Aol Radio - The End Of Traditional Radio?

AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are some of the online radio services that have become popular these last few years. A lot of of these are also accessible on mobile products such as cell phones. Does this mean the end of traditional radio stations? I will look at the impact of online radio on the radio landscape.

Local radio would seem to be having a hard time in today's radio landscape with competing satellite and online radio services taking away listeners by offering commercial-free music and entertainment. Specifically, online radio has become quite popular by offering a nearly unlimited amount of radio stations.

While historically local radio has been the only truly mobile radio, online radio providers like Pandora are now available on mobile devices such as cell phones.

AOL Radio provides in excess of 200 music channels in addition to 150 national CBS radio stations because it utilizes CBS radio as its platform. The underlying CBS radio platform "play.it" also permits listeners to make their own customized music channels. This is done by entering the names of albums, tracks or artists. The tracks played on each music channels can also be stored on an iPod for later playback by using 3-rd party tool iGetMusic.

Other online music services have followed suit and are offering similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm permit listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by arbitrarily picking titles by these artist as well as other titles which are similar in genre or character. On the other hand, most online radio broadcasters lack the ability to create fully customized radio stations such as the "play.it" platform.

Is the end of local radio near? The increase of competition from satellite and online radio has started to take away listeners from local radio stations. Conventional radio appears to have a awkward time to stop this trend. Online radio is particularly useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high price tag and licensing of frequency space.

The large number of available stations is a big advantage for online radio listeners. Still, this is a difficulty for online broadcasters. This large number of stations is diluting the number of listeners. Therefore streaming radio broadcasters have found it difficult to be profitable. At the same time, on the other hand, there is less pressure to insert commercials because of the lower costs of broadcasting in comparison with traditional stations. This has made online radio content more interesting than terrestrial radio.

Local programming such as news and local events, on the other hand, will remain one of the big advantages of local radio. Thus far the poor audio quality of FM radio has been a big disadvantage. However, latest digital radio broadcasts are set to improve the audio quality. One of these technologies is HD radio. It is difficult to predict a clear winner in the battle between online and local radio since both offer their own unique content and high mobility which are the essential factors that will decide the destiny of each service.