TORONTO – Radio enthusiasts are optimistic in the face of new media challenges to their traditional listenership numbers, as made evident by comments voiced at the annual Canadian Music Week conference, held last week in Toronto.
“Our biggest threat is we keep predicting the death of radio,” said Chris Byrnes, president of Byrnes Media, which owns 104.7 Heart FM in Woodstock, Ont. Byrnes was referring to the perennial navel-gazing that takes place among radio executives and on-air personalities at Canada’s yearly music industry gathering.
“Guys, that’s rubbish. We’re doing just fine, thank you. Our challenge is we just need to focus on the consumer and do a way, way better job,” Byrnes said.
Alan Cross, program director of 102.1 The Edge in Toronto and host of “The Ongoing History of New Music” radio program, said recent market research indicates 93% of the Canadian population listens to radio on a weekly basis. Terrestrial radio has been around for 102 years and there are more than 100 million radios in Canada, Cross pointed out.
“However, new media is making a charge,” Cross said. “And at some point, something does have to give. The old will have to make way for the new – or will it? Instead of new media driving radio to the funeral home, maybe we’re headed to the altar.”
Capitalizing on the interactive nature of the Internet is the key way for radio stations to extend their relationship with listeners in the online world, said Andy West, manager of product and label relations for Yahoo! Music Canada in Toronto.
“What I love about the Internet space is you open up two-way communication between you and your user. You have immediate feedback as to whether or not they’re listening to your music. You can gauge timing, gauge artist success and so forth,” West said. “What I’d love to see in traditional radio is an extension of that into their web site.”
Enabling listeners to customize playlists online, comment on songs and rate them is an extremely attractive idea for all of radio’s stakeholders, West said. “Artists love it because they get feedback, labels love it because it’s a built-in A&R (artists and repertoire) tool, and advertisers love it because you’re extending their brand experience into online and getting that data direct from consumers, seeing what’s resonating with them.”
Jeff Vidler, partner at Solutions Research Group in Toronto and former program director at MIX 96 in Montreal, agreed that it isn’t enough for radio stations to take their existing radio broadcast and put it online as a fixed audio stream. He cited customizable Internet radio sites such as Yahoo! LAUNCHcast and Pandora as having relative success in this new radio format.
“As the web evolves, it’s becoming more and more obvious all the time that this is a whole new medium,” Vidler said. “What radio does have, for the moment at least, is a distribution advantage. We have an audience who we can direct to new media opportunities and who we can sell through our relationship with advertisers and agencies.
“That doesn’t mean content isn’t important, but we have to get rid of the arrogance that we are somehow the kings of all this content, because we’re not,” Vidler said.
Making the initial investment in technology and human resources, and then keeping up with technological advances and staff training, is vital to the success of any new media venture, said Deb Esayian, vice-president of Emmis Interactive in Burbank Calif.
“The more technical things are, the more people are involved to actually make stuff compelling or interesting, just like content anywhere, in any way that you distribute it,” Esayian said.
Byrnes added that while radio stations are now looking to the web as a new source of revenue, the truth is most stations derive only 5% to 8% of their revenue from online business, suggesting a poor return on investment.
The ability to monetize podcasts was a topic of interest for some CMW attendees. But, as pointed out by Jeff Woods, director of content and programming for Splice Interactive Media, the interactive division of Corus Radio in Toronto, Canadian radio stations are limited as to what they can do with podcasting. For example, music can’t be included in podcasts, due to current music royalty restrictions.
“I’m all for artists making money off the music they produce,” said Woods, who oversees the creation of all of Corus Radio’s online programs. “However, we need to figure out how to adjust the system such that we can give the users what they want.”
Esayian described one advertiser-sponsored podcast approach that has been successful for her marketing organization. “We had a multi-integrated solution for Bally Fitness, and we had the DJs voice the training regimens. So we added their podcast to that multimedia type of concept, and we sold it for 20% more. That’s kind of a weird way to do podcasting, but it’s different from the original model (selling pre-rolls in podcasts),” she said.
Another new media advertising opportunity that Canadian radio stations don’t seem to be exploiting enough yet is text messaging, said Rob Mise, program director of Energy 101.5 in Calgary, speaking during a separate session on new revenue opportunities for traditional radio organizations.
“Just take a walk down a busy street, whether it’s people thumbing on their Blackberrys, it’s obvious that Canada is in love with text messaging,” Mise said.
Mise offered up some statistics to support his point. Between 2002 and 2005, the number of text messages in Canada doubled each year. In 2006, there were 4.3 billion text messages in Canada, while last year there were 11.5 billion texts, which averages out to 31.5 million text messages per day.
“If you’re a radio station exec who is not offering text messaging, your station may be living in the Marconi era,” Mise said. “Forward-looking radio station sales teams are now upselling advertisers with text messaging programs. And it’s working because the advertising works.”
It’s important that any text messaging promotion require listeners to opt in, thus avoiding the appearance of spam, Mise said. Examples of how to use text messaging effectively to engage listeners include weather and traffic updates, sports scores, electronic coupon promotions, and text-to-win contests, he said.
“Perhaps the greatest advantage of text message marketing is a radio station can reach its audience anywhere, any time, at any place,” Mise said.
Solutions Research Group’s Vidler said the challenge for radio stations is not to bring people back to radio, but to take radio to where the audience is.
“Our biggest opportunity is taking the distribution advantage we have right now, building those audience relationships and putting those relationships into new platforms, wherever they might be,” Vidler said. “The threat is that radio’s distribution advantage might fade before we get it right.”
Linda Stuart is a Toronto-based writer and editor.
