Yesterday I wrote about the growth of online radio as reported in The Infinite Dial 2013 from Arbitron and Edison Research.  Today I want to focus on the dramatic effects that mobile and the meteoric rise in smartphone and tablet market penetration.

These two graphs highlight the importance of having a mobile strategy.

As is pointed out in the study:

“Now that the majority of Americans have smartphones, they have a “two-way” radio in their pocket.

Find ways to engage an audience that is tuning-in and responding on the same device.”

This really demonstrates out the need for a solid digital strategy, that is more than just having a mobile app for your brand.  You should be thinking about how you can use the fact that for more than 80% of cell phone owners that device is always or almost always within arm’s length.  If you have kids who are under the age of 25, you know that their phones seem to always be in their hands and that most of them would rather text than talk.  Pandora reports that as much as 75% of their listening is mobile and we at Abacast have broadcasters who are delivering more than 70% of their online listening on mobile devices.  So just having an app is now an essential part of your digital strategy, but that’s just the price of admission.

Think about how you can leverage the intimacy that comes from your audience listening on their smart phone, you are literally in their head via their earbuds.  Brainstorm with your staff on ways that you can use this to further engage your audience for the benefit of both your brand and your advertsers who use your brand to reach those listeners.  Develop campaigns that have a mobile call to action to motivate them to interact with your advertisers.  Think of ways that you can provide content that they want to hear when they want to hear it.  A smartphone is much more than just a “new transistor radio”, it’s a way that you can provide unique on-demand content to your listeners that they can have when and where they want it.

Next time we’ll look at Podcasting.

If you haven’t taken the time to watch the excellent presentation from Tom Webster and Bill Rose of the latest results from the annual Infinite Dial 2013, produced by Edison Research and Arbitron,  released on 4/2 you should take an hour and really soak it up.  There is a wealth of actionable data contained in this yearly snapshot of radio, both broadcast and online and media usage in general.

I’m going to break the study into sections and highlight some points that caught my attention and provide some action items around each.

The first thing that grabbed me was the amazing growth of both online radio and digital media in general.

These two data points indicate, to me at least, that online radio is now really mainstream and no longer the step-child of broadcast.  If you’ve been following the stats you know that broadcast TSL has been flat to even down slightly over the past couple of years while online TSL has increased dramatically.  This brings up another point; media usage is not a zero sum game.  Online radio isn’t replacing broadcast radio it is adding to the total media consumption of listeners.

With  online radio reaching almost one in three 12+ Americans every week for nearly 12 hours of listening radio can no longer sit on the sidelines and wait to see what this new form of listening will do.  The answer is very clear; your audience wants to hear the content they want to consume everywhere they are.  This means two things to radio:  first you must have a solid digital strategy to ensure that your content is everywhere your listeners want it to be and second, and probably most important, that the content you are creating is good enough to rise to the top through all the noise and clutter of the ever expanding media world.  Radio must get back to doing what it alone can do; provide compelling, curated, local content that is unique and remarkable and not available anywhere else.  Any media company can provide a great mix of music, and some would argue that services like Pandora can do a better job of that than radio.  What those services cannot do, is create an emotional bond with the listener as only a human being can.  Only radio can add that special sauce between the songs that creates the emotional bond with the listener.  This is also, coincidentally, what your advertisers are looking for, that bond that builds trust and engagement.

Tomorrow more from “The Infinite Dial”

In mid-February 2013 we were excited to announce the upcoming beta release of our new song-skipping feature for live radio streams.  This feature will enable listeners to skip songs that they don’t want to hear when listening to live radio online.  The announcement generated a fair amount of publicity as well as some questions as to how it works and what the ramifications are for the radio industry, the program director, the audience, and more.

Radio Info invited me to write an article further explaining how the feature will work and benefit broadcasters and advertisers (as well as listeners).

Here’s a snippet:

When listeners have the ability to skip songs that they don’t want to hear, we believe that broadcasters will benefit from increased listening times as well as audience growth. One could argue that there has always been song skipping technology – just change the channel! However, that is one less listener for that broadcaster. With Hammer they’ll instead be able to skip the song but remain on the station. Consumers have indicated that they love the ability to skip certain songs, and we think they’ll favor services that offer this capability. We plan on releasing detailed listening time and audience size metrics at or shortly after we release this feature in Q2 2013.

You can read the complete article on Radio Info.

-Jim