How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Added on Wednesday, August 22, 2012

How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music

By BEN SISARIO For decades, the song of the summer would emerge each year following a pattern as predictable as the beach tides.

Pop radio would get it rolling before school let out, and soon the song — inevitably one with a big, playful beat and an irresistible hook — would blare from car stereos everywhere. Then came prom singalongs as the song finally became ubiquitous around the Fourth of July. In 1987, it was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” In 2003, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.”

But the success of this summer’s hit, Carly Rae Jepsen’s cheerfully flirty “Call Me Maybe,” shows how much the hitmaking machine, as well as the music industry itself, has been upended by social media.

Only a year ago, the charts were dominated by stars who had come out of the old machine of radio and major-label promotion: Katy Perry, Rihanna, Adele, Maroon 5. This year’s biggest hits — “Call Me Maybe,” Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Fun.’s “We Are Young” — started in left field and were helped along by YouTube and Twitter before coming to the mainstream media.

For “Call Me Maybe,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks, the longest run of the year, the critical piece was YouTube. After Justin Bieber and friends posted a video of themselves lip-syncing to it in February, hundreds of fan tributes followed. Alongside Ms. Jepsen’s own video, which has been watched 212 million times, versions by Katy Perry, the Cookie Monster (“Share It Maybe”) and the United States Olympic swim team turned it into a yearlong audiovisual meme.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

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.

Radio Ads Coming Back

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Monday, February 20, 2012

Radio Ads Are Coming Back, and the Presidential Run Will Help 

By BEN SISARIO

Radio advertising, badly hit by the recession, is bouncing back.

According to a report released Friday by the Radio Advertising Bureau, revenue from radio advertising last year was $17.4 billion, up 1 percent from the year before. Automotive companies, the largest category of sponsors, made up 26 percent of spending.

It was the second year of growth for the industry, after three down years. Spending in 2010 was $17.3 billion, up 6 percent from the year before. But the market is still down 18 percent from 2007, when ad revenue was $21.3 billion, according to the advertising bureau, whose data is collected by the accounting firm Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Company.