CRS: Country Radio Has “At Home” Problem

Larry Rosin

Country music fans are dedicated radio listeners, but they are becoming increasingly disconnected from the music format when they walk through their front door, said Larry Rosin, co-founder and president of Edison Research.

According to the Nashville Tennessean, the time has come, Rosin said, to talk about the “hardware problem” facing country music.

Gone are the days when a majority of people listen to music on radios when they are outside of cars. Instead, they reach for cellphones and other mobile devices, such as laptops and tablets that don’t deliver a terrestrial radio signal.

Country radio needs to make sure that it is “easily available and top of mind” for people on those devices, too, Rosin said.

Providing access to radio on smartphones would be a “game changer for our industry,” said Jeff Smulyan, CEO of Emmis Communications, in a keynote address to open the conference Wednesday.

“Today, the only portable device that matters is the smartphone,” Smulyan said. “We need to be there.”

Earlier this year, Emmis represented a group of radio companies in a negotiation with Sprint Nextel that yielded a three-year deal that would make local FM radio signals available on some of the carriers smartphones through an app that Emmis would design. Smulyan said the goal is to get radio access on 300 million phones. The deal would require an annual investment of $15 million a year from radio, as well as an investment from Sprint, which would get a 30 percent share of revenue.

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