STREAMERS HAVE THEIR EYES ON THE REAL PRIZE:  There’s usually a ton of chatter in the pubs about competition amongst the pureplay audio streamers.  What’s Spotify doing to compete with Pandora?  What new streaming tier is Amazon or Apple launching?  Etc., etc..  But as most of the sector knows, streaming isn’t a zero sum game in which one new listener to streamer A necessarily comes from streamer B.  Instead audio streaming is flourishing because of a steady migration away from Radio.  The attached Hackernoon article describes what’s happening.  As time spent listening to AM/FM drops streaming’s time spent and revenue goes up.  The chart below shows the direct (and stunning) correlation.  And the craziest part is that this trend is just beginning. Industry experts estimate all the streaming listening in the US is about 15-20% of what’s consumed on AM/FM, yet streaming is only taking in about 5-6% of the available audio dollars.  Feels like there’s a lot more gold left in those hills for the streamers to mine!

FACEBOOK’S BIGGEST MEASUREMENT MISCALCULATION TO DATE:  You might recall the half dozen measurement miscalculations FB has admitted to over the past year.  Most of these have to do with minuscule formula errors which were probably unintended.  But this latest miscalculation seems like a little more of a whopper.  In the attached AdWeek link an analyst at Pivotal Research points out that FB is self-reporting more users within a demo than are actually in the US according to the latest census.  To be specific, FB is saying it has 1.7M more active users in the 16-39 demo than the census says are in the US.  Granted, not all young people are picked up in the census count so there’s probably some wiggle room with the number.  But still – every single census-counted young adult is using FB plus another 1.7M mystery users?!?  This doesn’t seem possible.  C’mon Zuck . . . get your data guys to clean up their act!

IS RADIO STILL NEEDED TO BREAK NEW MUSIC?:  At this week’s NAB Radio Show attendees are seeing the usual set of self-promoting sessions which try to reinforce Radio’s strengths to a room full of radio execs (which btw, seems like a total waste of time to me).  During one of these breakfast sessions a mid-level country artist named Jack Ingram praised Radio for being essential to get exposure and break his music, which was all gleefully reported as a Radio triumph in the attached Radio Ink article.   But there’s another less publicized narrative brewing which isn’t as positive for Radio.  Recently a song (which I can’t name to protect my source) on the Country Music charts went to #1 without any AM/FM promotion.  Typically labels will spend $250-500K on promotional efforts through radio stations to get their priority songs charted.  But in this example the label worked only with the streamers, yet the song still rose up the charts.  Then Radio was compelled to start playing the song, because it was already popular, which pushed it to #1.  The lesson learned can best be summed up by an exec at the label behind this example who said in an internal memo “we are done with Radio”.  My guess is that Radio’s day as the one and only hit maker for the music industry are just about over.

Have a great Friday (and weekend) guys!