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Internet Participation

Broadcast radio executives are moving rapidly to work with internet radio. Just about every radio station management realizes that it has to have an internet site. The site streams what the radio station is playing but it goes beyond that to deepen and engage the user with the personality that the station aims to project. Consider the website of Power99FM, one of five Clear Channel radio stations in Philadelphia. This station focuses on “Bangin hip hop and R&B/' to quote the site. It is filled with songs, music videos, and in-studio performances that reflect the radio station's theme and website's “music on demand'' refrain. Surrounding all this music is a large promotional and advertising environment. Listeners can go to the site to find out about the station's contests and promotions. It also conducts its own contests to involve visitors. You can sign up for a VIP club to “enter exclusive online contests for concert tickets, hot prizes, movie passes, sporting event tickets, cash, trips, cars, you name it." All of this comes with advertising for local and national companies. In addition, the site connects to iheartradio.com, Clear Channel's platform for websites for its “350+ stations.'' The site also allows you to stream albums for free, create a personal playl­ist of music videos, and see various kinds of ads, some of which (for example movie trailers) are integrated into the site as if they are merely more Clear Channel content.

All these activities leverage the power of Clear Channel to create deals with recording companies and artists for the right to post material across Clear Channel's many websites. Like other internet music sites, visitors can purchase the albums online from the site, for which the company gets a transaction commission. In fact, with the idea of guiding consumers to the purchase of music online and through broadcast, Clear Channel reinforced the company's sense of itself as a part of the new digital environment. In 2007 it was among the radio groups cheerleading a new development in HD radio technology: users who “tag" a song on a special HD receiver have the option to purchase it or find more information about it when their iPod is synced with iTunes software.

The websites of stations owned by CBS Radio, Citadel, and other firms have many of the same features as the Clear Channel sites. CBS, in fact, owns LastFM, which “recommends music, videos and concerts based on what you listen to," while it also tries to facilitate discussions (“com­munity") around the music. It involves streams of its radio station programming from its website or from a central site, with specially inserted commercials. These activities reflect a changing radio industry that senses it must define itself to its audiences and its advertisers as far broader than AM and FM radio.