Will AOL Radio Cause The End Of Local Stations?

AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are some of the online radio services that have become popular these last few years. Several of these are also available on portable devices such as cell phones. Does this indicate the end of conventional radio stations? I will look at the influence of online radio on the radio landscape.

I appears that local radio stations are on their way to become extinct. They are being threatened by the development of online and satellite radio. These competing services typically offer hundreds of music and entertainment channels. Some of the channels are even commercial-free. The internet has enabled access to a virtually indefinite number of online radio stations.

Pandora and other online radio providers have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable products by installing the suitable app. This increases convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has to this point been the main advantage of local radio.

AOL Radio uses CBS radio as its broadcasting platform. It comes with in excess of 200 music channels. In addition it offers access to more than 150 local CBS radio stations. The underlying CBS radio platform “play.it” also permits listeners to create their own customized music channels. This is done by entering the names of albums, tracks or artists. The tracks played on each music channels can also be stored on an iPod for later playback by using 3-rd party tool iGetMusic.

Pandora and other online radio services have similarly started to offer customized music. The user can enter music-related details such as artist, track or album name. These channels will then choose tracks which are similar to the information entered. Other services, however, fail to offer fully customized music channels.

Is the end of local radio near? The growth of competition from satellite and online radio has started to take away listeners from local radio stations. Traditional radio appears to have a hard time to stop this trend. Online radio has proved valuable specifically for niche broadcasters due to the inherently lower broadcasting expense in comparison with local radio stations.

The big number of accessible stations is a big advantage for online radio listeners. On the other hand, this is a problem for online broadcasters. This big number of stations is diluting the number of listeners. Consequently streaming radio broadcasters have found it difficult to be profitable. The lower cost of online radio at the same time enables making of more interesting content than local radio by serving niche markets and inserting fewer commercials.

Local programming such as news and local events, nonetheless, will remain one of the big advantages of local radio. Additionally, local radio is now improving the audio quality by using digital transmission technologies versus conventional FM broadcasts which has been a big benefit of online radio to date. It is difficult to predict a clear winner in the battle between online and local radio because both offer their own unique content and high mobility which are the crucial factors that will determine the fate of each service.