Streaming Radio Growth Charts

There are presently 69 million people listening to streaming radio in an average month. The following charts break down the listener by delivery method, format, location, and growth projections. One can easily see the tremendous growth in online listening reflected in every available metric.

Sources - Arbitron, Edison Media, Bridge Ratings

Another Reason to be Streaming Online: Squeezebox

Let’s look at some quick facts from Arbitron:

• The weekly online radio audience has again exploded in the last year, to about 42 million Americans aged 12+.
• One in five Americans aged 25- to 54-years-old listen to online radio on a weekly basis—an all-time high.

Since the growth of internet radio is huge, taking the step to stream online is a move you will not regret…

Here’s a cool new gadget that will allow you to listen to thousands of free internet radio stations, Pandora stations, and your personal music collection…all in one.

Squeezebox players connect to your home Wi-Fi network to bring the music in any part of your home, office, school, etc. Any station that has an online stream can be possibly heard on Squeezebox players.

There's been a lot of hand-held internet radio devices launched lately. Why? Because internet radio is continuing to expand, and listener numbers keep increasing!

SHOUTcast: You Don't Have to Lose Your Following

SHOUTcast is a very popular AOL-owned listening portal that has been around for over 12 years. It is free for anyone to publish to, and this week it is ranked 4,895 on Alexa.com, with over 6,000 sites linking in.

There are many Internet broadcasters that have built up a following in SHOUTcast and do not want to lose that; however, in many cases, they would like to use a branded player with streaming features.

A station can use custom branded players, and still publish to SHOUTcast and not lose their ranking and following.

It’s very simple to do; most playlist and internet broadcast software programs allow multi-casting (SAM, PlayList, Icecast, SimpleCast and others have similar easy-to-use interfaces and allow you to encode in simultaneous multiple bit-rates in multiple formats).

In this example using SAM, one stream is in WVA9 at 22kb/s publishing to one point, and the other stream is being encoded in MP3PRO at 24kb/s . . .both at the same time, and both pointing to separate publishing points.

SHOUTcast allows the ability to add text and link to a website or player right from the directory window as shown below. The customer can still benefit from traffic going to their website or using their branded player, and at the same time, their listeners can find them in the SHOUTcast directory.

When a listener clicks on the “TUNE IN!” button as shown below, they are prompted the first time to select either the SHOUTcast Mini-Player or to use their own default player that their desktop is set for.