Week of December 1, 2008

Rock That Doesn't Rock?

Friday, December 5, 2008

The 51st Annual Grammy Award nominees were announced on Wednesday night. In perusing the list, I noticed that most of the nominees in the Rock categories barely receive any rock radio airplay. For example, here are the 5 songs nominated for Best Rock Song

* Bruce Springsteen "Girls In Their Summer Clothes"
* Radiohead "House Of Cards"
* Death Cab For Cutie "I Will Possess Your Heart"
* Kings Of Leon "Sex On Fire"
* Coldplay "Violet Hill"

AAA was the most engaged format, as all 5 songs charted in the top 30, with 2 of them (Coldplay and Death Cab) coming in at #1. The bottom 3 on the list were top 10 songs at Alternative, but the two formats with "Rock" in the title barely paid any attention. Only 3 of the 5 songs even charted at Active Rock, with the highest being Kings Of Leon at #42. And only one song, Springsteen at #27 (in 2007) charted at all at Mainstream Rock.

So is it a case of Rock radio being out of touch, or the Grammy nominees being too elitist. While rock formats deserve their share of criticism for being too narrow, the Grammy's are infamously tone deaf when it comes to rock. Who can forget the first winner in their "metal" category...Jethro Tull.

Stealth Online Radio

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Yahoo has announced that its Launchcast music service will be outsourced...to CBS. Yahoo will re-launch the service in the first quarter with CBS expanding its involvement. Currently, CBS provides 144 station streams. Next year, CBS will also supply Internet-only channels, as well as handling all of the ad sales.

The reason for the shift? Internet music royalties. The latest Copyright Board decision on royalties has significantly increased the costs. Launchcast is also affected by technical issues, which limit listeners to using Internet Explorer on Windows machines, limitation which CBS has promised to lift.

Steep Decline In Newspaper Revenue

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

A month ago we talked about the big drops in newspaper circulation figures. Today, the other shoe dropped, as the newspaper Association of America released its figures for newspaper ad revenue. Third quarter revenue for 2008 dropped 18%, or $2 billion! These drops include a 31% decline in classified ads, 18% in national and 12% in retails ads.

Compare this to radio's drop of near 10% and you can see what a disaster is looming for the print industry. Next year, revenue is projected to fall even further for print, leading to some drastic measures for some papers. While there may not be many that plan to completely follow the Christian Science Monitor's example of going completely online and no longer printing a hard copy, many papers may cease hard copy publication a few days a week.

Apple ranks the Top iPhone Apps

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Good news, bad news. First, the good news, the top free app for 2008 in the iPhone App Store was a radio app. Now the bad news, it was for Pandora, not terrestrial radio. Terrestrial has been late to the party, but a number of stations are now going mobile, recognizing the need to take their brands to mobile platforms. For the record, here are the top 10 free apps:

1. Pandora Radio
2. Facebook
3. Tap Tap Revenge
4. Shazam
5. Labyrinth Lite Edition
6. Remote
7. Google Earth
8. Lightsaber Unleashed
9. AIM
10. Urbanspoon

Social Networks Ad Dilemma

Monday, December 1, 2008

According to market research firm, IDC, social networks continue to see robust growth in traffic, but advertising on these sites has lagged far behind other sites. According to the survey, more than 75% of social net users log on at least once a week with 57% doing so daily. But their click-through rate on ads is much lower than those of new users in general. 57% of the social network users clicked through versus 79% for Internet users in general. Click-throughs are not the end all in evaluating advertising performance, but no one will deny that the social networking giants have underperformed in revenue generation

Ultimately, the answer to this dilemma for social networking sites is to provide more professional content. MySpace, in particular, has been targeting increased high quality professional video content to its site. Another clue to this situation came recently when an analyst for the Financial Times predicted that NBCU/New Corp's TV site, Hulu, would generate more revenue than YouTube in 2009.