Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Most Powerful Name in Music?

Perez Hilton!



Earlier in the week it was reported that our favorite cat-fighting celeb gossip hound was in negotiations to start his own music label. If I were an aspiring pop artist I would be jumping through rings of fire to get signed by Perez's new label-if it were to come to pass.

He is a force to be reckoned with and his web traffic is off the map:
The power of the web continues to roll.

Who from your station is your local web superstar? Your top-rated morning show? Your afternoon talk host? Maybe your award-winning newsroom?

I hope so.

Coincidence?

eMarketer published a poll conducted by Harris Interactive chronicling the daily online activities of US college students which they defined as 18-30 years old. Keep in mind this survey does not include cell phones, pda's etc., so no text messaging. Quite honestly no real surprises here. So the reason I'm posting the results? The percentage of students that download music. 25%.

If you happened to watch my multimedia podcast not long ago you would have seen this graph:
It's the nationwide 10 year AQH Rating trend of 18-24 year olds from Arbitron. The shockingly steep decline was just shy of 25%. Hmmm.

  • Daily music downloads 25%/Rating point decline 25%

For a significant portion of listeners of all ages, in the past, music discovery was an important part of the radio experience. These data suggest, at least in the abstract, that the music discovery component of radio may also be in significant decline. I have to admit I am guessing here, since it would be impossible to correlate that information from the available data. But, I think it's a good guess.

I can't say it enough, these 18-24's will be graduating into the 25-54 demo before we can blink and based on the declining numbers, unless some dramatic change happens, we won't be welcoming many of them into the P1 radio club.