On the agenda were the challenges of the current economic climate, the opportunities arising from new media and new technology and creativity. Topics that are very relevant to the readers of this blog too….

The general perspective is that the overall economic climate will remain bad for some time to come. This will have a severe impact on the advertising income, traditional the main source of income for radio-stations. Advertising will move more and more to digital and on-line media, as those are relatively cheap and have very good accountability.

On the other hand for music radio stations, these new media and distribution challenges have some serious issues that comes with those:

• The recession will put pressure on advertising income in the ‘core’ business…
• New media and on-line distribution rights for music are still in the infancy phase and the music industry and rights organisations are developing the models as those happen. This creates a challenge for commercial radio station owners as it is difficult to plan the business around uncertainty…
• Advertisers and media agencies are not that familiar yet with new media and tend to stick with traditional mass media and the advertising models around those…
• New media and on-line distribution adds additional cost to a radio station and the limited revenue that comes from those is not immediately covering these cost…

In my upcoming posts I will share more on these individual challenges and how those impact the business and what might be ways around those issues.

The advantage of a recession sometimes is that you will have to think smarter and smarter to make your business work and innovation and creativity are key…

I wrote a post (unfortunately Dutch language only..) on the definition of Radio last week at radio.nl, a popular Dutch website, related to… Radio and its definition…

I started looking at some welknown definitions too, like the one found in your Apple dictionary (push F12 and after the ‘bubble’ you will get the dictionary):

“The activity or industry of broadcasting sound programs to the public.”

I found this definition too limiting, especially when I look to our own in-house ‘radio’ activities

In the radio.nl post I examine some of the elements that I believe are interesting to more then just the Dutch audience.

We had a lot going on during the 12.5 year anniversary of our alternative radio station KinkFM. Let me share them with you here too, just to shed some light on the developments.

Not only did we live broadcast the shows with Dutch artists and their favourite music over various media (such as cable, internet, iTunes…), we also showed which song was playing on the internet and iTunes and provided playlists and background information through the KinkFM website.

We gave the listeners the opportunity to interact with mail, sms and calling in.

We showed them what was going on by having a live webcam coverage of what was happening in the studio.

After the shows were done, we provided podcasts to those listeners that did not record, were not able to listen or wanted to listen again.

In short we did do a lot more than ‘just’ air a radsioshow.

This led me to define radio a lot broader:
Radio: “means or media to broadcast or make available information for collection, of which sound programmes form the foundation, potentially added with text, images and interaction.”

One could easily argue that much more media than just ‘radio’ could be captured under this definition. And then you would be right…Media formats are blurring…

A radio station that would not add some or all of the elements mentioned in my definition, would probably be struggling in the ‘new radio world’… Maybe it signals the death of definition for old style radio definitions…