Sunday, September 18, 2005

Motorola iTunes Phone - Motorola ROKR


With iTunes and your Motorola ROKR, you can listen to music and podcasts on your mobile phone, wherever, whenever you want.



Motorola ROKR

A recent estimate says that 774 million wireless handsets are expected to be sold globally by the end of 2005, compared to the estimated sale of 57 million mp3 players.

Combine these totals, and its easy to see that Podcasting still has a lot of potential.




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Saturday, September 17, 2005

Tech Podcasts Still Most Popular

Technology-oriented podcasts are proving to be among the most successful. Los Angeles radio station KFI podcasts Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech, and it now has 41,000 subscribers, up from 360 in May, according to Rick Klau, VP of business development at FeedBurner, which manages RSS feeds for the radio station and thousands of other podcasters. Tech-oriented podcasts consistently rank among FeedBurner's top feeds, Klau says.


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15,000 Podcasts? For Real?

FeedBurner offers more than 15,000 podcast RSS feeds, up from less than 1,000 in January. It now has 450,000 podcast RSS feed subscribers, up from 150,000 in June.

The Yankee Group estimates that by the end of the year, 41.6 million consumers will own a digital audio player, and there will be more than 10,000 businesses and individuals publishing podcasts. Currently, however, less than 1% of digital audio player owners actively download and listen to podcasts, the Yankee Group says.

Would You Pay for a Podcast?

A recent study conducted among young European consumers by Forrester Research found that 46% of 16- and 17-year-olds would consider paying for podcast content. However, only 33% of the teens surveyed said they would accept advertising as a necessary evil to subsidize content

The biggest threat to terrestrial radio

First off, for those who do not know, terrestrial Radio is your common radio stations found throughout the globe, and not some E.T. device made out of tinfoil.

A Poll is being taken at a very popular radio industry website; http://allaccess.com

The biggest threat to terrestrial is:

Satellite Radio 5.8%
Broadband Streaming Internet Audio 3.8%
iPods and Downloads 17.3%
Itself and the lack of creative programming 69.2%
what threat? 3.8%

Of course, many broadcasters believe that if they had more creative programming at radio stations than everything would be fine, however I disagree. I believe that iPods are the biggest threat to any terrestrial Radio station that relies on the "More Music" concept that is so popular throughout the USA.

Talk radio, live talk, or any other radio show featuring live interaction still stands on its own, as iPods will never be able to allow for live interaction with the media.

Notice, that even broadcasters have no faith in Satellite radio as a threat, with only 5.8%. I stand firm on my belief that Satellite will become obsolete before it becomes profitable.

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Monday, September 12, 2005

iPODs integrate into HONDA and VW car stereos

In the midst of the excitement over the introduction of the ROKR iPOD phone and the new iPOD NANO, APPLE also announced that it had added HONDA-ACURA, and VOLKSWAGEN-AUDI to its program to integrate iPODs into car stereos for the 2006 model year.

With over 5 million portable MP3 players due for delivery this year, the market for Podcasting continues to grow. It's important to note that 650 million cell phones will be delivered this year. Imagine when all the phones have the ability to store MP3's, perfect for listening to your favorite Podcast.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

The MP3 players impact on traditional radio listening

During the twelve months ending December 15, 2004, Bridge Ratings conducted an eye-opening series of studies related to iPod/MP3 player libraries.

During 2005 an on-going follow-up study has been undertaken.

Study goal: To learn about radio listener music preferences and the MP3 player's impact on traditional radio listening

Methodology:

Two groups of music consumers were tracked.

A) Listeners whose listening to traditional radio has decreased at least fifteen percent over the previous 9 months.

B) Listeners whose listening to traditional radio has maintained, increased or decreased less than ten percent in the previous 9 months.

Each group was divided into music constituencies, i.e., participants were placed into groups representing their primary radio listening. For example, individuals whose favorite station was Country, were placed into a Country constituency. These groupings allowed us to study music purity when studying the music file selections on their digital players. (see charts below)
1200 persons 12+ in each of the above categories were tracked weekly over a period of three months in 2004. The 2005 studies have used the same structure. During this time, each participant was willing to share the contents of his/her digital music player.


Findings of Interest:

  • During 2004 on average 60% of participants made some change in the files on their digital music players each week (adding, deleting or both). In 2005 that number has increased to 68%.
  • 14% changed files more frequently than once a week in 2004 increasing to 20% in 2005.
  • 5% changed files daily
  • In 2004 17% made some changes every two weeks decreasing to 13% in 2005.
  • 4% made no change to their files
  • 88% in 2004, 90% in 2005 of the participants included more than one music "category" on their digital music players, i.e. almost all participants in the study have a variety of musical tastes.

This last point raises a very interesting and important point: today's radio listeners prefer diversity in their music entertainment. Both groups' radio listening experience suggests that if there is lower time-spent-listening it is a function of a desire to hear more musical diversity and thus cume more different stations per week.

This higher desire for more variety of music radio station choice each week is the motivator for listeners to seek additional music diversity by managing their personal music choices through MP3 players.

The study found that a significant portion of traditional radio's listener base is driven to alternative digital entertainment choices by lack of musical or programming diversity on traditional radio.

The diversity of the music on the digital players of each format constituency group was then plotted to give us a sense of commonality - if there was any - among the types of variety sought by each musical constituency. What we found was that, yes, most constituencies tend to prefer at least one music type in addition to the one which defines their favorite station music preference.

What is clear is that radio listeners who report preferences for radio stations with specific/narrow music formats have broader musical tastes than previously quantified. Over 85% of those interviewed for this project told us that the digital player offered them custom entertainment diversity in one compact solution and this was the number one reason they were spending more time with their digital players and less with traditional radio.