What is happening today in the Radio and Audio Innovation Field?
As students in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University and part of the Advertising and Public Relations Laboratory we were given the chance to explore the Radio and Audio field a little bit further. Some of us have already been an important part of Panteion University’s Web Radio: Spam Web Radio. Through Spam Web Radio we had the chance to see the hardships and the perspectives that the radio industry carries.
There is a very important question that lingers: why isn’t the radio not cool anymore, or at least as cool as it used to be? Can the radio be profitable, sustainable, and entertaining again? Do we have to go back to its roots in order to find what makes the radio cool or invent a whole new model in order to make it cool and bring it to the level of today’s standards? Of course, all these questions cannot be answered in this specific article but rather in a series of them. In this specific article, we will see what is cool in the Radio and Audio field today and what trends and beliefs are built around these two terms.
Starting from what the radio used to be, a medium that was invented in 1894 by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. He built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system based on airborne Hertzian waves (radio transmission). This Medium was revolutionary indeed and gave a whole new different perspective on what the Mass Media had to offer both in Journalism and in the Entertainment Industry as well. With the invention of the TV and taking a big leap with the invention of the Internet, we reach an era where the radio as we knew it cannot even remotely antagonize what exists today in the audio innovation field. Applications like iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube have taken over and people can listen to what they want whenever they want without the unwanted advertisement in-between.
What seems to be very popular nowadays are podcasts. Podcasts are defined by Cambridge Dictionary as a radio program that is stored in a digital form that you can download from the internet and play on a computer or on a computer or on an MP3 player. They are shows focused on a specific subject and structured in a series form most of the time. Anyone who is interested can download each “episode” and listen to it anytime he or she wants without mobile data or Internet access limitations. Generally, the web seems to be absorbing the radio as we used to know it and adding new features to it enhancing it. It is also a trend to record in video the shows and broadcast them live on the internet creating a web-TV type of experience but not quite that.
Apps like Radio Jar have been helping a lot this podcast and web radio trend to flourish. Radio jar is the number one choice for internet radio professionals. Essentially Radiojar is an affordable and complete online radio management and streaming solution. There are hundreds of Radio startups that have flourished in the last couple of years and most of them focus on the web aspect of the Radio. You can find some of the most important ones in the link below:
Some very famous ones are Stitcher, Overcast, Castro, Podcast Go, and Pocket Cast. Very useful are the apps of TuneIn and E-Radio where you can listen to any radio station that exists either FM or web radio.
A very remarkable model of radio today is BBC Radio. Another one is a Greek radio run solely by students: Spam Web Radio. As written and above, Spam Web Radio is an initiative by the students of the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University. It is run by its students, for the most part, as part of an unpaid internship in the radio and audio field. It gives experience and it offers the chance to get familiar with a very important medium, the radio.
Spam Web Radio follows a very interesting model, it takes some characteristics from the traditional radio model and enhances it accordingly. It has a very solid program starting from morning shows, cultural talks, informational podcasts, and ending with late-night shows and interviews. It tries to combine both music and thematic conversations and tributes. So it is not following the podcast model but it has taken the podcast model and it has combined it with some traditional radio features, such as the music playing in-between. Of course, the difference here is that the music playing is not just top 14 lists and mainstream music solely. A wide musical range is offered to the audience.
Is Spam Radio the future of the Radio? We cannot tell because Spam Web Radio has no solid profits or advertising partnerships. It is also a model that works for young people but is not tested on a wider range of audiences. It is very difficult to say, yet, what the future of the Radio is.
We observed very briefly some of the trends and what the Radio and audio field is progressing into. Stay tuned because our research is not over yet.
For now, let’s see some quotes about the Audio and radio field today, just some food for thought.
“Generation Z listeners prefer streaming platforms like Spotify and Pandora over AM/FM stations.” -digitalnews.com-
“Smart speakers have begun shaping consumer practices and preferences.”-digitalnews.com-
“As of earlier this year, a whopping 245 million people listened to the radio at least once a week. That’s an incredible 91% of the American population that is twelve or older, which is music to advertiser’s ears.” -Forbes-
“Music discovery as a whole is moving away from AM/FM radio and toward YouTube, Spotify and Pandora, especially among younger listeners, with 19% of a 2017 study of surveyed listeners citing it as a source for keeping up-to-date with music — down from 28% the previous year.” -variety.com”
“People say ‘oh radio is dead and dying’. Actually, radio as content is exploding. The way that we consume it is changing.”-Ben Lawrence quoted at Musically.com-
“Generation Z, which is projected to account for 40% of all consumers in the U.S. by 2020, shows little interest in traditional media, including radio, having grown up in an on-demand digital environment.” -variety.com-
A research made by The Ogilvies Team: Danai Lyratzi, Xenia Ntavranoglou, Stavroula Pollatou, Ioanna Thanasi, Katerina Tsigarida
For Startup Lab by the Advertising and Public Relations Laboratory of Panteion University.
Lab Director: Betty Tsakarestou Betty Tsakarestou
