My Radio Streaming State of Mind!

I haven’t used an alarm clock or a clock radio in many years but I still couldn’t come to dispose of one the other day.  I was thinking I might still need it if I wake up during the night and because it is an atomic variety, it is a cool clock.  But at my age, it isn’t bright enough to read.

According to a new study by Arbitron and Edison Research, a third of Americans over the age of 12 now use their cell phone to wake up compared to 12% who use a clock radio and 22% who still use a dedicated alarm clock.

Surprisingly,  a full third use some other means, probably meaning they rely on someone else to wake them up. I doubt they are all disabling “helicopter” parents.

In fact, I hardly listen to over-the-air radio anymore except for the local NPR station in snippets when I’m shaving or making coffee in the morning or occasionally in the car.  I find it more efficient to read NPR news shows via a smartphone app.  Reading is much faster and more flexible than listening.  It is also easier that way to forward something of interest.

I may not renew my subscription to satellite radio which has been useful on several cross-country road trips.  Being among the 28% who now have a Bluetooth in-car connection, I discovered a few years ago that it is much easier to stream the news via my smartphone through my car radio and much more enjoyable to listen to music that way via Pandora.

Pandora is measured as part of what is called online radio. In use by more than 80 million Americans since its launch in 2005, Pandora has an incredible 69% awareness level according to this new study.

If you are among the 3 in 10 Americans who are unaware, Pandora permits you to set up personal radio formats using a particular artist or song and then fine tune it by pressing a thumbs down to eliminate a song or a thumbs up to encourage more of that same type in the future.

More than 27% have listened to Pandora in last month and a fifth listened to it within the last week.  More than 45% are already aware of iHeart, a Pandora wanna-be but  driven more as a means to access over-the-air radio stations through streaming (app downoads of Pandora lead by more than 3 to 1.)

iHeart lumps Durham, where I live, in with what it calls the Raleigh, NC market, so if I’m ever inclined to use it to reach an old-fashioned radio station, I am probably just as inclined to select stations in Austin or other areas with stations that haven’t been homogenized (smile.)

Regardless, I find it easier when listening to old-fashioned stations or specific albums or artists or tracks at home or in the car to stream using Rhapsody as I have since 2004 which peaked my interest the following year in Sonos, a wirless, multi-room home HiFi system with access to countless online music services.

All of this is a huge shift.  In 2010 when I retired, only 6% of cell phone owners had ever listened to online radio via their car stereo.  That is now up to 21%.  As the scope of over-the-air radio becomes more and more the same, Pandora and Rhapsody are also a great way to explore new music.

For instance, when I became aware of a new country-folk group called The Lumineers while watching a Hulu Plus-streamed clip of the Chickeneers on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week (shown on YouTube here,) it took only seconds to tap into not only The Lumineers but a lot of other artists in that category that were new to me.

Not bad for someone who is now Medicare-eligible!  Of course, to my grandsons, ages 7 and 9, things tethered by a cord or restricted to over-the-air broadcast are historical artifacts.

By the way, the new study notes that in the month prior to the survey percentage of Americans over 12-years-of-age who watched TV shows by streaming or downloading them did so as follows:

21% on a television screen

19% on a desktop or laptop

8% on a tablet

7% on a cell phone

Studies such as this try to put the best face possible on traditional formats for TV and radio by pointing out that 45% of the population have digital video recorders (DVRs) and more people listen to online radio (including Pandora) than watch videos online through services such as YouTube.

Lost in the findings that 84% in a car and 62% at work still rely mostly on AM/FM radio is that these numbers are rapidly shrinking.  A sign that the “hoofbeats” of streaming are rapidly gaining is that 67% of homes now have a WiFi network compared to just 9% in 2011 and one in four already have five or more devices connected.

More than half of Americans over 12 have a smartphone including 17% my age or older and three-quarters of those between ages 18 and 34. More than half download music, and 44% listen to online radio compared to 57% who play games, 83% who browse the Internet and 90% who use this device to take photographs.  One in three Americans already have a tablet.

If this all sounds strange to you, just blink.  While I doubt they will ever become entirely extinct – after all we still use fax machines – the writing is on the wall for over-the-air radio and TV as well as cable.

Not only is this of great concern for those who make their living or fortunes with these technologies but even given just the capital costs involved it must seem as the saying goes, “like changing a jet engine in midair.” But shift they must.

The only thing in question is which replacement business model will be most successful in the future and how fast will it become obsolete as well.

Down Time

Homes in the U.S. now have nearly half a billion devices connected to the Internet.  According to research by The NPD Group, nearly 4 out of 10 consumers who used to use PCs to access content have switched to tablets and smartphones instead.

Reading and sending email migrated to mobile devices many years ago, but today Internet browsing is the number one activity to have migrated to mobile platforms and reading books and magazines and I suspect newspapers is tied for third.

So when your Internet connection acts up as mine did for four days last week, I easily switched to my phone and tablet by turning off Wi-Fi but I was unable to research and write daily essays which I still find practical only on a PC.

I used the down time last week to catch up on my reading, which I now do primarily on tablet and smartphone anyway.  With access across to the same book over several very portable platforms, I find myself reading far more than the four books read each year by the average American.

As it is for 40% of tablet users and 56% of smartphone users, that is also how I access and listen to music including my personal collection of nearly 4,000 tracks dating back to but not including the hundreds of compact cassette tapes in my closet.

According to NPD research, two-thirds of U.S. consumers listen to music in their vehicle (which for me can also access services such as Pandora or my personal music library,) while about half listen on their PC and a quarter through their TV.

Unlike my Kindle which I left behind a few years ago when the app made it possible to read on my tablet or smartphone, research shows that having more connected devices results in greater use across platforms.

This isn’t going away, but apparently, I’m still pretty rare for my age cohort.  That will change.

However, it isn’t at all clear if a majority of members of the U.S. Congress or the General Assembly in North Carolina, where I live, have a handle on the importance of infrastructure overall let alone Internet infrastructure, in part because they read so little.

Maybe they need a little down time to catch up on their reading!

15 Favorite Guitarists

One of my good friends and fellow bloggers, Bill Geist is also a former radio Deejay.  I look forward each week to his “Music Fridays” posts.

I thought of Bill when I spotted a headline earlier this week on the website for Rolling Stone Magazine about the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.  But before opening that link I couldn’t help but try first to come up some of my favorites.

So here are 15 of my favorites, in no particular order, but spanning some of the many genres, ages, genders, ethnicities and decades included in my eclectic taste in music:

Keith Richards – Start Me Up

Carlos Santana – Black Magic Woman

George Harrison - I Feel Fine

B.B. King – The Thrill Is Gone

Bonnie Raitt – Love Me Like A Man

Vince Gill – How Great Thou Art

Jerry Garcia – Teach Your Children

Santos Farina – Sleep Walk

Eric Clapton – Layla

Jimi Hendrix – Star Spangled Banner

Ruby Jane Smith – Beautiful You, Happy Me

Duane Eddy – Rebel-rouser

Henry Garza – Heaven

Tatyana Ryzhkova - JS Bach Sonata

George Benson – The Shadow of Your Smile

Oh, and if you’re not inclined to open the link to Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest, here is how they ranked the 15 above (remember, I didn’t order mine):  Richards #10, Santana #15, Harrison #21, B.B. King #3 Clapton #4, Jerry Garcia #13 and Jimi Hendrix #1.

Something tells me that eclectic wasn’t a part of their evaluation.

Music Engages More Regions Of The Brain Than Anything

Many people who have been come to know her over her more than twenty-year career in community/destination marketing (DMO) have been surprised to learn that my successor in Durham has undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, degrees often cited as excellent preparation for admission to professional schools.

Music is obviously also a perfect preparation for running a DMO!

In her new book Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson, notes that neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin has discovered that “music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requires all the different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing in various forms and makes us think differently.”

Levitin, who wrote the book This Is Your Brain On Music,directs the McGill University Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise in Montreal. He has noted that “music engages more regions of the brain than anything else.”

Additionally, in remarks at the University of Miami, he noted that “brain studies also indicate that components of expertise that contribute to superior performance include memory, attention, will power, belief in self, physical configuration and an ability to view multiple failures as necessary steps to succeed…”

One of Professor Davidson’s popular classes at Duke University substitutes the word “Internet” for the word “music.” The preparation materials for This Is Your Brain On The Internet, note that “the kind of research one does every day on the Internet helps one to think in a creative, collaborative, nonlinear fashion.”

Her new book makes the case that along with gaming, the Internet is giving us a model for how to reform public education. This month, we’re seeing the eighth class of first year students entering college who have grown up with the Internet as a given, a central part of the household, play and work.

Davidson’s new book makes a compelling case for a fresh look at the core benefits that subjects such as art and music bring to a holistic education. In the book, she also notes that the people who originated both the IQ test and the objective, multiple-choice exam, both warned against their use during their lifetimes and why.

Yet today, we find a major part of every class year devoted to taking standardized tests that measure only memorization and are largely irrelevant to the workplace. Davidson argues that the literacy skill to learn, unlearn and relearn must be added to the old three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Education according to Davidson must now include “three new Rs “rigor, relevance, and relationships.” Maybe innovation is right under our nose.