When FDR delivered his fireside chats to a frightened nation, he used the radio.When President-elect Obama delivers his version of the fireside chat, he uses YouTube.Maybe, just maybe, we in Radio have lived too long under the limits of our own inferiority complex. Maybe, just maybe, we need to carry our listeners wherever they want to go - in whatever medium they want to experience - whenever they want. On their terms.If you manage the ...

The latest is from Finetune, which is one of the better personalizable streaming music sites online.A Sirius/XM player and iPhone version from Slacker are both on the way.We're rapidly heading towards a world where mobile streaming music solutions will be commodities, differentiated less by the feature-set and brand power and more by whose application enjoys the largest share of voice.And the advantage there belongs, theoretically, to the brands with the biggest loudspeakers.Hello, Radio.

Great post from Seth Godin on what we should take away from the US Election.To summarize....Stories really matter. More than a billion dollars spent, two 'products' that have very different features, and yet, when people look back at the election they will remember mavericky winking. You can say that's trivial. I'll say that it's human nature. Your product doesn't have features that are more important than the 'features' being discussed in this election, yet, like ...

In Arbitron data just crunched by Public Radio's Radio Research Consortium, some nice trends for Public Radio were noted through Spring - not surprising considering the interest in political news over the past year.Specifically, CPB-Stations (P12+, Mon-Sun 6a-12m) have recovered to a 5.2% share - an all-time high AQH share percentage.Thanks to more recent newsworthy events, I would expect this share to rise again this Fall.This news was tempered by a broader review of radio ...

As more and more stuff becomes Internet-enabled, it will bring the capacity to enable that stuff with Internet audio, or "radio." That means we are fast entering a time when "radio" will become a feature of other things rather than simply a destination unto itself, as it has been until now. Historically, you "listen to the radio" by finding one and tuning in stations on it. But as streaming audio entertainment moves everywhere and on ...

Saturday Night Live is enjoying its best ratings in more than a decade. It's not because the show is better wall-to-wall than it has been recently. It's because the show has developed a "hit" that dovetails with the zeitgeist. The "Tina Fey as Sarah Palin" moments from SNL are watched and re-watched. Shared and Digged. Sought out and showcased. At a time when the TV industry fears the Internet could be its undoing, we see ...

Saturday Night Live is enjoying its best ratings in more than a decade. It's not because the show is better wall-to-wall than it has been recently. It's because the show has developed a "hit" that dovetails with the zeitgeist. The "Tina Fey as Sarah Palin" moments from SNL are watched and re-watched. Shared and Digged. Sought out and showcased. At a time when the TV industry fears the Internet could be its undoing, we see ...

Recently I heard about a broadcast group in one quite average market who was doing something very interesting and very effective - very quietly. You see, Radio is not nearly consolidated enough to do things on a system-wide basis. Thus there remains tremendous secrecy when it comes to "strategies that work." Some of the best ideas, in many cases, are not publicized because a broadcaster doesn't want his or her secrets out. Too bad. Because ...

The "Radio Heard Here" spots - fruit of the bone-headed "Radio Heard Here" repositioning campaign - are finally available, and just in time for the holidays. They're the perfect gift for that radio station in your family that is already running a slew of free HD Radio spots and is hungry for more. Because after all, listeners love hearing advertising so why not air it for free! At this rate, radio will be "all pro ...

Overheard at NAB (by Inside Radio): “I don’t think we can make enough money in digital to make-up [what] we are losing in radio.” If that's what you really think, then you don't understand digital and you don't understand why you're losing what you're losing in radio. Nor do you understand that they're not two different things. Also overheard: "How we monetize it, I don’t know. We do it because it’s the right thing to ...

For six bucks - half the price of just one month of satellite radio - Nullriver's "Tuner for iPhone" puts every radio station stream under the sun in your pocket and, potentially, wired to your car audio. Bookmark your favorites, browse by genre, pick from the top 500 or add your own. When you can get anything anywhere, you need to focus on why listeners would want to get your thing somewhere.

From Inside Radio: Multigroup Microsoft deal puts radio deeper into digital downloads. By 2012, one-third of all music sales will be by digital download according to Jupiter Research, and radio is on-course to be a growing factor in that equation. The latest move giving radio a larger piece of that business is an alliance between nine of the biggest broadcast groups to begin encoding both analog and digital stations for tagging, allowing users of Microsoft’s ...

It wasn't a comet hurtling to Earth that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but the environmental changes sparked by that collision, say many experts. The very world around the dinosaurs changed. I was watching some show on dinosaurs last night and the dino-expert summed up the situation nicely: "There are only three ways the dinosaurs could respond in a time of rapid environmental change," he said. "They could MOVE, they could ADAPT, ...

It's a simple thing, naming a station, right? We can pick: A) Call letters with a "Z" or a "Q," thus becoming "Z"-this or "Q"-that B) A name that says what we do, such as "Classic Rock" C) A piece of local geography D) Something else - if we're particularly clever But what is best? What is most desirable for your audience? This problem is obviously not for established stations, but for brand new ones. ...