On Track

Post date: Jun 03, 2011 10:40:47 AM

Somewhere near the start of this blog, I presented graphs of how Internet Radio listening is increasing. Here is an update

Just look at the figures! 157.8 million listeners by 2015 yet online radio ad spending is only US$1.6 billion when compared to the US$17.2 billion advertisement expenditure of over the air radio. What this tells us clearly is that internet radio as it currently is, is not yet quite there. Maybe the technology isn't quite there, maybe the business models aren't quite there, but there is something fundamentally different about internet radio we have at the moment.

One very blase observation is that over the air radio comes to us in a convenient package where we just hit a few buttons and we get the stations For internet radio, we either have to navigate to the website before we start listening or we have to use a different widget for different radio services. Not exactly something easily handled on the move or driving down the autobahn at 200 km/hr.. What if, just what if, internet radio is identical to over the air radio both physically and in terms of user friendliness? Will we see a convergence?