The print industry has long had to deal with disruptive aggregators, but for radio, this conflict is just starting to take shape.
Promising mobile apps like Swell and AGOGO launched this summer, representing a new challenge to legacy media companies like National Public Radio. These apps create new listening experiences for consumers of talk and news because they tie together segments of audio into customizable and curated streams.
AGOGO combines podcasts with segments from NPR, the BBC, audio from videos and text-to-speech versions of newspaper articles. And Swell has been dubbed the “Pandora for news.”
I’m a producer at an NPR member station, and these are frightening words in my world. Pandora dealt a massive wound to our cousins in music radio. The advertising dollars Pandora sucked up will likely never return to the table for terrestrial radio. That's just the new reality.
Despite the presence of podcasts and a handful of radio-streaming apps already on the market, talk and news distributors have largely been spared a Pandora-style disruption. Yet Pandora is still the elephant in the room, the boogie-man we know is out there.
“The monopoly advantage of the radio tower will begin to fade,” former NPR Chief Executive Officer Vivian Schiller said. “New digital-only startups will enter the marketplace in audio, and you will find yourselves longing for the days when the competition was that public radio station that overlapped with your broadcast signal.”
Outgoing NPR CEO Gary Knell, who announced his resignation Monday, has echoed these concerns as well. In a July Wall Street Journal interview, Knell said NPR was working on a “Pandora for news.”
“It’s a work in progress,” he said. “But we're all over this, because if we don't do this we're not going to last.”
In the world of terrestrial radio, aggregation is new, but curation is not a foreign concept. At my radio station, we curate a mix of NPR national news and locally produced content for a local audience of about 40,000 listeners a month. You can hear Michelle Norris in the mornings and Ira Glass on the weekends, but you’ll also hear news that we think is relevant to the local community.
Its strength is that it’s a one-touch solution that allows you to multitask while you consume the content. Of course, it’s not a personalized solution since it doesn’t react to the user.
A savvy consumer can already buck the system a little. They can download podcasts of "This American Life," and they can stream national content directly from NPR.org. But the reason why my employer still exists is because local matters to people. This, anyway, is the party line. And it’s what I told JD Heilprin, CEO of AGOGO when we sat down for an interview.
I said we know that our listeners want good national content, so the station carries NPR programming. But we want to give them things that are relevant to their surroundings, so we mix in some local news and talk, too. In a world without signal monopoly, that’s the value proposition of the local radio station.
“Which is precisely the way that we look at it as well,” Heilprin told me.
AGOGO acts a little more like a local radio station than the blank slate Pandora provides. Like Pandora, it will react to your specific input by saving content that you like and giving you more of it. But if you provide it with your commute information, it’ll give you traffic and weather for your area. Location data helps it find news and sports scores for your area. It’ll even provide your horoscope for the day.
It’s still Pandora-like in that you can either sit-back and listen, or you can actively curate your streams. But Heilprin doesn’t talk a lot about Pandora. He talks about Twitter.
“We’ve quickly become a Twitter-enabled world where the world changes and it changes very quickly," he said. "Things like radio and satellite radio are not really equipped to service that world.”
Developers at NPR know that “Pandora for news” isn’t the end-all-be-all solution it sounds like.
“‘Pandora for news' is an easy way to explain to the public the breadth of our ambition,” said Demian Perry, head of mobile for NPR. Perry is responsible for the Infinite Player, a little-known digital experiment that offers a continuous shuffle of NPR content and reacts to your up or down votes.
“We want to create a listening app for the spoken word that is as elegant and addictive as Pandora's solution for music,” Perry told me.
The Infinite Player is only optimized for the chrome desktop browser, although a beta app for iPhone has been available since May. Recent additions have included “channels” not unlike AGOGO’s, which stream topic-based content like “Music in Performance” and “Just the News.”
Perry also thinks Twitter has some good lessons for audio apps.
“Twitter finds ways of surfacing content that is trending now," he said. "That’s something that’s interesting to us."
But he’s quick to shoot down the notion that any one model will “crack the code” of digital audio in the talk space.
"For us to succeed we need to be open to the ideas of the whole tech community," Perry said. "It's not a problem that we can solve alone.”
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