash is officially a thing of the past. So let’s begin by accepting that fact. Further, being on new platforms in the new dash is fine, but we’re already on the platform that is most familiar and most used – the “radio” one

What will the dashboard look like in the car of the very near future? And what will radio look like there? Those are some of the questions addressed by Jake Sigal, founder and principal of Livio Radio, a company committed to getting music from the Internet into peoples’ ears, especially in the car. A personalized mobile device (and aren’t they all?) will personalize your dashboard, and it will allow you to control your content safely, by touch and by voice. Where does this le

There’s no doubt that technology is bringing new choices to an auto dashboard near you.  Nor is there any doubt that consumers will embrace and even demand those choices. It’s customary for broadcasters to freak out about this, as we stand by and watch radio’s hegemony over the dashboard under attack. The natural response is to fight technology with technology – to assume that your FM station must have all the doo-dads and whistles that Pandora has. What is the truth about ra

Pandora and other online radio pure-plays want to be in the car, and that will mean trouble for Sirius/XM, right? After all, Pandora et. al. are free while Sirius/XM is not. Not so fast. Here are five reasons why that logic could be all wet: 1.  Sirius/XM is destination programming.  For Pandora, the destination is me. That is, personalized radio services solve one problem really well, but they don’t solve all problems equally well. Tons of Sirius/XM listenership is for profe