I am blessed to do a lot of research work with Christian non-commercial broadcasters. As I travel around the country working with these amazing and passionate folks, I have discovered something unsettling – a trend that, I believe, should concern them a great deal. Here’s what I hear: Over time, the magnitude of giving is steady or rising, but the total number of givers is declining. Also – as my own research shows – the age of the giving audience is not just a little older t

So the hot rumor about the forthcoming iPhone 7 is that it will lose something that has so far been taken for granted. I’m talking about the headphone jack. No headphone jack means no place to plug in your earbuds, headphones, or stereo cable. That means the audio will transmit wirelessly, and that most irritating of mobile phone nuisances – the easily tangled and easily ripped-from-your-ear cord – will be a thing of the past. According to one source: …the iPhone 7 will ship

The BBC will reportedly abolish its radio and television divisions. BBC-produced radio and TV will still exist, of course, but they will be reorganized to reflect changes in audience behavior and in media definitions that I and others have been articulating for years. From Tubefilter: [BBC] director-general, Lord Tony Hall, believes an organizational overhaul is necessary as digital media continues to blur the lines between television, radio and online. In a speech before Eas

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

Do consumers want radios built into their mobile devices so they can save on precious bandwidth? In other words, does the use of audio streaming itself push bandwidth past available data caps? Is audio a “data hog”? Is there a consumer problem here? I have previously argued that audio streams are, in fact, fairly economical. Even if you do all of your streaming audio consumption without the benefit of Wi-Fi, you’d need to stream about 4 hours on Pandora every day to hit a 2-g

With a great flourish, the powers-that-be behind the NextRadio app have announced that this week shall begin a thunderous effort to enlist one constituency so far utterly lacking in enthusiasm for NextRadio’s product: Consumers. And so begins an onslaught of over-the-air radio spots designed to lead consumers to download an app that will not work on most of their phones, meanwhile attempting to incite rage that the “choppy, buffered streaming radio” that wireless companies “w

In a November survey by Morgan Stanley (released this week and reported in Quartz), more than 2,000 American adults were asked what audio platforms they used. Their answers: Now this question is roughly analogous to what broadcasters would call “reach.” It does not really address frequency of usage or “time spent listening.” Radio tops the list with 86% of respondents saying it’s part of their usage routine. That’s by far the highest number (although not as high as Nielsen wa

On the surface there are a zillion differences between radio brands and Netflix. One is local, while the other is national, even international. One is free (for the most part) while the other is by subscription. One is audio and the other is video. And so on. But the similarities are more important than the differences, because like Netflix, yours is a media company competing for the attention of consumers in a marketplace facing blistering changes and blossoming alternatives

Lots of folks in the radio space are talking about Emmis’ NextRadio initiative to activate FM chips in smartphones (here and here), but not a lot of folks in the industry are paying attention to NextRadio’s primary partner, Sprint. Remember that one of the driving arguments for NextRadio is that consumers can conserve bandwidth by tuning in radio over-the-air without eating up precious bits and bytes. But nobody in radio seemed to notice Sprint’s announcement last month that

Earlier this week I provided data and an argument to show why the NextRadio campaign to add an FM chip to mobile phones in the U.S. will be fruitless. But I hinted at an international scenario which might make much more sense for a form of this technology. Show me a market where everyone has mobile phones but not radios, and I’ll show you a market made for radios built into mobile phones. So it is in many areas of the world where radios and the plugged-in electricity which dr

So I read with interest today this distribution-related tidbit from NTS MediaOnline: Cumulus Media-owned Westwood One has announced an agreement with NextRadio that will enable all U.S. radio stations to use advertising inventory to fund the industry’s payments to Sprint. Over the past year, broadcasters have been asked to commit dollars and/or inventory to fund the Sprint NextRadio Initiative, which plans to sell at least 30 million FM receiver-enabled smartphones in the nex

From Radio Ink: The latest statistics from Emmis regarding NextRadio show the popularity in the app is still on the rise. NextRadio allows listeners to access their favorite radio station on select Sprint phones without using data. In addition to the NextRadio app being downloaded over 240,000 times, listeners have tuned to nearly nearly 8,000 radio stations racking up over 190,000 hours of listening through the app since it was launched. In January and February of 2014, the

Last week one of the radio industry’s big headlines was the preliminary deal struck between Sprint and various players in radio to provide over-the-air FM on Sprint devices via the Emmis/HD Radio NextRadio platform.  I haven’t seen much thoughtful analysis on this yet, so here goes nothing. On the surface, this is good news.  After all, it means more ways for listeners to listen to the stations they love and more ways to interact with those stations. Looking deeper, however,

What’s the best way for radio to compete in a newly digital mobile environment? Is it to ensure that every mobile phone has an activated FM chip?  Is it, in other words, to expand the limits of existing technology to cover new gadgets which are built fundamentally on newer and more interactive and personal technology?  Is it to turn a mobile phone into the same kind of radio that sits on your nightstand? No, no, a thousand times, no. Wild projections flutter about the radio i

So another News option vanishes from the dial in NY and Chicago. Does this mean “News doesn’t work on FM?” Of course not. It just means these stations in these specific formats executing what they did didn’t work well enough in these markets at this time. Perhaps these markets are just too news-soaked to reward new entrants without enough meaningful and palpable differences, I don’t know. Maybe the existing options were simply good enough. Maybe all the news bellies were al

Another study from NAB has been issued which supports the notion that consumers want FM on their mobile phones. And, like all studies about what people WILL do rather than what they HAVE DONE in the past, it’s flawed. You can ask people what they value and what they have done and they will give you an answer that represents their best frame on reality. But ask them what they intend to have for breakfast tomorrow morning if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns w

Radio Ink made a classic mistake last week when it celebrated the strength of AM radio by trumpeting the financial success of the top radio brands, many of which happen to be on AM. Why is this a mistake?  Because it confuses the band with the brand. AM radio is not what makes stations like WFAN so successful.  WFAN is what makes WFAN so successful. Indeed, the trajectory for AM radio in general is not pretty. We generally assume that AM, like FM, is universal simply because

Will FM radio ever end up pre-installed in mobile phones in the US? I doubt it, because consumers aren’t asking for radio to be built into their mobile phones (and here’s a full overview of the issue). But what’s more interesting to me is that radio industry leaders keep driving for this, obsessively wishing and hoping and planning for it. Why is that more interesting to me?  Because it’s not only deaf to what consumers are asking for, it’s blind to the direction of consumer

Evidently the NAB didn’t like my survey about behaviors among folks who have mobile phones and may also have FM built-in, whether they use it or not (and most don’t). Let’s dig into their official late Friday response: While Mark Ramsey argues there is little consumer demand for incorporating radio receivers on cell phones, he bases his glass-half-empty conclusions on a poorly designed survey to fit his own pre-conceived negative opinion. I don’t know, does the question “does

How many US radio listeners already have FM built-in to their mobile phones? And how often do they use it? How does this compare to the number who have downloaded a personalized radio app, like Pandora or Slacker?  How often do they use those? And how do these numbers compare to downloads and use of station-specific mobile apps? These were the questions I set out to answer in a national telephone study of 1,346 radio listeners, aged 15-69, conducted by VIP Media Research duri