The internet radio industry has seen greater strides in 2010 than at any time since I first became involved with it in 1997. The broadcast radio industry has also, this year, shown a greater awareness of how far behind it's become online. Whether this combination of activity and awareness brings about a better 2011 for either group depends on a few items - some shared, some isolated to either pureplay or broadcaster.

A few of the areas needing attention are in separating your station from the pack, getting a better grip on the analytics & metrics within your reach, being found, and anticipating what is about to happen and stick. None seems high on either pureplay or broadcast agendas. The same can be said for attempts at improving programs used to attract audience.

"Many owners in the long tail chose to just play music, performance royalty rates be damned."

The radio industry has plenty of bones in its closet since consolidation. Great ideas that died on the vine, especially those related to the internet, are easy to list. In nearly all cases, I recall failure came from a desire to create an internet presence without fully understanding how the audience uses this recently adopted medium. A second error was attempting to do things online on-the-cheap. It can't be done.

Pureplay, broadcaster, these were separate worlds in the beginning. Today the quality of broadcast content has dwindled to a point matching the slow-to-improve content presented by internet-only stations. We're at a point where a huge number of radio outlets, providing mostly the playing of songs and little more, only succeed at fragmenting the audience into larger numbers of smaller groups. As internet radio becomes more easily accessible in the car, fragmentation will increase in ratio to broadcast radio's inability to deliver local content.

Earlier this year we saw a buzz on Pandora's founder, Tim Westergren, stating that Pandora paid 44-45% of SoundExchange royatlies. That was followed by a few "experts" translating this data into "Pandora has 44% of the total internet pureplay radio audience listening." I am not be able to prove this point, but it's my guess that the figure is not even close to reality.

There is a huge number of internet radio stations flying under the royalty radar. Many owners in the long tail chose to just play music, performance royalty rates be damned. These stations make up the extremely long tail of radio moving into 2011.

The long tail applies to the radio industry in a much more impactful way than, say, auto dealers or cell phone makers. If you list the top radio companies online, it shows the same names seen in the list of top radio industry companies, with the addition of a few outstanding (early mover) pureplay radio stations. But lift the veil, and you'll see tens of thousands of internet radio stations, each drawing a few dozen to a few hundred listeners.

There's no credible data on the number of internet stations or the overall size of internet radio's audience. (Estimates are based on a comScore panel, Ando Webcast Metrics reporting of client-only station stats, without comments from other major players like Live365, GotRadio, Shoutcast, or Loudcity.)

And speaking of online data in a world where media buyers demand a growing map of metrics showing campaign progress or failure, the whole of the radio industry - online and off - still ignores the call. Few are the numbers of people in radio who push this industry towards an accountable relationship with advertisers, even though it's possible to do with over the air campaigns, and easy to do with advertisers of radio web sites.

There's just no movement, anywhere in radio, on showing quantified ROI to advertisers, though there has always been a continuing stream of talk.

In the "anticipation of what's happening" department, I find the rush to create radio station Facebook and Twitter accounts similar in size to the mistake made when the radio industry chose to chase Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in 1997. So much action, with so little results. (Add LMiV as an analogy, too.)

Smartphone use is growing and needs to be included in your scheme of having audio content available on all platforms, though smartphones are not the breadbasket for radio.

All eyes need to be on Detroit's move to making internet connectivity a dashboard standard. This only means that the terrestrial radio industry must focus on creating content separating it from the long tail of mediocrity delivered by internet radio.

Radio content is ubiquitous. So, once you've created better audio programs, the key for 2011 is to use new, efficient ways for being found. My research shows Facebook doesn't deliver audience efficiently. Try improving search rank or adding affiliate web sites that host a link to your stream.

Your New Year's goal should be to put your program everywhere.

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