Streaming Radio Will Not Bring the End to Terrestrial Radio
Traditional radio streams live. They don't run playlists and pre-packaged programming. Real personalities and staff are on duty now. They are awake.
Internet stations that only stream tend to be fully automated all the time. No life. No live shows. They are asleep.
Anyone hoping to rise to the top with only a stream will have to work harder. Much harder.
Streaming Live
I've been talking for a long time about the big weakness of streaming radio, which is the lifeless automatic approach taken by most internet stations.
Yesterday KDX Worldround Radio began a series of experiments to make our station more "live".
Step one was to start carrying "The Thom Hartman Program" and "Free Talk Live", both talk/call-in shows, from their live feeds.
The impression made by "being live" is very strong and we are looking for more ways to do it.
Previously we carried the previous days recordings of those two shows, which became especially out-dated, for example, the day after "election day", when the stale shows from yesterday still hadn't experienced the "results".
Terrestrial radio will always be around in some form, quite possibly as a secondary media channel. When cable tv came out in the early seventies, most people laughed at it, but in the end, it ended up becoming (IMO) the dominant media channel leaving many of the traditional over-the-air television stations in the back seat of the car.
In NY, as a kid growing up, most of the houses in my neighborhood had tv antennas/masts on their roofs; today you can drive by my old neighborhood and there's not one tv antenna on the roof's that formerly held them.
Today's generation of music listeners have much different listening habits then from the baby boomers who grew up on a diet of AM and later FM radio. They tend to download most of their music to listen too; some who enjoy hearing banter that goes along with traditional radio may listen on line or one of their favorite over-the-air stations locally. The big difference will be in approximately 5 years (once the majority of the country is wired for wifi) or so, you'll be able to drive across the country and listen to your favorite homegrown radio station in your car, something which you cannot do now. Streaming audio over the internet, at least for now, will probably be the future for a majority of listeners not only in this country, but around the world. 2 years ago, I drove from NY down to SC to visit my son; almost the entire time I drove down there, I was able to listen to my station over the internet. Having accomplished that cemented in my mind that the internet would definitely impact the radio industry.
Either way we shall see whether or not it shall come to fruition.
On the flip side of the equation: There are a dozen or more new OTA television antennas on my block as people give up expensive cable television and revert to OTA and streaming services...