A Story

The new web radio service from Boston.com -- dubbed RadioBDC (as in, Radio-Boston-dot-com) launched today at noon, following a montage of station production and string quartet versions (!) of classic modern rock songs. Dicky Barrett, frontman for local faves The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, called in to congratulate staffers and "front-announce" RadioBDC's first song, The Bosstones' "I Want My City Back."

Boston.com is a regional news portal owned by the Boston Globe. It attracts more than 6 million unique visitors per month. The site announced it would launch an online-only alternative rock web radio station back in June (RAIN coverage here), then hired on-air staff from the local alt rock station WFNX (which flipped formats after its sale to Clear Channel).

Triton Digital announced today that it will provide the station with its content delivery network (CDN), a Flash-based audio player and three mobile apps (available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices), as well as measurement and ad insertion. Additionally, Triton will provide audience engagement solutions including song and artist facts, lyrics, sampling and purchase options, content sharing and more.

The station will stream online at Boston.com (here). It will feature live programming (including news and lifestyle features) from 7am to 10pm every weekday and Sunday morning. At other times RadioBDC will stream alternative music. The stream will also include ads, though the "primary revenue generator" will be sponsored events, the Boston Globe reports (here).

Boston.com's general manager Lisa DeSisto says RadioBDC is "a way to deepen the engagement" of the site's visitors, Radio-Info reports (here).

"It’s all about attracting audiences and getting people to do things with us,” said Christopher Mayer, publisher of the Boston Globe. “We’ve seen people move from print to the Web, and from the Web to mobile. Why wouldn’t they also want our content in audio?”

"They haven't really asked me," explains Saga Communications CEO Ed Christian when asked why Saga's streams aren't available on Clear Channel's iHeartRadio.

He does take issue with the presentation of stations on iHeartRadio, though. For example, in using iHeartRadio Christian found "300 to 400 choices in country," reports Radio-Info. "I’m just kind of overwhelmed; I don’t know where to look" (a sentiment echoed in a recent New York Times piece on iHeartRadio and rival aggregator TuneIn, in RAIN here). That said, if iHeartRadio was interested in working with Saga, "I'd have to look at the economics of it. We're small in terms of what they're looking at."

Clear Channel's iHeartRadio platform has established itself as the clear leader among broadcaster-owned digital platforms (and truly in the same league with TuneIn and Pandora), far outpacing the performance of competitors like CBS Radio's Radio.com. IHeartRadio's leader position is so strong that companies that would normally consider Clear Channel a competitive rival -- groups like Cox, Emmis, Greater Media, Salem, and others -- have entered partnerships to have their streams included in the iHeartRadio platform. Obviously, the decision to enter a content deal that drives audience to a digital platform owned by a competitor can give one pause. Especially if the deal prohibits a broadcaster from making its streams available in other directories.

"According to several broadcasters, Clear Channel has been aggressive in pushing for exclusivity," The Times wrote, "offering in exchange greater promotion and visibility within the app. But most broadcasters have resisted. Aside from its first few big deals, none...have been exclusive. One reason...was uneasiness on the part of broadcasters about joining a platform run by the biggest player in the market."

But you can apparently count Cumulus as a satisfied iHeartRadio partner. Chairman/CEO Lew Dickey says, "We've already seen a meaningful increase in streaming" (since his company's streams were added to the platform in December). As Tom Taylor in Radio-Info reports, Dickey thinks streaming revenue could eventually contribute 5% to his company's bottom line.

Meanwhile, Entercom, like Saga, is not streaming on the Clear Channel-owned digital platform. "Sharing our content is a good thing, if the business arrangement makes sense," said Entercom CEO David Field told The New York Times (RAIN coverage here).

You can find Ed Chrisitan's comments in Radio-Info here, and Lew Dickey's here. Read more in The New York Times here.

ProPublica reports "it's not clear why" a pop-up ad for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared on North Carolina resident Crystal Harris' mobile phone screen — "whether she was targeted, because, for instance, she lives in a swing state, or because she was listening to Garth Brooks."

As they announced in November, Pandora is offering its audience targeting capability to political advertisers (see RAIN here). The webcaster can indeed "send ads to particular listeners based on their favorite artist or type of music, as well as by their age, gender and state, county or congressional district." USA Today adds that Connecticut Senate hopeful Republican Linda McMahon and Wisconsin Democrats who had hoped to recall that state's Governor Scott Walker have also used the webcaster's platform for targted ads.

But just because Ms. Harris lives in North Carolina and is a country music fan, that doesn't mean she's interested in hearing from Mitt Romney. "Don't harass me on my email. Don't stalk me on the apps that I use. To me, that just crossed the line," Harris told ProPublica.

"We don’t get it," writes Eliot Van Buskirk in the Evolver.fm blog. "Flip on a television, and you’ll see all sorts of advertisements, assuming you don’t know how to use your DVR. Those are targeted based on where you live and what you’re watching. Why should music apps be any different?"

Perhaps it's indicative of the struggles online publishers and content producers face in trying to monetize their businesses on a medium (the Internet) that taught consumers content is free. Most services are lucky to convert 5% of people who sample to a subcription plan. Free services are left only to run ads, or ask for donations (which often meets with gripes and groans from users as well). Or, do you supposed it's not the presence of advertising, but the nature of it (in this case, sending an ad for a Republican to a registered Democrat)? That politics can be so offensive to our sensibilities that we're far more outraged at being targeted by politicians than by, say, laundry detergent? 

Read more in ProPublica here, USA Today here, and Evolver.fm here.

Webcaster Batanga.com has rolled out a beta version of its new site, which is now centered around user-created stations based on a song title, artist name, or genre.

While the parent media company Batanga is based in the U.S. (and targets its products mainly to U.S. Hispanics, but Mexico, Brazil, and the rest of Latin America as well), the webcaster Batanga.com is one of its holdings, based in Spain.

Batanga's older presentation (still available as "Batanga Classic") was focused on dozens of pre-programmed genre-based channels of music (mostly Latin). Now, with the beta redesign, the front page of the site is sparse, with a single background color, and the increasingly-ubiquitous single search field (a la Pandora and Google) right in the middle (beneath a logo and positioning statement). Visitors are invited to "Write an artist, song or genre to create a station...". A link at the bottom leads to a page of dozens of "pre-mixed" genre stations.

Once a genre or artist station is launched (overlayed on to some beautiful photography, and copious ads for the Batanga mobile apps), the listener can both add songs or artists to the stream, or "narrow the list" by genre, country, gender, "tipo de artista" (duet, duo, group, solo), language, decade, and lyrical content advisory.

Check out the new Batanga.com here.

SiriusXM has launched a new streaming on-demand feature, offering around 200 programs for instant online listening. That includes recent talk, comedy, sports and music shows, "selections from [SiriusXM's] vast audio archive," and "exclusive, never-aired content."

Though the on-demand catalog doesn't include every show offered by SiriusXM, the company promises it will be updated regularly with new content. 

The new on-demand functionality is available via SiriusXM's web media player and via its iOS mobile apps. (Android support is coming "soon.") Mobile users will be able to download to on-demand programs for offline listening. Users must subscribe to SiriusXM's Internet service (around $15 per month) to stream on-demand programming.

If this new feature sounds familiar, that's because SiriusXM has been teasing on-demand functionality for months (see our coverage from August 2011 here and October 2011 here).

SiriusXM added more than 622,000 net subscribers in Q2, the company recently announced, up 38% year-over-year. Revenue was up too, beating estimates. SiriusXM now boasts 22.9 million subscribers and expects to reach 24.5 million by the end of the year.

You can find more about SiriusXM's on-demand features from its website here. Reuters has more coverage of SiriusXM's Q2 results here.

Web radio aggregators TuneIn and Clear Channel's iHeartRadio have become "symbols for the challenges of adapting to the digital age" for the radio industry, writes the New York Times. The two services -- now "going head-to-head in the marketplace" -- actually have much in common.

Both offer an enormous range of radio station streams (70,000 from TuneIn, nearly 2,000 live stations from iHeartRadio). Both are increasingly popular: TuneIn just today announced it now has 40 million monthly users, while Clear Channel says iHeartRadio has more than 12 million registered users.

"But as businesses they represent two poles of media," writes NYT. Where TuneIn only serves as an aggregator or directory, iHeartRadio has launched its own customizable radio service "modeled after Pandora" (not mention a series of "iHeartRadio Originals" stations, here). And iHeartRadio is only a piece of Clear Channel. That's a trait CC executives say is an advantage.

"The great thing about iHeartRadio,” said Clear Channel Media and Entertainment CEO John Hogan, “is that it is just one of a number of opportunities that we have to monetize the audience." 

Federated Media has just announced they will add their 17 radio stations to iHeartRadio (more coverage here). And iHeartRadio has added a new station dedicated to financial talk radio host Dave Ramsey (more coverage here).

But some broadcasters feel uneasy "about joining a platform run by the biggest player in the market," especially when "Clear Channel has been aggressive in pushing for exclusivity." That includes Entercom, which has joined TuneIn but not yet iHeartRadio. "Sharing our content is a good thing, if the business arrangement makes sense," said Entercom CEO David Field (more here).

TuneIn, on the other hand, is independent. That means it doesn't have the same sort of major media company backing as iHeartRadio, though TuneIn has just announced $16 million in new funding (bringing its total financing up to $22 million).

But that also means TuneIn has a level of "neutrality in the radio business," which the company says makes it a "safer choice for broadcasters." TuneIn CEO John Donham told NYT, "We are not a broadcaster, so we do not have any inherent interest for any broadcaster to succeed or fail."

More and more broadcasters, however, have opted to join both platforms. They aim "to be everywhere they could be possibly be."

"Everybody is looking at this and saying, look, you don’t know where the world is going, and you need to be in a lot of places,” said Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan. KCRW director of interactive media Anil Dewan said, "Our mission is about getting our content to as wide an audience as possible." Both KCRW and Emmis have joined TuneIn and iHeartRadio.

"It would be better for services and listeners if there were more than two aggregators offering access to every service out there, making it as easy as possible to listen," argues Audio4Cast's Jennifer Lane (here). "And stations, broadcasters and pureplays, should work with all of them."

Though "thorny" problems remain -- including "the possibility of being lost within the aggregators, like needles in enormous digital haystacks" -- the NYT writes (here) that both iHeartRadio and TuneIn can "help [radio broadcasters] reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio."