Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Radio War Heats Up
byThe fractionalization of former mass media empires continues as evidenced by what is happening in the radio industry. It is no longer just the local antenna-based signal broadcasters who are in the game. Internet radio is a fast-growing way for consumers to listen to what they want and not have their choices limited by radio signal coverage patterns. According to Arbitron, the online broadcast audience in the U.S. had already reached 51 million people by January of 2004.
Satellite radio also has some big momentum and there is a war on for new listeners between XM and Sirius. That satellite radio war will probably heat up even more with radio publicity king, Howard Stern, moving his show to Sirius on January 9. It is predicted there will be 35.6 million satellite radio listeners by 2010.
There is also new-found competition coming from podcasting. A recent study predicts the podcast audience will grow from 840,000 last year to 56 million in 2010.
Competition for music listeners is also coming from iPods, other mp3 devices and even digital cable/satellite television programming.
While all these radio alternatives make it almost impossible to use any one segment of the “radio” broadcast pie to reach a mass audience, it, nevertheless, makes it easier to narrowcast targeted, relevant messages to more granular market segments.
Ultimately, this should increase the return on investment for advertisers.
