Bret Piatt

The local paper is coming to an end...

The Internet and the plethora of news sources it contains gives you better and more timely information than reading your local paper.  “The paper” still had a chance when we could only use “The Internet” on big fixed location desktop computers.  Now that I can read the WSJ content on a mobile application on my BlackBerry I no longer need to have “a paper” if I’m out and want access to news.  It isn’t just about the better content on the Internet, it is about ease of consumption of that content as well.  What we all see happening right now to the newspapers will hit radio next.

This is where Pandora comes in to threaten local FM music radio.  I’ve recently acquired a new car that happens to have an AUX jack.  With that AUX jack I can hook up my  BlackBerry Bold with Pandora and play music, music relevant to me, music without commercials (I’m sure this will change over time), and it is easy to use.  As smartphones continue their proliferation and cars with AUX jacks (thank you Apple for the iPod success and it pushing automakers to add AUX jacks) do the same we’ll see more and more people doing what I’m doing now — listening to Internet streamed radio in their car for free.

This not only kills off local radio, it nukes satellite radio long before the local radio dies.  My new car came with a free 6 month Sirius/XM subscription and I’m not even going to activate it.  I’m a fan of the concept and I was actually an early subscriber to XM during my days commuting in the Bay Area during “the bubble”.  Sirius/XM is doing the right thing in coming out with smartphone based applications to consume their service.  This not only lowers their customer acquisition costs (I suspect they had to subsidize the hardware deployment in autos) but increases the ease in which I can use their offering.  They need to get all of their content over to the smartphone version yesterday and they need to start pushing this as their primary marketing effort.

Clear Channel, owner of over 1,200 local radio stations, is another player in the mix — and probably the player with the most to lose.  They’re experimenting in the smartphone space with iheartradio that currently supports both BlackBerry and iPhone with content from over 350 of their stations.  I haven’t tried this out yet personally so after I do I’ll come back and add more detailed thoughts.