iHeartRadio Joins Forces with College Stations

Corporate commercial radio behemoth Clear Channel and fiercely independent college radio might not seem like the most logical of partners, but they are joining forces on iHeartRadio. Last fall I’d heard that Clear Channel was planning to incorporate college radio stations into its iHeartRadio tool and today they confirmed that rumor by announcing that they will be adding 14 college radio stations to iHeartRadio later this month. This is part of their overall strategy to broaden the scope of their digital radio service beyond just Clear Channel-owned stations. It also comes on the heels of their announcement on Friday that the two college-owned public radio stations, KCRW (Santa Monica College) and KUSC (the classical radio network owned by University of Southern California), would also be added to iHeartRadio.

iHeartRadio’s expansion heated up last fall when they added custom stations. By October they had announced plans to add Christian radio conglomerate K-LOVE as well as Spanish language programming from Univision. According to John Hogan, President and CEO of Clear Channel,

“Bringing college radio stations to iHeartRadio is a great source of local and independent programming that offers our users a more diverse listening experience and also provides listeners new opportunities for music, news and sports exposure and discovery…Many of our top on-air personalities started their radio careers at college radio stations and we are glad to give back by providing these great college stations with an industry-leading national distribution platform — iHeartRadio.”

Clear Channel plans to add additional college radio stations to iHeartRadio, but is launching the college radio category with the following 14 stations:

1.  Appalachian State’s WASU

2.  Connecticut College’s WCNI

3.  Dartmouth College’s WFRD

4.  Denison University’s WDUB

5.  DePaul University’s Radio DePaul

6.  Emerson College’s WERS

7.  Flagler College’s WFCF

8.  Green River College’s KGRG

9.  Ithaca College’s WICB

10.  Rice University’s Rice Radio (KTRU)

11.  Seton Hall University’s WSOU

12.  Stanford University’s KZSU

13.  Temple University’s WHIP

14.  College of Wooster’s WCWS

It’s an interesting range of stations, from the metal-oriented WSOU to the eclectic KZSU to the slicker adult alternative station WERS. Even KTRU (aka Rice Radio) is getting a chance at a broader audience after losing its FM frequency last year. I will be curious to hear feedback from the college radio community about these deals, as it’s unclear to me if stations will be viewed as selling out or if they will be heralded for savvy marketing. Who knows, as iHeartRadio expands into more content areas, it may just be viewed as an innocuous listening tool ala iTunes. iHeartRadio can be heard online, via mobile applications, and in some automobiles.

My most cynical response is that the name change represents nothing new; Clear Channel hasn’t really been in the radio business for more than a decade. Rather, the company was in the broadcast real estate business, buying up stations and repackaging them into clusters in order to reduce staffing and other costs. In the short term it was a wildly successful strategy from a profit standpoint, because it’s a ruthlessly simple formula: radically cut costs while keeping revenues mostly static. However, it wasn’t a sustainable approach because it also resulted in diluting the product–the programming itself–which listeners couldn’t help but notice, as they jumped ship to new competing platforms.

At the same time, I think it is true that the company’s shift in strategy really is a turn away from traditional radio, but at radio’s expense. By comparison, National Public Radio has used its internet platforms to compliment and court new listeners to its programming, on the air and online. While programming ostensibly is the product offered up in iHeartRadio, the overwhelming sameness of it all is rather striking. Sure there are dozens of active rock stations to choose from, but the distance between their sound and playlists can be measured in millimeters.

Now it is true that Clear Channel is actually a significant radio content company with its ownership of Premiere Radio Networks, home to such highly lucrative programs as Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s. And while you can listen to these programs by tuning in live broadcast streams from affiliate stations on iHeartRadio, there’s no way to listen at another time. Furthermore, iHeartRadio doesn’t provide a schedule for these stations so you know when to tune it. Sure, you can subscribe to on demand access to Rush or Hannity on their respective websites, but I argue that’s a scattershot approach. First, it limits the audience to the more dedicated, rather than casual listeners. Second, it takes place outside of iHeartRadio, fracturing the platform’s value as a one-stop shop for Clear Channel radio content.

The even more telling aspect of Clear Channel’s move away from radio as we know it is its Total Traffic Network which delivers real-time traffic reports over its stations’ HD channels. Why is this not a radio service? Because one of its primary purposes is to feed traffic data to navigation devices like Garmins and TomToms, not radios. In effect, this is a step towards making stations more valuable for the spectrum they occupy rather than the programming that they can deliver.

This isn’t to say that I believe Clear Channel is abandoning radio. Rather, it’s clear that Clear Channel is continuing to move away from relying on profiting from individual station revenues towards seeing stations as a nationwide commodity where local programming is more of an obligation than a raison d’être. I don’t see the company reinvesting in programming at local stations so much as using them as resources to create new data services and outlets to push national programming brands as consolidated under the iHeartRadio banner. This can be seen no more clearly than in the massive layoffs of on-air talent that Clear Channel imposed last October.

The change from Clear Channel Radio to Clear Channel Media and Entertainment is consolidation 2.0. For the sake of true local service and innovative programming, we could only wish that Clear Channel were actually leaving radio.

103.7 Oldies Changes Call Sign to KOSF

As part of an overall re-branding and re-formatting effort across several Clear Channel-owned stations in San Francisco, call signs for KKSF, KNEW, and KKGN were changed yesterday.

The station formerly known as KKSF, now branded as oldies station 103.7 FM, became KOSF. That left the KKSF call letters available for use by the former KNEW at 910 AM (licensed in Oakland) under the brand NewsTalk 910AM. KKGN (formerly progressive talk station Green 960) at 960 AM now takes the call sign KNEW and is airing a talk format (hosts include Glenn Beck, Bill Press, and Stephanie Miller) under the brand 960 AM KNEW. It was initially rumored that 960 would become a Fox Radio News affiliate, but this plan seems to have been modified following the big changes at KGO.

It’s hard to tell what this means for each of these stations, but it’s curious that the heritage of the KKSF call letters (most associated with their old smooth jazz format, which lives on at KKSF.com) isn’t really connected with the news talk format of 910AM. Perhaps that means that more changes are to come.

(1) up to eight commercial radio stations in radio markets with 45 or more radio stations, no more than five of which can be in the same service (AM or FM),
(2) up to seven commercial radio stations in radio markets with 30-44 radio stations, no more than four of which can be in the same service (AM or FM),
(3) up to six commercial radio stations in radio markets with 15-29 radio stations, no more than four of which can be in the same service (AM or FM), and
(4) up to five commercial radio stations in radio markets with 14 or fewer radio stations, no more than three of which can be in the same service (AM or FM), provided that an entity may not own more than 50 percent of the stations in such a market, except that an entity may always own a single AM and single FM station combination.

In the FCC’s latest proceeding on whether to loosen these and other restrictions, broadcasters argued that satellite radio and Internet services like Pandora make these limits less necessary. The Commission disagrees:

“Satellite radio still only serves a small portion of all radio listeners and millions of listeners do not have broadband Internet access,” the FCC says. “Moreover, these audio programming alternatives are national platforms that are not likely to respond to conditions in local markets. Therefore, we propose that our local radio ownership rule continue to focus on promoting competition among broadcast radio stations in local radio listening markets.”

Speaking personally, I think that the FCC is right about this. Services like Pandora or Last.fm have yet to demonstrate any significant local presence anywhere, as opposed to the precious core of broadcast radio stations that really serve cities, towns, and rural areas with live news and information.

But the agency is proposing to eliminate its radio/television cross ownership limits, and everybody’s definitely starting to wonder how Internet only stations and music services compare with AM/FM broadcasters, audience metrics-wise. Folks are getting pretty touchy about the issue, too. Of late, Edison Research did an audience study for Pandora that included some Average Quarter Hour share data. Around the same time, Arbitron issued a statement questioning the wisdom of comparing Internet radio log file data with Arbitron audience estimates.

“There are many areas to be carefully considered when comparing Arbitron audience estimates with those from another source,” the Arbitron commentary noted. “We advise clients to avoid comparing self-reported audience estimates from Internet music services to Arbitron radio audience estimates,” given these differences:

• The difference between “one-to-many” broadcast stations and “one-to-one” Internet music services;
• The differences between Arbitron’s published methodology and calculations for its audience estimates and the estimates used by Internet music services;
• The ability of the provider to determine if a person is completing the survey task and should be counted as “exposed” to the content; and
• The reliability of self-reported demographic data and the steps taken to validate the information.

Meanwhile, Edison hit the ceiling over an Inside Radio piece on the issue that the research group called ”grossly inaccurate.” According to the excerpt published by Edison, the Inside Radio story claimed that the Edison study ranked Pandora figures with local radio stations via Arbitron stats.

“Edison has never (as in never ) reported anything other than the AQH figures for Pandora – full stop,” Edison’s statement insisted. “We defy Inside Radio or any interested party to come up with a ‘ranker’ from Edison that compares Pandora ‘alongside’ any terrestrial radio station.”

So is the consensus that broadcast radio and the Internet remain apples and oranges? Tim Westergren of Pandora would appear to disagree. This week he told the Wall Street Journal that Arbitron’s perspective reflected a “concerted effort” to keep his company out of the broadcast radio loop. “The broadcast industry does not want the world to know about us, basically,” Westergren declared.

Actually, big radio does want to know about Pandora, it seems, to the extent they can use the specter of Internet radio to convince the FCC that it should relax its local ownership rules. That tactic clearly isn’t working, so far. But if Internet radio actually develops a serious local presence, things might change.

I am pondering the merger names as I compose this post:

Clear Citadus?
Cumulo Citichannel?
Citaclear Channelculus?

My meditation is inspired by Clear Channel’s announcement on Monday that Cumulus’ 570 radio stations will be featured on the former company’s iHeartRadio application “wherever it is offered.”

In exchange:

Clear Channel Radio will also advertise daily deals from Cumulus Media’s SweetJack, the rapidly growing deals platform that provides local merchants – including the best restaurants, spas, salons, stores and venues—the promotional power of radio.

Obviously, this alliance will boost Clear Channel’s already preponderant advertising power—a by-product of its owning multiple stations in multiple local markets. But on top of that, Cumulus (which just dumped indie DJ Jim Ladd in LA) has the green light from the Federal Communications Commission to snarf down the third largest radio chain: Citadel.

Here was FCC Commissioner Michael Copps’ reaction to the mid-September move:

The wheels of media consolidation spin on. Today the Media Bureau approves the combination of Cumulus and Citadel, the number two and number three radio companies in the country, creating a media giant that will own more than 560 stations. Earlier this year we had the huge Comcast-NBCU transaction. Last week we learned of another large company buying up seven additional media outlets. Time after time and in market after market, there are fewer independent options and fewer local voices.

To satiate the FCC and Department of Justice, Cumulus-Citadel will only have to sell off 14 licenses. So basically Cumulus will gobble up Citadel’s 228 stations to create a 570 + 228 = 798 – 14 = 784 station empire, which will launch collaborative ad campaigns with Clear Channel, which owns around 850 stations.

The effective combined advertising entity will represent about six percent of the 10,102 commercial AM and FM stations in the US, but doubtless control a much larger swath of ad revenue in local markets. How big a percentage? The last time the FCC checked in 2007, Clear Channel and Cumulus already enjoyed 74 percent of the radio advertising revenue in Arbitron Metro regions.

Thus, while there doesn’t seem to be any plan for a formal merger of the two remaining giants, an effective ad income duopoly appears to be in the making. This is great news if you are rooting for corporate radio to compete with Groupon and Livingsocial. Maybe not so grand if you’re worried about those other local commercial radio stations out there treading financial water.

So let’s see:

Citacum Channel? CCC-C? Radio Survivor readers are invited to submit their own names and logos.

Clear Channel may have been too focused on scarfing up stations in the early 2000s to construct anything resembling an internet strategy, but the company has been making up for lost time with its iHeartRadio service. When it went live in 2008 it was primarily a site and mobile app to provide access to the live streams of Clear Channel stations. Since then iHeartRadio has morphed into a competitor to the likes of Pandora and last.fm, especially with the addition of custom stations in September which provide Pandora-like experience of music based upon a seed song.

Back in September Clear Channel promised that the stations would be commercial free through the end of the year. This week the company announced that they will stay commercial-free through April 1, 2012.

This is obviously a move intended to lure Pandora and last.fm listeners who want to avoid the free services’ commercials, in addition to hooking users already using iHeartRadio to catch terrestrial stations. However, when a Pandora user jumps ship she also loses the stations she has created and all the curating she’s invested by giving tracks the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. That user investment is one of the things that keeps Pandora users loyal, though a new user to iHeartRadio can make the same investment in Clear Channel’s platform.

Working in Clear Channel’s favor is that if a listener tires of her custom stations she can easily navigate to a broadcast station–that will have plenty of commercials–or one of iHeartRadio’s curated or themed stations, like CBGB Radio or Eagles Radio.

I must admit to being a strong critic of Clear Channel and the destruction it wreaked on the radio industry through its consolidation strategy that hemorrhaged staff and homogenized programming across the country. So there definitely is a part of me that wants to find fault with iHeartRadio, on principle, if nothing else.

But after spending the better part of the week listening to the service I must be honest and give it due credit. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades for internet radio listening. It offers a lot of options, even if none of them are class leading. But, as I’ll explain, the sound quality of iHeartRadio is probably its weakest attribute.

The customized stations work like last.fm or Pandora. Feed it a song seed and iHeartRadio starts serving up similar artists and songs. One aspect I like is the “Station Control” feature which lets you decide whether you’re interested in hearing more familiar artists or “more discovery” which plays artists you are less likely to have heard before. When I first tried the custom station feature I wondered if I would be limited to artists actually played on Clear Channel stations. So I entered the 1980 Swiss experimental metal band Celtic Frost as a test. And quite dutifully iHeartRadio created a station full of extreme and harsh sounds that are rarely found on commercial radio.

However, the custom stations are more limited than Pandora’s because you can specify only the initial seed. By comparison Pandora lets you finely tune a station by adding additional artists and songs as seeds. So if you like the 70s power pop of Cheap Trick, you can further refine it by adding in the more ragged punk edge of the Replacements, for instance.

iHeartRadio’s curated channels remind me most of satellite radio, organized around a genre, such as hair metal, the music of a particular artist, or songs ostensibly chosen by an artist, like Radio Weezer. Of course the terrestrial stations on iHeartRadio are just that. I’m not sure how much the rock station in Waco, TX will differ from WZZO in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. But if it matters to you, then you have the choice.

Fidelity is what I find to be iHeartRadio’s greatest limitation. I’ve listened to the service on my iPhone, iPad and two different Mac laptops. At home I’ve used both my MacBook Pro’s built-in headphone jack and two different USB audio devices. Across all devices I found that the custom stations sound the best. While quality does vary some from song to song, overall fidelity is roughly equivalent to Pandora’s free service. In general that’s equivalent to a 128 kbps MP3 file, which is considered the minimum for decent sound.

By comparison, the custom stations all exhibited perceptibly lower quality sound that would indicate a lower bitrate is used. No matter the station I chose the high end exhibited the shimmery quality of a poorly encoded MP3. There’s an overall graininess to the sound that I find fatiguing when listening on headphones for more than 10 or 20 minutes. These deficiencies are quite audible over speakers, too, though less bothersome at low volumes.

The broadcast stations are all over the map, in terms of fidelity. While some approach the smoother quality of the custom stations, most had a compromised and grainy sound like the curated stations. However, I found most of the broadcast rock stations to be even more fatiguing than the curated stations due to the heavy compression and processing evident in these streams. Most mainstream commercial stations use compression and other sound processing to make their stations sound louder and stand out when a listener is scanning the dial. This comes at the expense of dynamics, as the volume of the sound varies very little, with much less change than you’d hear when listening to the original recording.

Listening to most broadcast stations on iHeartRadio with headphones was tiring after 10 minutes or less. In all cases my local analog and HDRadio broadcast signals sounded much better than their internet stream counterparts. In particular the treble was overly pronounced and distorted on the internet streams, while the broadcast signals sounded smoother and more natural to my ear.

I recognize that I’m probably more sensitive to sound quality than many listeners, however I’d frankly rather listen to a decent AM signal than have to hear many iHeartRadio stations over headphones for more than a half-hour. Using cheap computer speakers at low volume the fidelity limitations are less perceptible, and I’m certain that’s how many folks experience internet radio. But I think the sonic flaws of even the curated and genre stations are obvious enough for an average listener to recognize, especially if she compares it to the custom stations or a broadcast signal.

That said, I can see the appeal of having all of these options in one app. I’m not sure it’s enough to keep me from using Pandora, Spotify and other services. The field is getting pretty crowded, and while each service offers something unique, none of them is sufficient to take over the majority of my online listening time. I may be a freak that way, with tastes that run decidedly outside the mainstream. Then again, isn’t the promise of the internet supposed to be infinite choice?

I’m curious to know what Radio Survivor readers think about iHeartRadio and other internet radio services. Let us know in the comments.

On October 11, Clear Channel representative Lawrence Sidman met with FCC Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus and Jessica Almond, Special Council to Commission Chair Julius Genachowski. According to the ex parte summary, Sidman maintained:

that the Commission can no longer reasonably justify retaining the AM/FM subcap provisions in light of the extremely significant technological developments and regulatory changes that have occurred in recent years, as well as the current state of the broadcast radio marketplace.  Moreover, based upon empirical data available as a result of Clear Channel’s previous station divestments, there is a high probability that repeal of the AM/FM subcap provisions will result in notably increased minority and female ownership of broadcast properties, a critically important and unfortunately all too elusive policy goal of the Commission.

Translation: thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC’s rules say that there’s no limit on the number of commercial stations a company can own nationally. That’s why Clear Channel presently holds about 800. But in “sub” markets like New York or Los Angeles (45+ stations), an entity can only own up to eight commercial licenses. Then the allowed number tapers down for lesser markets. In regions with 14 or fewer stations, an entity can own no more than five.

Clear Channel wants all those limits to go away.

The FCC is currently reviewing its media ownership rules. The comments in the proceeding, Clear Channel says, reflect “a broad cross-section of the radio industry, evidence the existence of a vibrant market for transactions that could enhance efforts to increase minority and female ownership and stimulate job growth and technological innovation in the radio industry were Commission to repeal the AM/FM subcaps.”

What does this mean? Probably that Clear Channel would like to sell some smaller radio stations and buy a bunch of bigger ones, but the FCC’s subcap rules gum up the plan. How casting them aside will “stimulate job growth” is unclear, given the layoffs that have just taken place in an already heavily deregulated market.

Randy's FM news station has about this many listeners.

However, the surprising news is that Randy appears to be actually acknowledging that maybe there are some kinks in the execution of the station’s programming, if not the concept. The idea for WWWN is target women listeners with news more suited to that demographic than the typical news talker.

Chicago media reporter Robert Feder has a source who was in on a staff meeting held Wednesday at the station, and according to the source Randy acknowledged that, “[t]here was a feeling that we’d gone too far in focusing on women.” Feder adds that perhaps part of the problem is due to “the assumption of what women wanted to hear on an FM news station, as conceived by Merlin Media’s chief operating officer, Walter Sabo.”

Having listened to the station myself, I agree with Feder. The station’s news sounds watered down and the overall sound is unpolished. I’m not sure that’s what anyone wants, whatever the demographic.

I’m sure most Radio Survivor readers have already heard about the passing of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Jobs will be rightly celebrated for how his company’s products, directed by his unique vision, changed the way most of us make and consume media. This includes radio.

Whether intentionally or not, the introduction of the iPod and iTunes in 2001 almost instantly created a fearsome challenge for traditional terrestrial radio. As the first elegant and user-friendly portable digital music player, the iPod helped create a perfect storm for the commercial radio industry, especially the nation’s largest radio owner, Clear Channel.

It’s easy to forget that at the turn of the century Clear Channel was riding high with mammoth profits brought on by its program of aggressive consolidation whereby the company vacuumed up stations, fired staff, and consolidated operations and programming in order to drive down costs. By 2001 the public had started to become wise to the fact that their local stations no longer sounded the same, with more repetition and fewer recognizably local personalities. As listeners started to tune out, Jobs’ Apple stepped in with a desirable alternative, the iPod.

Sure, folks had mobile CD and cassette players for years before the iPod. And many models of MP3 players had been on the market since the late 90s. But for most people the iPod offered the first user-friendly device that could supply 1,000 songs in a pocket-sized package.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent podcasting, but the integration of podcast management with iTunes in 2005 made the new medium accessible to new listeners who might never have sought out a specialized “podcatcher” application. The iTunes store almost instantly became the default directory for finding audio programming from across the web, which otherwise required many Google searches to sniff out.

While the iPod and iTunes are not exclusively responsible for the declining fortunes of commercial radio–I’d argue the industry deserves most of the blame–the impact of these technologies cannot be denied. So today I remember Steve Jobs for how he changed the landscape of radio and audio programming for the better, by making it easier and fun to find and listen to programming from around the world, helping to foster a whole new medium that sounds a lot like radio.

The iHeartRadio Doris Day channel

I’m listening to Clear Channel’s new updated version of iHeartRadio, which allows you to create Pandora-like music channels. iHeart is pretty easy to access via your Facebook account. And if you overlook the annoyance that it requires you to ‘like’ it to get started, it’s a limited but reasonable application.

Once you’re logged in, you can create your own channels by picking artists, genres, or bands. I picked Doris Day (yes; I’m a Doris Day song fan). And the system kicked in with Day doing her great version of “My Secret Love.”

Excellent choice. Alas—I was hoping for a few more Doris Day tunes. Instead I next got Dean Martin crooning “Ain’t that a kick in the head,” followed by Andy Williams singing “Moon River.”

I like the Martin song. As for Williams, that was an actual kick in the head, as far as I was concerned. To add insult to injury, the Clear Channel database followed that with Bing Crosby warbling “I’ll be home for Christmas.” That was it for me. I went back to the home page to try again.

Next I tried the app’s new classical channel. I got a performance of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances for violin and piano, which was a great opening choice. I should note that iHeart’s sound is truly excellent. Really fine tone for everything I listened to. And the classical channel was commercial free (let’s see how long that lasts). The Bartok was followed by Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. Another fine pick.

But I really wanted to hear another Doris Day piece, so I went back to that channel. A good selection came up: June Christy singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” followed by an Eartha Kitt tune: “Ushaka Dara—A Old Turkish Tale.” But no Doris.

Anyway, your iHeartRadio channels come with three parameters: “Familiar artists,” “More discovery,” or a combination of the two. You can make Facebook comments about the songs; like them; dislike them; do all the various things that Pandora lets you do. There are a variety of preset channels: 80s & 90s; Classic Rock; Reggae; no big shockers here.

Will the new iHeart take off? The critics will doubtless cry too little, too late. But it isn’t a bad app. Comes in iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, and Blackberry.

I’m wrapping up this review and still listening. In comes another Dean Martin tune: “Catch a falling star.” Nice, but couldn’t we get Day doing “Que Sera Sera”?

Nope. Instead it’s Rosemary Clooney singing “This ‘Ol House.” Ok. I’m outta here.