While this is mostly a column about radio industry web sites, I figured I’d take some time in the New Year to take a look at the broader internet picture for the radio industry. Everyone else seems to take the first few weeks of the year to prognosticate, so why not jump on that bandwagon? We’ll have the rest of the year to look at websites themselves, so let’s examine online streaming.

There are many options for streaming your station’s audio online and The Net Untangled will get into them in the coming weeks. For now, I want to explain the opportunity and threat that online streaming will provide over the next few years. To examine the differences and similarities between internet audio and broadcast radio and how they will change into the next decade, it’s useful to break both into three parts and examine those in depth.

We’ll look at them from the user’s perspective starting with our first part, the output - or what comes out of the speakers. Audio gets to the speakers by our second part, the delivery method. Finally there is the creation of the audio, our third part, the content. The parts intertwine somewhat, but are worth looking at individually. I’ll also be using the term internet “audio” instead of internet “radio” because it comes in so many forms, from streaming audio to podcasts to short embedded audio segments, like on NPR.org

The Output

In a nutshell, terrestrial radio and online audio streams work in the same way over the last link in the broadcast – sound leaves the speakers, it hits listeners in the head, and they complain about too many commercials. So, once it gets to the speakers it’s all about presentation and content – as an end-product, internet-only audio streams have a chance to compete on equal footing. Once it leaves the speakers, it’s just sound waves.

I know, many music programmers would scream that there’s no way some high-school geek could shuffle his iTunes and create an experience that a well thought out and orchestrated music log with great imaging couldn’t beat. That is true, but knock-offs of high-fashion purses and clothes aren’t as good as the real thing and still a lot of Americans purchase the cheaper knockoffs because they are “good enough”. And with thousands of online competitors, some of them will be good enough.

Besides, with user-customizable options like Pandora and Last.fm, listeners no longer have to find a station that plays their favorite bands – now they can just type in their favorite music and websites will generate unique audio feeds for them on the fly. These are “stations” that exist only for one person. Why listen to a CHR station and wade through the hip-hop when you can just visit http://www.last.fm/tag/emo and go back to writing in your journal about how nobody understands you? Radio can’t beat that option from the speakers to the ears.

(Seriously, if you haven’t visited those sites and you like music, check them out right now. We’ll be here when you get back. They offer users a music stream based on what music the listeners already like, and then they suggest new songs that are similar. Pandora is like that cool friend in college who would always tell you to listen to this band you’ve never heard of because “you’ll like it”, and it turns out the band was awesome. Of course, if you’re a music director or PD of a music station, you probably were that person.)