From Inside Radio:
What happened to all of that new-media competition for radio? Motorola can’t get the economics of the 435-channel “iRadio” cellphone to work. The punishing new fees on Internet streaming music decreed by the Copyright Royalty Board will cost terrestrial radio more — but net-only stations a whole lot more. Bottom line — suddenly that burst of new-media competition and fresh voices that Mel Karmazin’s talking about may be muted by money (Motorola) and regulatory policy (last week’s onerous Internet music-rate decision from the Copyright Royalty Board).
You’re right, Inside Radio!
Those declining quarter-hours for radio are simply a mirage, a passing fad.
If Motorola can’t figure something out, nobody else will either. That’s assuming Motorola will give up, and of course they will! That’s what “delay” mean – giving up! And the phone networks that already provide and derive revenue from song downloads couldn’t possibly be a reason why. And those downloads won’t amount to a hill of beans and will never replace listening to radio because, after all, nobody owns a mobile phone and they don’t go with you wherever you go.
If Internet radio gets a lot more expensive to create, radio will avoid it because – let’s face it – nobody cares about the Internet anyway. It’s another passing fad. It’ll never be in the cars, for example. And if I can’t get my radio by streaming there’s no chance I would ever swap streaming time for downloading time and move more of my listening to my iPod. Nope, that’ll never happen.
And what about those iPods – just another fad. Wait until listeners discover they can go to Wal*Mart and spend a couple hundred dollars to buy a clunky in-dash HD receiver that they have to install themselves. They’ll toss out those iPods faster than you can say “Wolfman Jack.”
I’m glad “the most trusted news in radio” can be trusted to tell the radio industry what it needs to know to thrive in the future.
Is 1980 the best year ever, or what?
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