What has the Internet done to Radio Listenership? :: Essays Papers

What has the Internet done to Radio Listenership? Annie McBride (name changed to protect the internationally famous) is a junior at Syracuse University who hails from the land of Guinness across the Atlantic. She has regularly kept in contact with her native land by listening to and calling the premier student run radio station in the Ireland, LSRfm at the Leeds University. She was an American correspondent who informed the listeners of LSM about the latest fads, movies, and television shows in the United States. The radio station is broadcast over the internet, and will be returning to the FM dial in Ireland in 2006. (lsmfm.com) LSMfm is part of a trend that has been growing since the late 1990s: internet radio broadcasting. Many radio stations, like LSM in Leeds, Ireland and z89 in Syracuse, New York, have live audio streams of their broadcasts in real time. This allows anyone on the planet to listen to their favorite local station, no matter how far away from home they may be. The internet also allows for access to an extraordinary range of music. All of this is contributing to radio losing its foothold in society to the internet. One of the main reasons that the internet has become such a popular source for music is its diversity. Kim Vasey (2005) says â€Å"†¦Internet radio (has) brought alternative music choices that mostly cannot be found on the 'dial,'†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Newswire Association, 2005). These days, terrestrial radio stations have to take into account a wide diversity in their listeners’ musical tastes. In order to satisfy everyone’s palette, â€Å"the best a station can hope to do is program it's content so it hits "the middle" which, inevitably leads to little risk taking and bland programming.† (Deitz, http://radio.about.com/) This bland programming is of course what the turnoff for most radio listeners is in the first place, driving them to other annals of consumption, mostly the internet. A study done by a consumer research company called NPD reveals online radio listening is on the rise. â€Å"The research from NPD centers around people listening to music on thei r computers. It points to 77.2% of users having moved in this direction, and 55.3 million now listening to radio online.†(Music Online http://www.audiographics.com/) The internet is the one of the leading alternatives to terrestrial radio because it is so ready to use. The software is extremely accessible, and it is rare, in this day and age, that a computer is not hooked up to the internet.