Will Aol Radio Cause The Extinction Of Fm Radio?

Online radio services like AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm have become fairly popular lately and are even available on many mobile cordless products including cell phones. Does this indicate the end of conventional radio stations? I will look at the influence of online radio on the radio landscape.

Local radio stations do appear to have a difficult time as of late. Satellite radio has been cutting the market share of previous radio stations relentlessly in the past couple of years by providing mobility, a big number of commercial-free music channels as well as news and entertainment channels. In particular, online radio has become pretty popular by providing a virtually unlimited number of radio stations.

Numerous online radio providers like Pandora are nowadays accessible on mobile products like cell phones and other wireless audio products via appropriate apps. This adds mobility to online radio which has still been the trump card of local radio stations.

AOL Radio which features 200 plus music channels of 25 genres uses CBS radio as its underlying platform. It also offers access to 150 national CBS radio stations. Listeners can also make their own customized radio stations at the CBS radio "play.it" website and save each track for playback on an iPod by employing 3-rd party software iGetMusic.

Users can also create customized radio on other online music services by entering the artist and album names and these providers will play songs based on that information. So far, however, competing music services have fallen short to offer similarly fully customized radio channels.

Are conventional radio stations destined to become extinct by the constant decrease of market share due to online radio? Particularly niche broadcasters have found online radio very practical. The main cause is the low broadcasting cost of online radio compared with terrestrial radio. One more reason is the difficulty acquiring frequency space licenses from the FCC. However, increasing royalty charges have made the life of online broadcasters more difficult recently.

Online radio broadcasters have found it hard to be profitable. The main cause is the enormous number of competiting channels which is diluting listeners. The lower expense of online radio at the same time allows making of more appealing content than local radio by serving niche markets and inserting less commercials.

Local programming such as news and local events, however, will remain one of the big benefits of local radio. Up to now the poor audio quality of FM radio has been a big drawback. Nonetheless, new digital radio broadcasts are set to improve the audio quality. One of these technologies is HD radio. Content and mobility will be crucial in deciding the fate of online and local radio. Online radio provides a huge number of alternatives while local radio excels by supplying local content. Both online and local broadcasts offer great mobility. Consequently it is hard to predict a clear winner in this radio battle.

By: audiogadgets

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