Welcome to Smart Audio.
It started with music services, like Pandora and Spotify. Now, Apple, NPR and Disney are making moves that signal customized content is king.
On the heels of Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of headphone maker and music service Beats, it’s now picked up another company in the space — the social podcast platform Swell.
Swell found success applying a social layer to the podcast experience to deliver smarter content.
NPR’s also joined the fray with the release of NPR One, an iOS app that promises “a stream of public radio news and stories curated for you.”
And most recently, Radio Disney is making a big switch to digital, unloading 23 of its 24 stations after realizing that only 18% of its listeners access the channels on the radio, opting for other platforms, instead, including the Watch Disney Channel app.
As CEO of a startup also tackling “smart audio,” I’m confident we’re entering the most exciting period in this sector’s brief history. When I took on this challenge, I wondered what events would mark the tipping point signaling validation of the smart audio movement. Three years later, Apple, NPR and Disney have done just that.
The investment flooding into the audio information field, combined with maturation of services like Spotify, Pandora and SoundCloud, heralds the total re-imagining of how audio content will be personalized and delivered.
Today, most people’s audio consumption consists of a carefully curated list of songs, albums, podcasts and streams. We aren’t far from a world where every listener can sit back and enjoy a unique audio stream with virtually no setup and little-to-no interaction with a user interface.
To accomplish that, the industry will need to embrace sharing, tagging and delivering content based on context and information from listeners. Apple’s headed in this direction.
But we at Rivet have embraced that idea from Day One.
A consumer’s audio experience will continue to improve as plummeting costs of storing and analyzing data, machine learning, predictive analytics and social connectivity will enable it to happen. Audio will be as personalized as Twitter, and as easy to engage as AM/FM radio.
Combine that with the ability to deliver a truly personalized stream to any audio delivery device — connected headphones, smartphone, car, TV, web — and the time spent cultivating incoming sources of information drops almost to zero.
At Rivet, we’re creating, sourcing and tagging audio content to do our part to bring this future to consumers. Every story heard on Rivet improves our algorithms and brings us one step closer to building everyone a unique listening experience.
We’ve taken on a huge task, but where there’s data, there’s opportunity. Smart content means smart advertising, and a captive listening audience in spoken word is worth multiples above what a reader, and even a music listener, is worth.
John MacLeod is the Founder & CEO of HearHere Radio Inc. and visionary behind Rivet News Radio. Previously he was an EVP at NAVTEQ, in addition to VP roles at Sony Pictures Entertainment and The Walt Disney Company.
