Survey: Checking Messages Starts The Day

Communication comes first for most US internet users—and even before coffee for a great many of them, according to February 2016 polling.

Email service provider Adestra and Flagship Research surveyed US internet users under 35 and over 55 about their usage habits, and found that overall, 61% of them checked email, social media, text messages and voicemail before breakfast—including 39% who did so before their morning coffee. One in five respondents waited to check their messages until after the most important meal of the day, but before heading out to work. More than eight in 10 respondents checked their basic communication channels before work on a typical day.

When GfK MRI asked US smartphone users about what mobile apps they checked first thing in the morning on a typical weekday, two-thirds said they looked at text messages, and 63% checked email. The survey didn’t specify, however, whether caffeine took precedence over messaging. Social media, namely Facebook, was certainly popular, with nearly half of smartphone users logging on first thing—but there was a big dropoff between the top two basic communication apps and Facebook, suggesting that email and texting are more universal morning routines—even among millennials.

Hilo Radio: NativeFM Launches CHR Island Simulcast

After years of broadcasting popular mainstream and local reggae island music, Pacific Media Group’s Native FM KPVS 95.9 FM Hilo and KLUA 93.9 FM Kailua-Kona is changing its format to CHR.

The format for the new Native FM – “The BEAT of the Islands” – includes today?s top hits from Hip-Hop, R&B, and mainstream Pop with Bruno Mars, Drake, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Arianna Grande. It also includes a variety of top hits in Reggae and Island Reggae Music from JBoog, Common Kings, The Green, and Sammy J.

“The excitement of this new change in format will allow mainstream Hip-Hop to be heard with an island feel,” said Program Director Jaz Yglesias, veteran on-air personality of over twenty years.

KPVS 95.9 FM (39 Kw) Red=Local Coverage Area

The new sound will still be held together by its veteran on-air talents, the Big-O Show With Eddie-O from 6 a.m. – 10 a.m., Ms. Holly K in the mid-days from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., Jaz “Uncle Jazzy” Yglesias in the afternoons from 3 p.m. – 7 p.m., and Harley Trip from 7 p.m. – 12 a.m. weeknights, as well as weekend DJs Maelan Abran and Shaka Kev.

Click Here To Listen-Live

Pacific Media Group owns and operates 14 radio stations in Hawai’i. On the Big Island, station offerings also includes KAPA Hawaiian 100.3 FM Hilo/Ka’u, KAGB 99.1 FM Waimea/Kona, KKBG 97.9 FM Hilo, KLEO 106.1 FM Kahalu’u-Kona, and ESPN Radio KHLO 850 AM, KKON 790 AM Kealakekua. Additionally, the company operates BigIslandNow.com, a news and community information website.

KLUA 93.9 FM (3.7 Kw) Red-Local Coverage Area

On Maui, PMG includes KPOA 93.5 FM, KJMD DaJam 98.3 FM, KMVI ESPN 900 AM, KLHI Native 92.5 FM, KJKS 99.9 KissFM, and Bloomberg Radio KNUI 550 AM. Additionally, MauiNow.com serves the Maui community with news and information, and digital offerings include Aloha Stoked and the Maui Activity and Maui Dining apps.

Spotify To Use Data To Unlock The Power Of 'Superfans'

Since Spotify began to gain prominence, there has been a debate over whether its royalty system pays musicians enough. Critics often cite the small royalty checks musicians get for substantial amounts of streams. Spotify supporters point out that 70% of Spotify’s revenues go to recording and publishing rights, and that Spotify is only one piece of the music industry apparatus that produces revenue for artists.

Regardless, finding new revenue streams for artists is a top priority for the company, Lucchese tells BusinessInsider. And he thinks a key to unlocking these is tapping into the superfan market.

Spotify looks at various indicators, like length and depth of listening, to find “high-passion” fans, who Lucchese says are more than five times more likely to spend money on things like concerts than the average listener.

The next step is taking advantage of this knowledge, Lucchese explains. One method Spotify uses is pre-sale ticket emails to superfans. “We've done over 100 of these, and the metrics are pretty nuts. The average open rate on these emails we're sending is 35% … and the click-through rates average about 18%.”

For most artists, Lucchese estimates that the majority of their revenue comes from 10-20% of their fan base. These are the ones that buy  concert tickets and merchandise, crucial elements in a music economy where streaming services (like Spotify) don’t usually provide the bulk of an artist’s income.
Lucchese wants artists to see Spotify as a valuable source of data.

And to show the types of insights Spotify can give, he starts listing the different types of superfans Spotify has identified.

Here are three basic categories:

• “Streakers”: people who've listened to the artist every day in the last week.
• "Loyalists": people who listen to an artist more than any other artist when they listen to Spotify.
• "Regulars": people who listened to an artist a majority of days in the past month.

The thinking is that information like this can help musicians plan their monetization strategy, and even their touring schedule (by finding out which areas of the country they are most popular in).

Hugh Hewitt Takes Over SRN's Morning Show

Talk radio host Hugh Hewitt takes over Salem Radio Network's nationally-syndicated morning drive time slot, starting today.

The revamped Hugh Hewitt Show will air weekdays from 6-9 am ET, from coast to coast. Hewitt is widely hailed as one of the sharpest intellects in conservative radio, and perhaps the best interviewer in the business. He's gained an even larger national following over recent months thanks to his participation as a panelist at four separate CNN/SRN Republican presidential debates. He's also emerged as a near-ubiquitous presence on television, particularly as a staple on NBC's venerable Sunday morning chat show, Meet the Press, and across CNN's lineup.

The announcement was made public last month.

Longtime SRN morning host Bill Bennett will stay on with the network as a commentator and maintain a significant on-air presence: “Keeping Bill in the Salem family, doing what he loves to do, was very important to us and we have found the perfect opportunity,” said Salem Senior VP Phil Boyce.

“Bill will be a huge contributor to the morning show going forward, and has already lined up some amazing interviews that will continue his legacy."

Talker Larry Elder fills Hewitt evening slot. Elder's show will air nationally from 6-9pm ET.  Meanwhile, listener favorites Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved will remain in their traditional time slots across the network.

SiriusXM To Provide 70-Hours Of Masters Coverage

SiriusXM has announced its comprehensive coverage for the 2016 Masters Tournament, which is highlighted by more than 70 hours of original talk programming, more than 20 hours of live Tournament play-by-play, several new shows hosted by past Masters champions and contenders, a guided course tour with Ben Crenshaw and Lou Holtz, and historic audio from the Augusta National archives.

Masters week on SiriusXM programming is available to subscribers nationwide on satellite radios (Sirius channel 208, XM channel 92), on the SiriusXM app and at SiriusXM.com.

"We're very pleased to be expanding our roster with distinguished hosts and enhancing our Masters week coverage," said Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM's President and Chief Content Officer.  "Our listeners are getting insight from a remarkable group of personalities - several of whom have competed in and won the Masters - giving our audience a very special perspective on the course, the competition and the Tournament's rich history."

Highlights include:

Live Masters Play-by-Play 
Listeners will hear live hole-by-hole commentary from Augusta National starting at 2:00 pm ET each day of play - Thursday, April 7, through Sunday, April 10 – that will follow the action on the course and provide updates on players moving up and down the leader board.

Access to the Masters Archives 
SiriusXM will give listeners access to rare audio from Augusta National's exclusive archives on a special Masters History show.  Airing April 4 at 1:00 pm ET (and replaying April 9 at 8:00 am ET), the show will feature an audio history of the Masters going back to its origins in the 1930s, Tournament highlights over many decades, archived interviews with legendary champions like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and more.

New SiriusXM Shows Debut from Augusta 
SiriusXM will debut three new shows live from Augusta, Ga., during Masters week, each hosted by players who finished at or near the top of the Masters leader board:

• 1982 Masters champion Craig Stadler will unveil his new show, I am the Walrus, so named for Stadler's longtime moniker. I am the Walrus premieres live from Augusta, Ga., on April 5 at 1:00 pm ET and will air monthly on SiriusXM PGA TOUR Radio.
• World Golf Hall of Fame member Hale Irwin, who has four top-five finishes in the Masters (1974, 1975, 1976, 1977), will host the debut of his new monthly show, The Follow Through with Hale Irwin and John Feinstein, live on April 6 at 1:00 pm ET.
• Dave Stockton, the renowned short game guru who finished as runner-up in the 1974 Masters, will premiere his new monthly show, Own Your Game, live from Augusta, Ga., on April 5 at 4:00 pm ET.

Tour of Augusta National with Crenshaw and Holtz 
Two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw and Lou Holtz, both SiriusXM hosts, will take listeners on a tour of the course, describing each hole from tee-to-green, and providing a first person perspective on the allure and challenges of the Masters. The special airs April 5 at 9:00 pm ET.

ESPN Audio Launches First Podcast Mini-Series

ESPN Audio will offer its first long-form podcasts, “Dunkumentaries,” a five-part series celebrating basketball’s most powerful shot by examining its history, memorable moments, impact and future.

Topics will include the impact on the sneaker business of Dee Brown’s performance at the 1991 NBA Dunk Contest, the first dunk by a woman in college basketball and how the only known tape of it was found 25 years after it happened, and whether creativity in dunks has run its course and there are no “new” dunks to do.  The project is a collaboration between ESPN Audio and ESPN Films, and is sponsored by Seat Geek.

Traug Keller

All five episodes will be published Tuesday, April 5; they range in length from 12 to 20 minutes.  They will be available on the ESPN app, iTunes, and other podcast platforms/apps, as well as on the web, including ESPN.com and espnW.com.

Contributing to the series are former NBA players Dee Brown and Leo Rautins, Tristan Thompson of the Cleveland Cavaliers, as well as basketball coaches, historians and journalists.  Voices from ESPN include SportsCenter’s Cari Champion, espnW’s Kate Fagan, David Jacoby of ESPN Radio’s weeknight Jalen & Jacoby, and reporter Ramona Shelburne.

“We offer more than 30 original podcasts, it is a rapidly growing business, and for a long time we’ve been looking to add long-form, narrative productions to our lineup,” said Traug Keller, who oversees ESPN Audio as ESPN senior vice president, production business divisions.  “Fans love to consume audio on their terms – when they want, where they want, and these creative and enterprising offerings provide compelling content.”

Added Ryan Nantell, ESPN Films’ producer of the project, “The slam dunk continues to awe fans on an almost daily basis.  We’ve all got our favorite dunks and dunk contest memories.  We wanted to take a closer look at the impact of those memories and the personalities connected to them.”

Report: Facebook Drops NFL Streaming Idea

Less than a month after Facebook Inc. confirmed its interest in live-streaming the National Football League next season, the social media giant has withdrawn from the bidding for Thursday games, according to Bloomberg.

While a deal to stream the most-watched American sport on the most-popular social network has obvious appeal, Facebook likes its live videos to be commercial-free and balked at the NFL’s traditional advertising model, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. Early morning London games that come with the deal were also a turn-off, according to the person.

The NFL is still shopping digital rights for its Thursday night games. Verizon Communications Inc., which already streams games to its wireless customers’ smartphones, Yahoo! Inc., which has streamed London games, and Amazon.com Inc. are considered contenders for the rights.

Aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, the NFL has used this recent round of negotiations for Thursday night games to aggressively court technology and telecommunications companies eager to serve so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known.

Need Headphones? Consider SennheiserHD 598s

The Sennheiser HD 598s are a throwback. They aren’t wireless, they don’t have a companion app, and they don’t rely on any digital processing to produce a more “fun” sound. Instead, they purely focus on the fundamentals: sounding great and being comfortable.

This is the case with much of the HD series, but at a typical street price of $150, the HD 598s are particularly good value for audio enthusiasts without hundreds to spend on higher-end cans. Right now, though, Amazon has them down to $130. That’s not the lowest they’ve been — they fell under $100 around Black Friday — but it’s a good discount all the same.

This deal applies to the “Special Edition” HD 598s, which are no different from the originals aside from using an all-black color palette instead of the usual brown and beige. If anything, it might be a more agreeable take on their retro look.

Either way, the HD 598s are comfortable, reports BusinessInsider. They’re lightweight, with plush velour earcups and a soft leatherette headband. There’s a fair amount of plastic here, so they don’t feel all that high-end, but they’re pleasant to wear for hours at a time.

That pleasantness applies to their sound, too. For this range, the HD 598s are clean, balanced, and accurate.

(Tom Notes...this article is NOT a paid advertisement!)

'Who's On First' Routine Made Famous On Radio

Abbott & Costello

Playball!  It's the first fullday of opening games for MLB and a good time to revisit one of comedy's funniest routines ever.

Comedian Bud Abbott once stated the famous Abbot & Costello routine 'Who's On First' was taken from an older routine called "Who's The Boss?", a performance of which can be heard in an episode of the radio comedy program It Pays to Be Ignorant from the 1940s.

After they formally teamed up in burlesque in 1936, he and Costello continued to hone the sketch. It was a big hit in 1937 when they performed the routine in a touring vaudeville revue called "Hollywood Bandwagon".

In February 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of The Kate Smith Hour radio program, and the sketch was first performed for a national radio audience that March. The routine may have been further polished before this broadcast by burlesque producer John Grant, who became the team's writer, and Will Glickman, a staff writer on the radio show. Glickman may have added the nicknames of then-contemporary baseball players like Dizzy and Daffy Dean to set up the routine's premise.

Here's the routine from an un-dated Abbott & Costello NBC radio show. Routine starts at marker 21:15...



This version, with extensive wordplay based on the fact that most of the fictional baseball team's players had "strange nicknames" that seemed to be questions, became known as "Who's on First?" Some versions continue with references to Enos Slaughter, which Costello misunderstands as "He knows" Slaughter. By 1944, Abbott and Costello had the routine copyrighted.

Abbott and Costello performed "Who's on First?" numerous times in their careers, rarely performing it exactly the same way twice. They did the routine for President Franklin Roosevelt several times.

An abridged version was featured in the team's 1940 film debut, One Night in the Tropics. The duo reprised the bit in their 1945 film The Naughty Nineties, and it is that longer version which is considered their finest recorded rendition. They also performed "Who's on First?" numerous times on radio and television (notably in The Abbott and Costello Show episode "The Actor's Home", widely considered the definitive version). Here it is...



In 1956 a gold record of "Who's on First?" was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

R.I.P.: WBBM Chicago Radio Reporter Dave Mitchell

A reporter for Chicago's WBBM Radio was killed Sunday morning after his vehicle crashed into a concrete barrier wall on Interstate 65 in northwest Indiana, the station confirmed.

David Mitchell

David L. Mitchell, 60, was driving at about 8:40 a.m. southbound on I-65 just north of 61st Avenue in Merrillville when he veered to the left, went off the road and struck the concrete median barrier wall.

ABC7 News Chicago reports Indiana State Police said it's undetermined why he veered off the road, and said in a statement that he may have had a medical incident prior to the crash. An autopsy is pending.

It does not appear that there are signs that his vehicle braked before the crash, state police said.

Mitchell, who was from Chicago but living in Lowell, Ind., was taken to South Lake Methodist Hospital in Merrillville where he pronounced dead.

According to WBBM Radio, he worked there since 1992 as a traffic reporter at the Sears Skydeck during the morning and evening rush hours, as well as a reporter/anchor. He worked as a broadcaster since 1973 at several stations in the Chicago area.

April 4 Radio History

In 1914...singer/actress Frances Langford was born Frances Newbern in Lakeland Florida.  Her fame began as the longtime vocalist (& skit player) on Bob Hope’s radio shows, her many USO tours with Hope, and her role as Blanche Bickerson opposite Don Ameche in The Bickersons, radio’s favorite battling couple.  She died from congestive heart failure July 11 2005 at age 89


In 1922...WAAB, Baton Rouge, Louisiana became the first station in the United States to have call letters that began with "W".


In 1938...after seven years of singing in the evening on the radio, Kate Smith began a new daily noontime quarter-hour talk show on CBS.

In 1996...the Howard Stern Radio program debuted on KJFK-FM, Austin, Texas.

Don Imus

In 2007...Don Imus called the Rutgers women basketball team "nappy-headed hos". The comment erupted into a firestorm of condemnation which a week later led to him being fired from his nationally syndicated radio show.

On April 4, 2007, during a discussion about the NCAA Women's Basketball Championship, Imus characterized the Rutgers University women's basketball team players as "rough girls," commenting on their tattoos. His executive producer Bernard McGuirk responded by referring to them as "hardcore hos". The discussion continued with Imus describing the girls as "nappy-headed hos" and McGuirk remarking that the two teams looked like the "jigaboos versus the wannabes" mentioned in Spike Lee's film, School Daze; apparently referring to the two teams' differing appearances.



After outrage from the initial reports, Imus dismissed the incident as "some idiot comment meant to be amusing".  He also stated that "nappy-headed hoes" is a term that rap artists use to refer to African-American women.

He said: "That phrase [nappy-headed ho] didn't originate in the White Community. That phrase originated in the Black community. Young Black women all through that society are demeaned and disparaged and disrespected by their own Black men, and they are called that name in Black hip hop."

In response to mounting public censure, Imus issued a statement of apology:

I want to take a moment to apologize for an insensitive and ill-conceived remark we made the other morning regarding the Rutgers women's basketball team, which lost to Tennessee in the NCAA championship game on Tuesday. It was completely inappropriate and we can understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we are sorry.

On April 9, Imus appeared on Al Sharpton's syndicated radio talk show, Keepin' It Real with Al Sharpton, to address the controversy. Sharpton called the comments "abominable", "racist", and "sexist", and repeated his earlier demand that Imus be fired. Imus said, "Our agenda is to be funny and sometimes we go too far. And this time we went way too far. Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it."

The Rutgers basketball team held a news conference at which coach C. Vivian Stringer stated that the team would meet with Imus to discuss his comments. Several of the players expressed their outrage over his remarks. Team captain Essence Carson said Imus' remarks had "stolen a moment of pure grace from us".

On April 11, 2007, Steve Capus of NBC News, announced that MSNBC would no longer simulcast Imus in the Morning, effective immediately. The next day, CBS Radio canceled Imus in the Morning, effective immediately. CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves stated:

From the outset, I believe all of us have been deeply upset and revulsed by the statements that were made on our air about the young women who represented Rutgers University in the NCAA Women's Basketball Championship with such class, energy and talent. There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision.  Moonves had met with Sharpton and Jesse Jackson shortly before the announcement was made.