For the radio industry, there may be no better symbol for the challenges of adapting to the digital age than two candy-colored mobile apps. The apps, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, are aggregators — conduits for thousands of online radio streams. With a few taps on a smartphone, a listener can dart among a pop station in New York, gospel in Atlanta and talk almost anywhere.
Both have quickly amassed big audiences. TuneIn, which offers 70,000 streams from around the world, announced on Monday that it has 40 million monthly users. IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, has been downloaded 95 million times and has attracted more than 12 million registered users.
For broadcasters, these aggregators can help reach audiences in the growing but increasingly fragmented world of online radio, which can mean anything from a customized playlist on Pandora or Spotify to an iTunes stream.
For now only a fraction of the radio audience is online; John Hogan, chief executive of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, the company’s radio and online division, said that 98 percent of listening to his company’s stations is still on its terrestrial signals. But it is growing quickly. According to Triton Digital, a company that measures Internet radio audiences, Clear Channel’s online audience has risen 117 percent in the last year.
But making money through online radio remains a puzzle, largely because of its royalty structure.
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