Two Apps, TuneIn and iHeart Radio, Put Radio Online

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 06, 2012

Two Apps, TuneIn and iHeart Radio, Put Radio Online

By BEN SISARIO

For the radio industry, there may be no better symbol for the challenges of adapting to the digital age than two candy-colored mobile apps.

The apps, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, are aggregators — conduits for thousands of online radio streams. With a few taps on a smartphone, a listener can dart among a pop station in New York, gospel in Atlanta and talk almost anywhere.

Both have quickly amassed big audiences. TuneIn, which offers 70,000 streams from around the world, has more than 30 million monthly users. IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, has been downloaded 95 million times and has attracted more than 12 million registered users.

For broadcasters, these aggregators can help reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio, which can mean anything from a customized playlist on Pandora or Spotify to an iTunes stream.

“Our mission is about getting our content to as wide an audience as possible,” said Anil Dewan, the director of interactive media at KCRW, a public station in Santa Monica, Calif., whose digital outlets include TuneIn, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Spotify and an app of its own.

At the same time, many broadcasters say they worry about the rising costs of online royalties; the plans of the companies behind the apps; and the possibility of being lost within the aggregators, like needles in enormous digital haystacks.

Both aggregators let users find stations by typing a city, genre or station name into their search bars. TuneIn also points listeners to any station currently playing a given artist or song; iHeartRadio has an extensive custom-radio function, modeled after Pandora.

But as businesses they represent two poles of media. TuneIn, in Palo Alto, Calif., which started as a simple directory, transformed itself into an app purveyor two years ago, with streams that include not only radio and podcasts, but also emergency scanner signals.