 RAIN 9/9: Amie Street will focus on Net radio-like Songza after selling download service to Amazon ·Sep 9, 12:03 PM SOCIALLY-FOCUSED SONGZA PROVIDES CUSTOM-BUILT “RADIO” STREAMSAmazon has purchased music download service Amie Street and plans to shutter the service. That leaves the Amie Street team free to further develop Songza, a Net radio-like service they acquired in 2008. Songza provides custom-built stations with an emphasis on social networking — users can share their music, create their own stations and even request a song or artist from a particular station.
According to Ars Technica (here), Information Week (here), All Things Digital (here) and others, Amie Street Inc. will remain independent of Amazon and will pursue the development of Songza on their own. Amazon reportedly only purchased the company’s music download service, which will be incorporated into Amazon’s own MP3 store. However, other sources — including CNet (here) — report that Amazon has in fact acquired all of Amie Street Inc. and will use the team to develop Songza for its own purposes. That would put Amazon head-to-head with Google and Apple, both of which are rumored to have streaming music plans of their own. We think this isn’t exactly correct though — it seems that Amie Street Inc. is taking Songza to the next level on their own. RAIN SUMMIT EAST AD PANEL WILL SHOW WHAT NET RADIO LOOKS LIKE TO AD BUYERSA panel focusing solely on advertisers’ perspectives in Internet radio will be featured at RAIN Summit East, and we’re happy to today announce the panelists. The discussion will include Christina F. Santos, Marketing Strategist and Media Director for ICF International — a 19-year veteran of marketing, advertising, branding and new media strategy.
Joining Santos will be Lisa Kleinman (pictured right). RAIN Summit East is an official co-located event of the RAB/NAB Radio Show. It takes place Tuesday, September 28 in Washington D.C. The Summit will feature a long list of radio experts, from Bonneville president/CEO Bruce Reese to AccuRadio COO John Gehron. More details, and information on how to register, can be found here. We hope to see you there! NIELSEN: SMARTPHONE USERS DOWNLOADING MORE APPSA new survey from Nielsen shows that smartphone users are downloading more apps than they were last year. Users who downloaded at least one app in the previous 30 days have an average of 27 applications on their device, up from 22 last December. When just looking at iPhone users, the average app count jumps to 40 per device.
As for what type of apps most people download, Nielsen found that games were most popular, but social networking is close behind. In fact, Facebook was the most popular app across all smartphone platforms. That’s not surprising, considering Nielsen also recently found that web users spend a quarter of their time online using social networking sites (more coverage here). The Wall Street Journal has more coverage here. MORE BUZZ ABOUT STERN’S NET RADIO PROSPECTSThere’s more talk about the advantages of Howard Stern going digital once his contract with Sirius XM is up, this time from New York Daily News. In the article, RAIN publisher Kurt Hanson proposes that Stern launching a streaming radio app “would speed acceptance further.”Talkers magazine editor Michael Harrison agrees, arguing that Stern could overcome digital monetization issues because he “would be selling something not available anywhere else – himself.” Read more from NYDailyNews.com here. share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
CommentCommenting is closed for this article.  Other stories RAIN has upgraded (and moved)! RAIN 9/13: RAIN Summit Chicago takes place today! RAIN 9/12: First Summit in RAIN's hometown takes place tomorrow RAIN 9/9: Summer holidays, "doldrums" impact July Webcast Metrics, but audience up over last year RAIN 9/8: Clear Channel launches new customizable iHeartRadio beta; RAIN goes hands-on RAIN 9/7: Meet more speakers you'll hear at RAIN Summit Chicago in less than a week RAIN 9/6: Clear Channel taps The Echo Nest to take on Pandora RAIN 9/2: RAIN reviews Spotify's radio-like product Artist Radio RAIN 9/1: UK online radio aggregator Radioplayer campaigns b'dcasters to create "all radio" ratings RAIN 8/31: Execs from Merlin, Triton Digital, jacAPPS and more to appear at RAIN Summit Chicago |
She currently serves as VP/Associate media Director of Local Broadcast at Hill Holiday, where she has spent 13 years. Amy Bickers of Starcom will also appear on the panel. Ando Media 
