New Year-Where things stand in Seattle Radio

[Bongwater]

Andy, you bring up a good point that a friend and I have been making for years now. In the age of smart speakers, a unique branding should be more important than ever. Just a few examples,
1. If someone says to their device of choice "Play 99.5 The Wolf," are they going to get Dallas when they want Portland?
2. Same applies to Z100. If they say "Play Z100," they're likely to get New York, when the wanted station may be Portland or even Missoula, though the Missoula station is a Townsquare station, meaning that you actually have to enable the skill.
3. The same friend I mentioned above, who lives in upstate New York, has both Family Life skills on her Echo. One is the local network heard across New York and Pennsylvania, the other is the similarly named and similarly formatted network based in Arizona. I can't remember which is which, but one is Family Life Ministries and the other is Family Life Communications. Wouldn't it be a benefit to both brands if they either merged or one rebranded to something a bit more unique?
4. I was going to leave it at the Family Life example, but then I remembered there are actually documented cases of listener confusion. The most notable example in commercial radio is the confusion of listeners between WBEB in Philadelphia and WBWB in Providence, both at the time using the name B101. Another good example is a public station in CA rebranding as KVPR last year because their former name, Valley Public Radio, had the same initials as Vermont Public Radio, causing listeners to send their donations intended for the local station to Vermont instead.
I could go on and on about this, but I'll leave it there.

I agree with the branding. It's WAAAY outdated for the world of 21st century radio, We're rapidly approaching a time when terrestrial dial positions will not matter. And in that world, you can only have so many "MOViN"s, "JACK"s, "Warm"s, "Hot"s, "Cat"s, "Bear"s "Wolf"s (Wolves?), "Bull"s, "Q"s, "Z"s, etc.

 

[boombox4]

I agree with the branding. It's WAAAY outdated for the world of 21st century radio, We're rapidly approaching a time when terrestrial dial positions will not matter. And in that world, you can only have so many "MOViN"s, "JACK"s, "Warm"s, "Hot"s, "Cat"s, "Bear"s "Wolf"s (Wolves?), "Bull"s, "Q"s, "Z"s, etc.

But they need that sort of connective, radio branding to have some continuity between the station and that station's particular stream. The OTA station has to drive listeners to the stream, otherwise, the listeners will just use Spotify, Pandora, YT, et. al. Or another station's stream.

By the time OTA radio is mostly a curiosity and anachronism of a bygone age (maybe 20+ years from now), the stations' actual streams will probably disappear, because the internet marketplace can only support so many independent audio/radio streams, thanks to ad rates and digital royalty costs. Consequently, the current style of branding will also probably disappear. Some streams may survive, of course. The branding by that time might change, just as stations' branding changes and evolves whenever there is a change of format.

I don't use a smart speaker, so I don't know the mechanics of how their search function works. I know that when I do internet searches on radio stations, often the search engine will bring up the closest stations to me in the results, based on my own general location. The geographically closest stations to the search criteria I typed in appear at the top of the list.

I can't see how smart speakers wouldn't have the same sort of location-based results programmed into their algorithms.

 

[CTListener]

Geofencing doesn't play into this? Surely it has to.

The Dallas Wolf and New York Z100 don't geofence.

 

[boombox4]

Has anyone here who uses smart speakers actually asked for the speaker to play a station just using the simple moniker ("Wolf", "Bull", "Bear", "Fan", "Zoo", "Kiss", etc.)? What actually happens?