When streaming services first began to penetrate Australia, the major FM networks were quick to partner with the start-ups to hedge their bets should doomsday predictions for terrestrial radio finally come true.
SCA threw its lot in with Songl while NOVA Entertainment hitched their wagon to Rdio. ARN, half owned by US radio giant Clear Channel at the time, inherited iHeart. Besides them was Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and Google’s Play Music as well as a clutch of smaller ventures.
Since then, the field has narrowed significantly with only Spotify, Apple Music and iHeart holding any serious market share in Australia.
“Clearly we’ve got an audio platform that everyone else would die for called iHeart,” says ARN CEO Rob Atkinson.
Yet, he admits that ARN has been slow to capitalise on its strengths, “It’s light’s been hidden under a bushel for quite a while. And a lot of that’s our own fault, not really understanding what its core purpose was as that bridge between the analogue to the digital world. And the amount of data that that throws off that’s not only going to be useful from a content point of view but also from a commercial point of view.”
Last year, according to GfK’s comprehensive survey into Share of Audio, Spotify accounted for an 8.0% share of all listenng, Apple Music 1.6% and Pandora 1.5%. iHeart was barely a blip on the chart. But since Pandora quit the Australia and New Zealand markets, iHeart has been rapidly gaining ground.
“The interesting thing about Pandora, which we didn’t really pick up on until their demise,” says Mr Atkinson, “was that we’re the closest thing to Pandora because of our Artist Radio. So, the vast majority of the people who have moved across from Pandora to us – and it’s been at a rate of 1,000 a day – they have gone straight to Artist Radio and said, ‘play me Bruno Mars’ and then the algorithm gives you everything that sounds like Bruno Mars.
“For many it’s their first move towards streaming and they’re not necessarily equipped yet with the confidence to go, ‘I’ll create my own radio playlist and my own station,’ they want the algorithm to do it for them. That’s where iHeart has won the day. Pandora’s unfortunate demise has been very useful for iHeart.”
Source: Commercial Radio Australia: GfK Share of Audio
Says Mr Atkinson, “With iHeart we can house so much more content – we’ve got the ABC, SBS. And then you’ve got podcasting and iHeart for businesses which includes playlists for retailers and other businesses.
“We see radio as part of the audio landscape, we recognise that. We know people are moving towards discovering our content on multiple devices in multiple locations, on multiple platforms. I think we’re readymade to take advantage of it as and when that audience migrates,” he says.
So where does that place radio right now?
“Whichever way you look at it, radio still takes the lion’s share of listening and that’s the important bit. If we get the core fundamentals right and our ratings continue to steam ahead then that part of the business will drive everything else,” says Mr Atkinson.
