March 21, 2005
 This
week has brought more evidence that radio is an industry in the midst of disruptive transformation. The big news was that Viacom is planning to split off its broadcasting side,
including the troubled Infinity radio division. But there were many smaller signals as well that radio as we know it is about to change. For instance:
* Arbitron and comScore Media Metrix released the online radio ratings for January, which for the first time include Live365. Led by Yahoo! Music, AOL and MSN, the four top streaming radio sites now have nearly 5m listeners a week. That's not only a lot, but it means (if I'm reading the stats right on the "persons using radio data" here) that the top Internet radio sites have more listeners than any US radio station.
* The WSJ had a great page one piece (inspired by our own cover package, I suspect) that discusses how the trend to ever-tighter playlists is now reversing as stations play more music. With listenership at a multi-decade low, they recognize that the quest to keep listeners by
using market research to pick the perfect top 40 has now proven a failure. Instead, more stations are playing more eclectic, even iPod-like, mixes. They're also starting to cut down on ads, which today make up an oppressive 22 minutes per hour for many stations.
Meanwhile, there's been a lot of interesting Exploding Radio commentary and analysis around the web this week:
* Barry Ritholtz, a good financial analyst, adds an interesting perspective to the WSJ piece:
One thing I note as missing is a discussion of the long term generational effect, and the threat to a possible radio recovery: Since 1996, radio's decay has led to an entire generation of listeners who have essentially written off radio (at least, when it comes to music).
The other key issue: Radio as a source of new music, and its relationship to the labels. It used to be part of the draw -- a relationship with a trusted DJ who plays music you like, combined with introducing you to new songs (trust is the key component in granting someone taste-maker status).
* Technology Liberation Front, a blog worth subscribing to, has an excellent analysis of why concern over Clear Channel's radio "monopoly" is so misplaced. It also notes an amazing (and very encouraging) new white paper from the FCC: "[T]he Scarcity Rationale for regulating traditional broadcasting is no longer valid.” So begins a stunning new white paper from the Federal
Communications Commission. In the paper, “The Scarcity Rationale for Regulating Traditional Broadcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed,” author John Beresford, an attorney with the FCC’s
Media Bureau, lays out a devastating case against the Scarcity Rationale, which has governed spectrum & broadcast regulation in
the United States for over seven decades.
* The Pew Internet Project released a report that finds that the Internet surpassed radio as a source of political news for the first time last year.
* NPR's "Here and Now" show had a segment on exploding radio, based on our issue (I was a guest). You can listen to it here.
* Fred Wilson, a NYC VC who has written some of the best analysis of radio's future, disagrees
with my flip assessment that radio is "hosed". Two responses: 1) I meant "radio as we know it" 2) That was "endism"--exaggerating decline for rhetorical effect--and it's okay.
Originally posted by Chris Anderson from The Long Tail, remediated by yatta on Mar 21, 2005 at 07:30 PM
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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This
week has brought more evidence that radio is an industry in the midst of disruptive transformation. The big news was that Viacom is planning to split off its broadcasting side,
including the troubled Infinity radio division. But there were many smaller signals as well that radio as we know it is about to change. For instance:
