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Stern, Jack sparked format flips at radio in 2005
The year is ending nearly two weeks too soon to catch the biggest radio news of the day: the debut of Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio.
His move is arguably the make-or-break moment for Sirius. The company predicts it will have 3 million subscribers by the time Stern hits the air on January 9. Rival XM expects to have twice that.
If January holds satellite's D-Day, then terrestrial radio took the covers off its beach-head armaments on December 6. That is when eight major broadcasters came together to announce their strategy to turn high-definition radio (terrestrial's digital initiative) from a neat idea to a practical reality.
But satellite is not the only competition for terrestrial radio. The success of the iPod and the podcasting phenomenon that followed have worked to make everyone a radio programer and inspired the likes of NPR and Infinity to release podcasts of their own. The latter also took a San Francisco AM and crowned it the first all-podcast radio station.
The shuffle function of the iPod was equally inspiring to radio. Stations that had switched to the format du jour, Jack, touted it as the radio version of an iPod on shuffle. Jack became the new format by not having a format. The listener never knew who the next act would be (K.C. & the Sunshine Band into Nirvana was fair game) but would surely like it.
Latin formats were another big format-flip target. By the time the summer ratings came out, a baker's dozen of stations in the top 25 markets had flipped to Spanish-language programing. Ten had ratings increases.
With all of these pressures, the business of radio is no longer a stock market favorite. To combat that, traditional radio is aggressively investing in itself.
full Billboard.com story
posted by Unknown @ Sunday, December 18, 2005,
