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…