Nashville's Country Genome Project

Pandora founder and evangelist Tim Westergren: “There is little doubt now that the future of radio is Internet radio, and personalized radio.”

I appreciated Tom Taylor's perspective, as he quoted the former musician, composer and Pandora visionary's claim of 3.6% of all U.S. radio listening, followed by "a radio executive in the hallway who isn’t discounting Pandora, but knows that broadcast radio, done right, offers a sense of community. So it may come down to broadcast versus customized radio – which must grow its share of ad dollars to break out of its business model where the royalties consume more than 50% of total revenue."

Music discovery is no doubt important to any transitional format, but as any experienced radio vet will testify, trying to use "new music first" as a tactic to create a musical difference almost always loses to the direct competition who lets the newbie familiarize the audience with the unfamiliar material and then plays the biggest hits.

It seems to me that, as with so many other upstarts that have emerged since the dawn of format radio, we don't have to fail for Pandora to succeed.

Newness and similar sounding genres are a dual-edged sword.

Today in the NAB convention hallways I ran into Edison Research's Larry Rosin a longtime student of country radio and music who currently has a concern about country even as new music and artists are clearly booming. His wife listens to country in her car almost constantly thanks to SiriusXM, but he can't listen as much over the last several years since New York has no country FM station anymore: "I hear all this new music, and she obviously loves the songs, but I can't tell one singer from another."

Radio doesn't need a genome project. We have one already. The music biz does it every time. The instant something starts to work, every label seems to have a soundalike.

For the majority of the population, it takes a curator to separate wheat from chaff.

Radio wins by doing what satellite and personalized streams can't do, making sure our local community of listeners gets plenty of the era and genre variety they prefer along with surprises presented by a trusted friend who relates compelling stories about artists we expose, to be sure that the fresh becomes familiar and favorite, reflecting local, topical values and concerns.

High Tech Firms Use Radio Advertising

"Radio is a congenial home for many advertisers in the hardware business, whether the hardware is lawn mowers or e-mail archivers. All that remains to be added are regular holiday sales for the I.T. products. Maybe the Labor Day weekend will bring a Sale-A-Bration — for load balancers."

- Randall Stross, Silicon Valley-based author and professor of business at San Jose State University in the New York Times

Thanks to Randall Bloomquist for reinforcing the key reasons why:

Affordability – “’We discovered radio was unnaturally inexpensive,’ says Michael Perone, Barracuda’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

Targeting – Radio is an efficient way to reach the handful of decision-makers and “influencers” who are responsible for buying IT gear for their organizations.

“[Barracuda] also sells to medium-sized businesses, defined as those with 300 to 2,000 employees. It can be too expensive to send sales representatives to make the multiple visits necessary to close a relatively modest sale to these customers. But it turns out that radio offers an economical alternative way of reaching the three or four people who might work in the I.T. department of a 300-employee company.”

Endorsements – Citrix has found that endorsement spots provide effective “third-party validation” and “can create a brief sense of personal connection with each listener, in a way newer media can’t really match.”