How podcasts and music streaming are helping radio thrive
For years, radio has been threatened with warnings of its own pending extinction.
First it was the rise of locally-focused newspapers, then it was the arrival of television. It was also the jukebox, the widening distribution of recorded music, and the Sony Walkman.
Radio blasted past all these challenges in a variety of ways: by focusing on local production, with the advent of Top 40 programming to capture the kids, and through the sheer luck of affordable portable transistor radios flooding the market in the 1960s.
Then the MP3 came along, and it was panic stations once more.
John Musgrove, the head of research for Commercial Radio & Audio, spent two decades as head of insights and research at Southern Cross Austereo. He recalls those early days where everyone, SCA included, was viewing the MP3 format as “an attack on music radio.”
“There were headlines out of the UK. There was this thing called MP3s coming out, the iRiver (an early MP3 player) was taking over, and then there was this thing called this Apple iPod coming to market.”
The iPod came with the seemingly impossible promise of storing one thousand songs in your pocket.
