 CBS Radio gets it; Mason and Goodman appear in Chicago ·Apr 29, 06:53 AM For a company that was the last to the table among major broadcast groups when it came to streaming their radio stations online — see RAIN‘s May 2000 open letter to Mel Karmazin, “Mel, it’s time to start streaming“ — CBS Radio has made extremely impressive progress over the past year or so. Under returning CBS Radio CEO Dan Mason, who was brought back by CBS Corp.‘s Les Moonves to replace Joel Hollender a little over a year ago, CBS Radio seems to have made a CBS’s boldest move to date has been Moonves’s $280 million cash acquisition of U.K.-based Last.fm, which is not so much a “radio” site per se as it is a social-networking platform that’s getting into the business of ad-sponsored on-demand plays of specific songs and albums. (That puts them more in competition with iTunes and Rhapsody, I believe, than with radio. It thus makes sense that Last.fm is in CBS’s “interactive” division rather than its “radio” Another bold move at CBS is CBS Radio’s recent announcement that they’re taking over management of the back-end infrastructure for AOL Radio and that, as part of the deal, the various free channels of XM Radio that AOL has offered in the past will be replaced by CBS Radio stations from around the country. This afternoon (Tuesday 4/29), Mason and his marketing chief David Goodman are appearing in Chicago as part of a cross-country tour on which they’re describing CBS Radio’s strategy (”Rethink: The Next Generation of Radio“) to advertisers. (Hey! Wait! “The Next Generation of Radio” has been AccuRadio‘s positioning statement for the past several years! As Jack Benny might have said, “Well!“). We’ve been invited to attend and will report on it in tomorrow’s RAIN, but it’s clearly another bold step in the right direction. Being like PaleyI’m not sure the timing actually makes sense, but it’s almost as if Moonves and Mason were inspired by a chapter of Seth Godin’s most-recent book, “Meatball Sundae.” (Covered previously in RAIN here.)
Here’s what Godin wrote: “Be like Paley. No, don’t do what Paley did. That won’t work. Instead, think what Paley thought. “William S. Paley built CBS from a small radio station into one of the big three TV networks, generating a fortune in the process…” “By investing in both stations and content, Paley built a media entity that dominated the country for more than fifty years. Paley’s investments (in stations, in shows, in newscasts) paid for themselves many times over… “Most of the existing gatekeepers… are going to fight the new realities. These gatekeepers are going to work hard to force the world back into the configuration where they used to thrive. “A few, though, will understand that getting in sync with the new systems is far easier and more profitable than the old guys ever were.” share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
Comment Other blog entries Book your TUESDAY travel to Washington, DC! Want to experiment with a new approach to drive times? Kurt's iPad review: Absolutely, astonishingly game-changing! Apple iPad: No Flash, no multitasking... yet What might the Apple tablet mean to online radio? Missing the obvious: NBC did. Are you too? Conan: Classiest, smartest guy in the whole NBC/ Leno imbroglio Lesson for radio?: NBC's value today is in its cable channels Internet radio is coming to your nightstand's clock-radio Best RAIN Summit ever? Maybe! Thanks to everyone |
clear commitment to radio programming delivered across all delivery mechanisms, including AM/FM, HD, streaming, and podcasting. (See their logo at left, which states their position very vividly.)
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