Can Social tools save plain ole’ Radio?
Over at GigaOm Rags Guptagives his view on the future of radio:
Social networking around music has emerged as a class of Web service. While terrestrial radio has yet to fully embrace this, music social networking represents a large opportunity for terrestrial radio stations to gain relevance and currency online. Fundamentally there are two functions around music that social networking can fulfill…
He’s got a fair point, radio is really well positioned to gain from music lovers sharing and comparing music online. Nokia have been trying to bridge this with visual radio (pretty awful multimedia content and radio mash-up) and yes.com aggregates 2,600 US music stations output to show the zeitgeist.
Stations like XFM are really trying to bridge the gap and have excellent content to drive people to the site and some great forums to keep people there. Part of the problem is radio is still fairly fragmented when it comes to marketing with stations mostly managing their own budgets and never really having a huge push together to tackle online. The exception of course being good old aunty who is fantastic at building online service and discussion around music radio as well as branching into social networks like Second life.
Thanks to Ed for the link.
