Station Managers creating their own Radio Apps on iPhone and other smartphones
The US radio groups have been busy building iPhone apps with multiple stations in one app, some of these apps like iheartradio from ClearChannel are really popular, but this concept hides the brand identity of the individual Radio Stations. The individual Radio Station, being one of several hundreds in a list inside the app, cannot leverage their brand and benefit from the loyalty of their customers.
We had a chat with Mikko Linnamäki, CEO of, spodtronic, a company specialized in making Radio apps for mobile phones. We discussed with him the current situation and role of Radio Stations in the mobile world.
Q: Hi Mikko, everyone is talking about iPhone Apps and iTunes App Store, how do radio stations fit in there? We don’t see too many of the US stations in the App Store yet.
Mikko: Hi, I would describe the situation like this: Music applications such as Pandora and Last.fm are extremely popular, having several million users already. We can see radio groups bringing in their apps now, and the popularity is increasing. But most of the US radio stations don’t have their own apps yet.
I think that the cost of creating Radio apps has been the hurdle for the individual stations, since the cost of the creation of an app for iPhone has been several thousand dollars, and if you want to add Android and Blackberry as well, the total cost has been around 10K each.
These kinds of budgets are not available in this market, and that has lead the radio groups to the conclusion of making just one App with all the stations inside using a new umbrella brand.
Q: But wouldn’t it make more sense for a radio station to use their brand popularity to create their own branded apps?
Mikko: Absolutely, so if we look at the iHeartradio app from ClearChannel, I heard that it has had 1 million downloads to date. That’s a great number, but inside it are over 150 of the finest radio stations from the US, each capable of creating 100K downloads. Do the math! Iheartradio, as the brand, has not attained the potential of reaching 150 x 100K users. That is at least 15 million users! So the individual stations are far more popular than a collection.
Q: I understand what you mean. But if every radio station needs to contract one developer for iPhone, another one for Android, Blackberry ad Nokia, this will be a very expensive and time consuming process.
Mikko: Thats right. This is where we come into the game. We have seen stations spending $2,000 to $15,000 for their iPhone app alone, and we thought that this is not effective for the industry and leads to aggregated players.
So we designed a modular online system for the creation and configuration of the iPhone player, where stations can create their branded radio apps, and we publish them to the App Store. We do have the same system for Google Android, Blackberry and NOKIA as well.
In Europe, the trend to individual station apps is at full speed, 45% of the top 100 apps in the music category of the iTunes charts I Germany are apps from stations. A single iPhone app costs as little as $499 and a bundle of three apps (iPhone, Android and Blackberry) for $5,000.
