Overview

The Web redraws the map in the competition to find and keep the eyes and ears of an audience, as many so-called dotcom companies have discovered to their cost from late 2000, once the first rush of excitement over the e-commerce revolution had begun to wear off. While large personal fortunes continue to be made on speculation that online businesses should be as profitable as parallel offline businesses only with faster returns there is little evidence yet that anyone has worked out how to achieve sustainable operational profits from an Internet-only company. This is certainly as true or maybe more true for web radio stations as any other online venture: there has been as high a casualty rate among commercial web radio operators as any other dotcom sector, in the recent shakeout after the loans dried up. The swift descent into receivership of the webcasting portal company BroadcastAmerica in early 2001 is perhaps the most notable to date. So this book makes no claims to offer a route map for financial success in web radio. When someone does manage to draw such a map, we will hear about it soon enough. But, once again, these are early days in what is undoubtedly a unique new form of distribution and, just as analogue radio did in the 1920s and 1930s, before it really knew precisely how it might earn its keep, the first thing to concentrate on is establishing an audience. And that will be done...