Musonomics

Digital music services continue to drive recovery of the music industry after a long period of decline, and the AM/FM music radio business is starting to feel it. Young people born after Millennials don't use radio the same as previous generations. Can commercial AM/FM radio compete with pure play digital music services? Russ Crupnick of MusicWatch and Steve Goldstein of Amplifi Media join us to discuss what's happening to radio listenership, and how radio needs to respond to the threat posed by unlimited, commercial-free music. The way radio pays for music it uses may have acted as a kind of an economic disincentive for radio to invest in its own digital future. AM/FM radio broadcasters in the US pay a tiny amount, about 4% of revenues, to songwriters and music publishers, but American AM/FM stations are exempted from paying anything to the artists who performed the music or their record companies. This exemption doesn't apply to digitally delivered radio streams, like SiriusXM or Pandora, or even the digi