Music licensing? HD radio pays the same rate as broadcast. Which means they don't pay the additional fees to SoundExchange that their stream pays. The music licensing fees are based on revenue. One way some large groups get around the labor involved in music logs is run national formats from their streaming services. Audacy has access to that.
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Boo..hiss..to Audacy
- Thread starter wattsup
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Music licensing? HD radio pays the same rate as broadcast. Which means they don't pay the additional fees to SoundExchange that their stream pays. The music licensing fees are based on revenue. One way some large groups get around the labor involved in music logs is run national formats from their streaming services. Audacy has access to that.
Case in point, the music-formatted HD subchannels Audacy pulled in the Cleveland market were of formats with practically no visibility. No one knew they existed and there was no reason to want to tune in. (The ones that survived run CBS Sports Radio and BetQL off the bird, with one directly programmed by the Cleveland Browns.)
In fact, the only radio stations in the Cleveland market that have actively marketed their subchannels belong to the local public broadcaster Ideastream (WKSU and WCLV). And even they offer those subchannels on every major streaming platform and their own smartphone app. WAPS, the Akron Public School district-owned AAA, has done the exact same thing. In effect, they’re making them available to the vast majority of people who don’t have or don’t use an HD Radio, so why bother to get one or use one?
When you stream an HD channel, those streams are then subject to digital music royalties that don't exist for just HD radio.
Absolutely not, never advocated that. But broadcasters have to realize that there are a lot of potential listeners that are completely dissatisfied with the current offerings on traditional broadcast radio. Not a majority, or even a large minority, but nonetheless a notable slice of audio consumers. And those people are going to turn to other options to find what they want. As I said, they are not going to meekly accept a product they don’t like just because other options have been removed.
As has been discussed numerous times in these forums, listeners aren’t customers of commercial radio, but rather the product, so the analogy breaks down. If radio can’t produce enough of that product (audience) then it will have fewer customers (advertisers.) Satellite and streaming have the listener as the customer and obviously provide what those customers want, as those listeners are willing to pay for those services.
HD Radio’s big failure was that it was barely promoted, as broadcasters were terrified of losing audience from their main output. “Why would we compete against ourselves?” was the mentality. Ironically that same type of thinking was used in criticizing broadcast consolidation in the 1990s, before it was realized that having multiple smaller pieces of a larger pie was better than having one bigger piece of that same pie.
That's not true. Members of the HD Radio Alliance ran thousands of spots promoting HD radio stations. The REAL problem was that all that promotion happened before HD radios were commercially available. So they were promoting something that people couldn't hear or buy. It took years for iBiquity to convince Best Buy to carry HD radios in their stores, and by then, the HD Alliance promotion campaign was over. By then, radio stations were more interested in streaming.
It's actually far more complicated than that. From the get go, HD radio wasn't marketed very well and there were gross misunderstandings about what it was and I'm not sure how well or strongly the radio industry as a whole got behind it. I remember reading an article in Radio World back in the day where a guy set off on a multi-city pilgrimage to find both HD "tabletop" radios for his home and also cars equipped with HD. He found that few tabletop radios sold in the stores he went to were equipped with HD and none of the salespeople in any of the stores he visited knew anything about the technology. At car dealerships he found 1 or 2 salespeople who knew what HD radio was and how it worked. Others knew everything there was about satellite radio and were happy to demonstrate it and sell it, but they knew little to nothing about HD, some confused it with HDTV saying it was the same radio stations but more clear. Ads at the time weren't much help, explaining it was "channels between the channels".
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Correct, and the reason for that is because satellite radio PAID car manufacturers for space on their dashboard, whereas HD Radio CHARGED car manufacturers to include their chip. That very basic difference is what killed HD Radio. iBiquity wanted to get paid before there was any consumer demand, and that killed the potential for any consumer demand. You need to offer a free sample in order to get people to try your product. Satellite radio understood that, and HD Radio did not. iBiquity thought consumers would demand new radios, and that demand never happened, because consumers couldn't hear what they were buying. Even today, Sirius allows potential subscribers to sample their service for a few months before charging them. That option was never given for HD.
I’m listening to a secondary HD channel right (an oldies station adjacent to the primary HD-1 classic rock station). No commercials but I would still listen if there were commercials. Although the age of listeners to this HD-2 might not be the most desirable I know from local talk and all news stations there are advertisers willing/wanting to advertise to an older audience, like our local Blue Cross’s Medicare plans. So maybe the restaurant (in this case) is willing to give away the food
I remember when the HD Alliance started their campaign. They were promoting "stations between the stations." The average consumer probably tried tuning between stations thinking they would find something, but found nothing but static. Plus, the first generation radios, like the Boston Acoustics Recepter HD, lacked good sensitivity (it didn't help that the "one percent of analog power" rule was still in effect either).
Best Buy started selling portable Insignia tuners about three years into the broadcasters' HD push. I wasn't impressed with their efforts though.
It was like they let an engineer come up with that tagline. It's literally accurate but didn't clearly describe the advantages an HD radio tuner might have brought a consumer. It probably have been better to advertise specific programming. Here's a couple of ad scripts to illustrate what I mean:
"Smooth Jazz: free on your radio with an HD Radio receiver. Tune to 101.3 channel 2. Available at Best Buy, Ward's, Radio Shack and other electronics retailers. Look for the HD Radio logo."
"ESPN Radio around the clock. Your favorite ESPN personalities discuss the NBA playoffs all week. Listen to 93.1 subchannel 3, on an HD Radio tuner. Available in all Pioneer receivers, now on sale at K-Mart"
Another thing I never saw: external advertising. An ad in print or outdoor media might have captured certain consumers who were put off by a format change. Keep in mind that HD radio came about in the era when Smooth Jazz and Oldies were dying, so there were some displaced customers.
The problem today isn't the age of the audience, but the lack of audience size. According to Nielsen, all HD subchannels combined earned a 0.1 share and 24,000 cume in the latest Phoenix book.
I feel like the broadcasters didn't promote the HD2 channels because they didn't want to cannibalize the audience of the main channel. But then again, I keep hearing "Please listen to KEZ" promos on 95.5.
But all of that should have been worked out BEFORE the promotional campaign. You don't promote a product without giving consumers a way to sample and buy that product. Apparently iBiquity gave no thought to that, and that's why they failed. This is not a radio failure, but an iBiquity failure. They were the ones who stood to gain financially, because that's how the system was set up. By contrast, satellite radio had everything figured out BEFORE their launch. They even had portable satellite receivers available for people who wanted them. That wasn't part of the product plan for HD Radio.
You keep saying that, but it's not true. Most of these companies owned four or five stations in a market, so they were already competing with themselves.
And Ford - freaking FORD - was one of the investors in the original iBiquity (they were also investors in Sirius, so there's a conflict of interest). You'd think they would have wanted to help with their investment by adding HD in more vehicles other than their luxury lines, but they wanted to sell more Focuses at a cost point, so the HD chip was left out of the radios.
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iBiquity allocated a number of HD home radios that stations would give away at remotes (I know that because I worked for a station that did exactly that). Even though said radios weren't that good, I don't think the general public really understood it.
They were TABLE radios, which traditionally were the least popular models of radios sold at the time. They were expensive and not as consumer friendly as the radios the people already owned. The sound quality wasn't noticeably better either. This was the same problem satellite had at the time. Satellite radio was promoting itself as "CD quality sound." First of all, it wasn't true, and secondly, it wasn't noticeably better than FM. That's why satellite had to change their marketing focus to programming content.
True. Those radios were a pain to set up as well, and didn't hold memory for time or presets if the power went off. Let's not get into the mess with the HD tuners from Radiosophy, which almost got it right with its second offering, but was still a low-end unit not built that well.
In the case of satellite, they saw the advancements in codecs since the services were proposed in the mid-'90s, and though "now we can squeeze 100 channels on this small amount of bandwidth." They did so to the detriment of audio quality, and they're paying the price to this day.
That's the other problem with HD. Because HD radio is a trademarked technology, any changes to it by outside developers were not allowed. There are a lot of changes we'd like to see in HD, but we can't make them because it would be a trademark violation.
About 5 years ago, I was looking to buy a new AV receiver.
I went to the nearest Best Buy (I bought 2 other AV receivers previously from them) here in the KC area and looked over the models.
There were a large number of logos of the various surround sound decoding functions on the boxes and stickers on the front panels, but no HD radio logo on any of them.
I asked the sales people in the AV receiver area if they stocked any AV receivers with HD radio reception - they said they didn't know about HD radio - I said HD radio was a free digital radio service and about 2/3 of the FM stations in KC were broadcasting the HD signal and suggested they Google HD radio.
They checked their inventory and told me they only had the boombox style HD radio.
(In 2009, I bought the $200 Sony HD table radio on closeout for $50 at Best Buy, I still used it sometimes, but it isn't currently connect to my surround sound system)
Kirk Bayne
I went to the nearest Best Buy (I bought 2 other AV receivers previously from them) here in the KC area and looked over the models.
There were a large number of logos of the various surround sound decoding functions on the boxes and stickers on the front panels, but no HD radio logo on any of them.
I asked the sales people in the AV receiver area if they stocked any AV receivers with HD radio reception - they said they didn't know about HD radio - I said HD radio was a free digital radio service and about 2/3 of the FM stations in KC were broadcasting the HD signal and suggested they Google HD radio.
They checked their inventory and told me they only had the boombox style HD radio.
(In 2009, I bought the $200 Sony HD table radio on closeout for $50 at Best Buy, I still used it sometimes, but it isn't currently connect to my surround sound system)
Kirk Bayne
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