RAB's Haley: Are We Doing Enough With Song Tagging?

Jeff Haley

The country's leading radio broadcasters announced in SEPTEMBER their commitment to broadcast programming on FM stations that included song tags. The announcement came in conjunction with MICROSOFT's announcement of a new set of features for all ZUNE portable media players that takes advantage of the built-in FM radio tuner to let people instantly tag and retrieve songs broadcast from any Song Tagging enabled FM radio station. 

Now, RAB CEO JEFF HALEY is asking about the state of that committment. YESTERDAY (10/22), HALEY e-mailed a questionnaire to 80 radio CEOs. HALEY's e-mail read:

"Radio has long enjoyed a position as the number one source for new music discovery. Recent products launched by Apple and Microsoft are a testament to our success and the enduring strength of Radio. The broader distribution of the FM signal on mobile devices will change Radio misperceptions and drive more listeners.

"Our next opportunity will be to drive greater listener satisfaction through the direct purchase of music from our programming. Device manufacturers and telcom carriers will be key partners to help broaden our distribution and make interactive commerce happen from our broadcasts. As consumer adoption of this evolves there are many other opportunities including incremental revenue streams and interactive advertising.

I believe it is imperative for our industry to more broadly adopt RDS RT+ radio text functionality. To that end I am asking your help to complete the survey below so we may benchmark our progress. Over the next several weeks we will share the results of this survey and help facilitate broader adoption of the RDS standards. It is my hope that we rapidly adopt this platform and tie listenership and digital music purchasing more closely together."

« see more Net News