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Is AOL Radio Going To Cause The Extinction Of Local Radio?

By: Gunter Fellbaum

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Online radio services such as AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm have become rather popular lately and are even available on many portable wireless devices such as cell phones. I will look at the impact of online radio on traditional radio broadcasters to find out if this means the end of local radio stations.

Local radio seems 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. There is virtually an unlimited number of online radio stations available.

Pandora and other online radio services have become available of portal devices by installing the appropriate app. This increases convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has thus far been the biggest advantage of local radio.

AOL Radio offers more than 200 music channels as well as 150 national CBS radio stations since it uses CBS radio as its platform. The underlying CBS radio platform "play.it" also allows listeners to create 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.

Pandora and other online radio services have similarly started to offer customize music. The user can enter music-related information such as artist, track or album name. These channels will then select tracks which are similar to the information entered. Other services, however, fail to offer fully customized music channels.

Are traditional radio stations destined to become extinct by the continuous reduction of market share due to online radio? Online radio has proved useful in particular for niche broadcasters due to the inherently lower broadcasting cost compared with local radio stations.

While the variety of stations is a benefit to listeners, it is at the same time diluting the audio and online radio broadcasters are finding it difficult to attract a reasonably large number of listeners and be profitable. However, online radio has less pressure to insert commercials which has made the content more appealing to listeners.

However, local radio has one big advantage over satellite and online radio. That is local content such as local news and events. One drawback of local radio has been the poor audio quality of FM broadcasts. However, that is being remedied by the recent introduction of digital radio broadcasts such as HD radio. The big factors that will ultimately determine the fate of each technology are content and convenience. Online radio and traditional radio each have their own niche in terms of offering unique content and both offer high mobility and convenience so there will probably be no clear winner.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

You can get additional details about AOL Radio and audio transmitter products from Amphony's website.

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