“Beyond the Clouds”: Insider Perceptions on the Transmutation of Terrestrial Radio in Canada

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how leaders in the Canadian radio industry perceive, and plan to react to, nascent personalized music streaming services. Recently, Internet-based music services like Jango and Rdio have launched in Canada, providing listeners with an alternative music experience to conventional broadcast radio. In this article, we analyze 5 interviews with experts from terrestrial radio, on-demand services, and government regulation to create a conceptualized listener profile. This profile supports the central finding of this research: should certain factors remain in place, conventional radio is likely to continue dominating as the leading commercial audio platform for Canadians in the years to come.

Notes

¹Canadian Content Development (CCD) consists of funding initiatives by broadcasters like Astral and Rogers to help create and promote audio content using Canadian resources. According to the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunication Commission, such initiatives provide support, promotion, training, and development of Canadian musical and spoken word talent, including journalists.

²Unlike traditional television and radio broadcasting services, broadcasting services that are delivered and accessed over the Internet or received by mobile devices (new media broadcasters) were exempted by the CRTC from licensing requirements of Canada's Broadcasting Act.

³Spotify was founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Spotify is incorporated in Luxembourg and privately funded by the owners. The name is a combination of the words “spot” and “identify” (Spotify Company Information, 2011).

⁴According to information published by the Financial Times of London, Spotify has 3 million paid users world-wide, 1 million of which reside in the United States. In the same article, Spotify founder Ek told the FT that its paid subscribers represented more than 20% of its active user base (Bradshaw, 2012).

⁵These are speculative figures which were calculated using the number of global Facebook users who have signed up to use Spotify (APP Data, 2012).

⁶According to TechCrunch's Eric Schonfeld, Pandora had 80 million registered users and 800,000 songs from 80,000 artists. Registered users grew from 22 million in 2009 to 46 million in 2010. The hours of music listened to on the service similarly doubled from 1 billion hours per year in fiscal 2009 to 2.1 billion in fiscal 2010 (Schonfeld, 2011).

⁷CBC is a federally funded radio broadcaster while Astral is a privately funded undertaking.

⁸Radio experts: 1) Rob Farina, Vice President of Content at Astral Media; 2) Duff Roman, former Vice-President of Industry Affairs with CHUM Limited, former President and founding member of FACTOR, the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records; and 3) David Bray, President Bray & Partners Communications, Broadcast programming consultant and consultant on numerous successful CRTC broadcast license applications.

On-demand expert: 4) Former Vice-President of Content and Regulatory Affairs with a Montréal- based digital music company.

Regulation expert: 5) Michel Arpin, former Vice Chair of the CRTC and former Senior Advisor of Regulatory affairs with Astral Media.

⁹The BlackBerry dominated the market for mobile email, until Apple's iPhone was introduced in 2007, but is now third in smartphone market share.

¹⁰12–17 is the official teen listening demographic as outlined by Canada's Radio measurement organization BBM.

¹¹Canadian Television Network, owned by Bell Media.

¹²The 2011 results are from CMRI's Media Trends Survey conducted November-December 2011 among a representative national sample of approximately 900 Anglophone respondents aged 18-plus. The results were posted by chief of CMRI, Barry Kiefl, on his media blog in 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pierre C. Bélanger

Pierre C. Bélanger (Ph.D., Université de Montréal, 1992) is a professor of Communications in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in Canadian media and telecommunications industries and in the sociology of technological innovations.

Geoffrey Manchester

Geoffrey Manchester (M.A., University of Ottawa, 2012) is a prospective doctoral student whose research interests pertain to the intersection of digital technologies, music and Canadian culture.