Wrapping up our decade in review.

Anyone taking a broad view of the radio industry in 2000 could certainly see a lot of balls being thrust up into to the air, but it would have taken a psychic to predict where they would land. Nevertheless, for all of the churn we can say very safely that audio-focused content is alive and well.

It’s become clear to me that we Radio Survivors do consider radio to be greater than just the traditional electromagnetic broadcast medium. While we included the RF-based college radio, pubic radio, LPFM, HD Radio and satellite radio in our review, we also touched upon internet radio, Pandora and digital downloads. I believe we are first and foremost fans of terrestrial broadcast radio, but that does not cause us to ignore or discount new audio media. Nor does it cause it us to claim that they are not, in essence, radio services.

The homogenization and delocalization of the broadcast dial caused listeners to seek alternative places to hear more interesting and diverse content. At the same time the popularity of MP3 players and Pandora shows that people were also looking for customization.

The thing I want to point out about all of these new options is that, truly, only one is wholly under the listener’s control: MP3s (or other digital music files). With all the other options, including Pandora, the listener still gives up some control over what comes next. With any service that has “radio” in its name, the programming is linear, and you generally don’t know what’s coming up. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a live DJ, a pre-programmed playlist or a library of tunes on random. You might choose an all-Springsteen or all-Mussorgsky station, but the actual song or piece is not under your control. With Pandora or Last.fm you choose an artist to set the tone and style, but all the subsequent plays are up to the algorithm.

What that says to me is that radio listeners–no matter the form of radio–are still looking for a curated experience. With music they may want more control over the genre, sub-genre, style, artist or time-period. With talk and information programming they want to choose the topic, host or political slant. But in both cases the listener wants somebody (or something) else to create the overall experience.

The fact that the major commercial radio companies so degraded this well-crafted experience helped drive away listeners to these other audio forms. Regardless, I believe there would have been erosion of commercial radio’s listenership triggered by these new ways of getting audio entertainment. It just might not have happened so fast and dramatically, and the big radio players might have been able to make the transition to online more smoothly.

As we look forward, the growing availability of wireless high-speed internet is going to make the medium itself less important than the programming that’s on it. I do think that each medium will continue to enjoy its own unique advantages. Whether it’s the low-tech ubiquity of analog broadcast, the nationwide coverage of satellite or the chaotic, but nearly infinite choices on the internet.

After content, the second most important factor will be how much hardware you have to buy. HD and satellite radio are already at a disadvantage because they require specialized equipment that (so far) doesn’t do much else. That makes it harder to compete with a mobile device that checks email and facebook, make phone calls, sends text messages AND receives thousands of online stations. If it were starting today, AM and FM radio would be at a severe disadvantage, too. But they enjoy a first-mover advantage, which means that receivers are so cheap and ubiquitous as to be nearly free.

I’m not sure there has to be any clear winners or losers here. I actually see the potential for coexistence amongst all these forms of radio. Whether or not that can or will happen is up to the companies, consortia and oligopolies who are mostly in control of the commercial, HD and satellite radio.

It should be an interesting listen.

In case you missed them, here’s a rundown of our 14 most important radio trends in the last decade. They’re in no particular order.

• #1: The birth and troubled childhood of satellite radio
• #2: The growth of Internet radio
• #3: I-tunes lures listeners away from terrestrial radio
• #4: Podcasting
• #5: The Age of Pandora
• #6: HD Radio launches, but who listens?
• #7: Internet Radio’s Day of Silence
• #8: The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic
• #9: The FCC authorizes Low Power FM
• #10: Clear Channel goes private equity
• #11: Cash strapped schools turn their backs on college radio
• #12: National Public Radio keeps growing
• #13: College radio tightens its playlist
• #14: Pacifica radio democratizes itself

#2 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Although today’s New York Times claims that “Internet Radio Stations are the New Wave,” a look back at the past decade makes it very clear that Internet Radio’s growing influence is hardly revolutionary news. In fact, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Internet and Internet Radio during the last 10 years.

The radio landscape has changed tremendously and much of that had to do with the adoption of both the Internet and streaming media by the mainstream.

According to the decade-spanning report, The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio’s Digital Platforms, by Arbitron and Edison Research, in 1999 only 50% of Americans had online access compared with 85% in 2009.

Beginning in 2006, the majority of Americans with at-home Internet access had a broadband connection; making it easier to download and stream audio content. By 2009, approximately 42 million Americans listened to online radio weekly (twice the number who did in 2005).

Although this massive growth of Internet radio happened in this decade, the first attempts at streaming radio started in the early 1990s. The very first terrestrial radio stations to begin broadcasting online were college radio stations WXYC (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and WREK (Georgia Tech University) in 1994.

Always ahead of the curve, many college radio stations embraced webcasting, online playlists, blogging, podcasts and broadcast archives well before these technologies were adopted by their commercial counterparts. Tech-savvy students were often the instigators and developers of the technology (as was the case at WREK). Commercial station KPIG claims to be the first commercial radio station to broadcast online with its first webcasts in 1995.

Early online-only radio (and broadcast) ventures emerging in the mid to late 1990s included Broadcast.com (later acquired by Yahoo), Spinner (which started in 1996 as TheDJ.com and was later acquired by AOL), NetRadio, Imagine Radio (purchased by MTV), and online radio network Live365.

According to a study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research, in 1999 13% of Americans reported listening to Internet radio. This was a huge jump in listeners over the course of a 6-month period and they speculated at the time that:

“…adoption of audio online has occurred far faster than other historical new audio technologies such as AM or FM radio, CDs, cassettes, etc.”

By 2000, Arbitron and Edison reported that 20% of Americans were listening to online radio and by 2001 they found that among those listening to online radio, more than 50% said that they mostly listened to stations from their local area. In 2003 the percentage of Americans who had ever listened to online radio grew to 40%.

Online radio encompasses not only terrestrial radio stations with webstreams, but also the variety of online-only offerings including the now-defunct community-based interactive streaming service Echo that launched in 2000, the DJ-less recommendation-engine Pandora (our #5 trend), and a number of companies that hosted a range of genre-specific stations such as Radio@AOL and Live365. By decade’s end, Apple was also hosting radio streams and providing a directory of stations through iTunes.

Along the way, there were bumps in the road, especially when it came to working out all of the details about copyright and royalty payments for online broadcasts. Protests about royalty payment rate hikes led to 2007′s Internet Radio Day of Silence (our trend #7 ) and there’s still ongoing debate about payment schedules.

Before taking their own broadcasts online, commercial radio stations felt the sting of competition from the wide range of radio offerings available online. By the end of the decade many learned that the best response was to create their own online streams and increase the variety of programming that they aired.

Yet, the often trend-setting non-commercial radio stations were miles ahead of their commercial counterparts, embracing the range of opportunities available to them by taking their broadcasts online. Since my personal focus is on college and indie radio stations, here are a few of the ways that these stations have adapted and evolved due to online radio:

1. Some college radio stations chose to go web-only, either because administrations took away their terrestrial signal (see trend #11) or because they no longer saw the relevance of using older methods like campus-only carrier current (and even FM!). For stations with college-age listeners, computers were often more common in dorm rooms than radios; so terrestrial broadcasts seemed a bit antiquated (we’ll see if this changes as FM radios are incorporated into iPods and iPhones).

Notre Dame's online-only WVFI

2. Many college and public radio stations adopted multiple web streams for different types of content. Some college stations aired different content over their terrestrial signals than they did on their online streams, whereas others crafted online-only stations specifically for training purposes.

3. Students who were eager to start up college radio stations on campus were now able to easily do so by launching online-only radio stations, without having to go through the laborious process of applying for an FCC license for a terrestrial signal (which they would have little chance of getting anyway).

4. Pirate radio stations had more options to share their community-oriented programming. Stations like East Village Radio opted to shed its unlicensed past when it went online-only and has attracted a wide following. Similarly, when the FCC came knocking at Pirate Cat Radio in San Francisco, the station decided to abandon the FM airwaves for the safety of an online-only signal.

5. Audiences for stations with weak terrestrial signals have the opportunity to grow exponentially through streaming which allows listeners to tune in from all over the globe.

In another 10 years we’ll probably be amused by the distinctions that we now make between terrestrial radio, satellite radio, Internet Radio, HD Radio, podcasts, etc. As technologies converge, these categories may matter less and less. It’s already the case that one can purchase Internet radio tuners that can dial up any station that’s online and broadcast it to your home much like a classic radio would. And with iPods and mobile phones now incorporating FM tuners, some have speculated that they may be the new transistor radios.

In any event, Internet Radio is here to stay, bringing with it endless variety, thousands of stations (from commercial to college), and every subgenre of music you could dream up. It’s hard to imagine the world without it.

#3 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Music listening has changed dramatically in the past decade in large part because of the rise of digital music. Following the explosion and shut down of illegal file sharing service Napster (1999-2001), a variety of digital music companies attempted to profit from the burgeoning interest in music delivery via the Internet.

Some focused on music subscription services (such as Rhapsody and eMusic), others turned toward music recommendations (like my former employer Uplister, which had hoped to turn the playlist into the “next unit of global music consumption”), and the legal descendants of Napster (from Apple to Amazon.com) became purveyors of MP3 downloads.

The timing of the digital music explosion couldn’t have been better; as many radio listeners were turned off by the increasingly consolidated commercial radio landscape that appeared on the scene as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which reduced limitations on the number of stations that could be held by one owner.

A direct result of the reduction in the number of station owners was less diversity on radio, with shorter playlists and fewer artists represented. As a 2002 report by The Future of Music Coalition pointed out, music fans were not pleased by this and stated that they actually “want longer playlists with more variety,” flying in the face of commercial radio’s own survey results.

So, it’s no surprise that services like Rhapsody and iTunes, where music fans could select their own playlists of music from a menu of choices would resonate so strongly with folks who had turned away from radio. Portable digital music players appeared on the scene just before 2000 with MPMan and the Diamond Rio, followed by Creative Lab’s Nomad Jukebox in 2000 and the Apple iPod in 2001.

The iTunes Music Store was launched in 2003 and the first mobile phones to incorporate MP3 players arrived in Asia the same year. MP3 players became increasingly common in many mobile phones and again Apple was a leader in popularizing their use with its introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (which had music features of the iPod built in to it).

A report issued by Bridge Ratings in 2006 pointed out that in their survey sample, young people were turning to MP3 players vs. terrestrial radio. According to the study, “12-24 year olds substantial increase in time spent with their MP3 players has significantly reduced their use of traditional AM/FM radio.”

Of course, at decade’s end we’re seeing massive convergence to such a degree that devices like the iPod may not necessarily be as big of a threat to traditional radio as they once seemed. Some portable music players and phones actually contain FM radios and may serve to draw in new listeners, whereas many others allow for the streaming of radio or the playback of broadcast archives.

As a radio DJ and indie radio fan I still have a preference for expertly curated radio playlists vs. iPods on Shuffle, but the lines keep blurring. Some lazy college radio DJs just plug their iPods into the board instead of hand-selecting CDs and pieces of vinyl to play over the airwaves and some iPod owners lovingly craft playlists that would be the envy of any college radio fanatic.

And then there’s commercial station RXP in New York City, which actually has an on-air feature called “Spin Matt Pinfield’s iPod,” in which listeners chose a number between 1 and 8000 in order to hear a random track from the morning show DJ’s iPod; thus bringing the whimsy (and breadth) of an iPod’s library to the commercial airwaves. So who knows, perhaps the iPod (and certainly consumers’ preference for massive choice in music) will help to spice up commercial radio yet.

#13 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Although college radio as a rule is much more diverse than commercial and public radio stations, there’s been a trend in the past decade for many stations to create a more focused identity surrounding a specific style of music. In some cases this is done with the help of professional consultants and paid staff members; whereas in others, it’s simply due to a rigid (and perhaps lazy) mirroring of playlists from other college radio stations.

In 2001, University of Washington station KCMU was transformed into KEXP after an infusion of cash and equipment from The Experience Music Project in Seattle. The station moved off campus and has a more specific music focus than when it was a student-run station.

Some stations, like WERS at Emerson College, have opted to adopt formats more familiar to commercial and public radio listeners. In 2006 they switched to AAA (adult album alternative) programming during the day, moving specialty shows to the evening and weekends.

In August 2009, University of Nebraska station KRNU modified its format in order to appeal more to college-age listeners. Changes at that station included a narrower playlist of indie/alternative music and a shifting of specialty music shows to a new web channel. The new web channel serves to play the more experimental sounds that their terrestrial station used to play.

Rochester Institute of Technology station WITR recently reduced the number of specialty music shows so that they don’t comprise more than 25% of the station’s schedule and is cutting down the number of slots available to non-student DJs. Many speculate that this is also part of a bigger mission to narrow their playlist into a more standardized rock format geared towards college students. Their current format is described as “Modern Music and More.”  Similarly, Vanderbilt University station WRVU is also putting a limit on the number of non-student DJs.

With college radio under much more scrutiny from administrators, many of these changes may simply be out of fear that a school may abandon, sell, or cede control of its radio station if few students listen or participate. In the process, though, some stations may be losing their edge and what really differentiated them from mainstream radio to begin with.

Y2K is a distant memory. Will radio soon be, too?

Myself, I can hardly believe that another decade is coming to a close. It seems like just yesterday we were stockpiling canned goods, bottled water and batteries in anticipation of the Y2K global computer meltdown. Of course, on every millennial survivalists’ compound shopping list was a good battery-operated radio.

Now, ten years on, radio has undergone many changes. Many–like the rise of internet radio–were certainly predictable, even if the particular forms were not. While those of us critical of the consolidation fever that gripped the industry in the late 90s certainly believed that trend would lead to no good, I’m not certain that any of us knew just how badly Clear Channel and its brethren would gut commercial radio, and how many bankruptcies would arise by the end of the decade.

Between now and New Year’s Day my fellow co-bloggers and I will set about enumerating the fourteen most important trends in radio during the 2000s. These trends are in no particular order. Why fourteen? Well, ten was too few, and, uh, we ran out of steam at fourteen.

So, tune back in tomorrow when Matthew and Jennifer will school you about numbers 14 and 13.

The radio-trends-of-the-decade series

• #1: The birth and troubled childhood of satellite radio
• #2: The growth of Internet radio
• #3: I-tunes lures listeners away from terrestrial radio
• #4: Podcasting
• #5: The Age of Pandora
• #6: HD Radio launches, but who listens?
• #7: Internet Radio’s Day of Silence
• #8: The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic
• #9: The FCC authorizes Low Power FM
• #10: Clear Channel goes private equity
• #11: Cash strapped schools turn their backs on college radio
• #12: National Public Radio keeps growing
• #13: College radio tightens its playlist
• #14: Pacifica radio democratizes itself