Radio should be careful for what it wishes for.
As excitement builds over the possibility that mobile phone makers will be required to add FM to their phones, it’s a good time to reflect on what an FM chip means.
Radio won’t will be able to hide behind the excuse of a decline in consumer access. Radio will be in the hands of almost everybody all day long.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that we won’t be competing just against the station across the street. Radio won’t even be competing with services like Pandora or Rhapsody.
Radio will be directly competing for attention with all that the Internet can provide: Google, Facebook, YouTube, and all the other Internet behemoths.
In a sense, it's true today. Computer users can listen to streamed radio while doing other visually oriented tasks. Multitasking on a cellphone is less likely. Competing for shared attention on a computer will give way to more of a winner takes all battle on cellphones.
Is radio really ready for that battle?
If the goal is to turn today’s smartphone into tomorrow’s radio, the industry has a tough hill to climb. And before radio can climb that hill, it has to climb out of the hole it has dug for itself.
We’ll return to the question, but first look at new research from Nielsen that illustrates radio’s challenge.
The chart below shows the average minutes per hour a smartphone user spends doing various tasks (click to enlarge).
Email takes up 25:00, nearly half (41.6%) of the hour. For all the capabilities of new app bedecked Internet enabled mobile phones, their greatest value remains the ability to read email.
Despite all the talk that social networks are making email obsolete, email actually takes up more of the hour today than it did in 2009.
Portals like Yahoo or AOL rank a very distant second at 7:00, 11.6% of the hour. Just seven minutes on the second most popular activity.
Half of the hour is consumed by email and accessing portals alone.
Checking social networks and blogs consumes 6:18, 10.5% of the hour.
Search ranks fourth at 4:12. News ranks fifth at 2:42. The remaining quarter-hour is shared by a wide range of tasks all taking two minutes or less.
Music manages to capture 1:54 of attention. Less than two minutes out of an hour, and that is an increase over last year!
The fact that smartphone users spend much of their time communicating through emails shouldn’t be too surprising. It has been true all along. Last year we wrote that even with smartphones, the primary value to the user is to communicate:
Today we can now communicate via voice, text, email, and so on. A smart cell phone has expanded our means to communicate, but fundamentally it just continues to provide the valuable service Alexander Graham Bell's invention provided.
With so much of the hour devoted to personal communications, there will be a scramble for the left over minutes.
Robo-radio, voice tracking and tired programming isn’t going to persuade a listener to switch her cellphone from email to the radio. It isn’t going to be enough to stop her from checking her Facebook status.
Unique compelling programming is the only thing. Unfortunately, creating unique compelling programming is going to be expensive.
For an industry that puts greater emphasis on hitting this quarter’s numbers than investing in programming, it isn’t going to be easy.
Radio should be careful for what it wishes for. Winning the FM chip battle will be just one victory in a long costly war.
I believe that mandating analog FM is a precursor to FM-HD chipsets, as many of the NAB/NRSC Board Members are investors in iBiquity (slight conflict of interest). They are sacrificing analog FM, in hopes that this will help with an iBiquity IPO.
Posted by: Greg | August 23, 2010 at 03:54 PM
Thought it was interesting that texting wasn't included in the "clock." Have to believe that's an increasing function for any smartphone user.
Finally, it stands to reason that radio is already competing with all of these distractions. Whether or not AM/FM chips are added to phones (highly unlikely because consumers aren't asking for it and manufacturers are not going to include features that suck battery life and add weight to the device) radio still needs to be focused on delivering the goods. That means investing in talent and content delivery.
Posted by: Dennis Gwiazdon | August 20, 2010 at 06:40 PM
Great article. Of course, radio also needs to do this with their HD programming. We can't keep saying we have no money to program for these other sources and yet expect to expand our audience through these sources. There's a reason it took decades for FM to take off, and HD and, therefore, portable device interest will too if we keep programming what people could always get from their ipod or a internet station. Lets bring LIVE and LOCAL back! We may have to start with interns but we can move up as we start recognizing the profits. But we won't get profits without the programming to create the draw, and jukebox programming creates no draw and no loyalty.
Posted by: Frank | August 20, 2010 at 04:12 PM
Yes, of course radio wants to be there. It HAS to be there. While radio will be on display, pari-parsu with all that is digital and interactive, it will also be one of the (if not the) only LOCAL and potentially LIVE and LOCAL button on that device. While it may not truly compete with Rhapsody and other futuristic entertainment sites, it will be the local-connection to the community. And who knows, this feature alone may FORCE radio to again become what it has been best at: local, relevent info and entertainment.
Further, there MUST be an FM analog AND digital chip, so as AM's become re-broadcast on FM's HD-3 or HD-4 there will be access to AM programmng, which is often the most local and live link to a community. The chip is available now (ask iBiquity), it can and will be enginered to sap less battery energy, and the cost will add only 20 cents to 89 cents per unit.
And worst-case: Imagine the day when the cell tower is down or the "bars are low" and the earth shakes, smokes or floods... and the ability to switch to an entirely non-cellular dependent info source for vital communication.
Radio does not do what Rhapsody or Slacker does, but can do so very much more when needed or wanted to tie a user to the local community.
Posted by: Michael O'Shea | August 20, 2010 at 03:59 PM