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There is a new opportunity available for musicians, artists, producers, radio DJ’s and talk radio announcers. Internet radio, podcasting and video casting are becoming a huge commodity worldwide. International audiences want to know what other countries and artists are creating. They are listening and viewing more and more Internet based programming and recent developments have made the creation of Internet programming even more important.

Within the past few weeks the United States most listen to Internet radio streams have been silenced outside of USA borders. The initial reasoning is that the music royalties being charged for Internet streaming outside of the US is cost prohibitive, I however see another reason. American companies are not interested in buying advertising that is streamed to International audiences who are NOT interested in their products. The United States system is based on ad impressions and non-US ad impressions is simply not warranted. The largest Internet radio streams Pandora, CBS Radio (which includes AOL Radio and Yahoo! Radio), and Clear Channel Radio, all are dependent upon advertisers to pay for bandwidth used for the streams. Thus closing the streams down will save the companies bandwidth plus they maintain their advertiser base. In addition to music based sites, talk radio streams have been silenced also. This is due to the CBS / AOL software platform. It is impossible to separate the talk stations from the music stations so everyone is off.

The best part of this International shutdown is that the market will be looking for alternatives to the BIG 3. The ability to start developing your own shows, creating playlists of independent artists and becoming personalities can once again be accepted by International audiences without the BIG 3 marketing and promoting smaller companies out of the business.

CBS Radio and Clear Channel Radio both have another issue that will be affecting their operations and that is local advertising.

Pandora Radio, the Internet based streaming company that uses advanced logarithms to determine the type of music you program it to play and finds additional music for you to listen to, is now available in automobiles and on cell phones. You can find the Pandora platform on iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Android and now available on Windows Mobile. With that can of layout it was only inevitable that Pandora created an initiative to target local radio advertisers. Here is where Pandora really attacks CBS Radio and Clear Channel Radio. Pandora has the ability to be genre, cult and community specific and since the listener basically programs their individual station local advertising will be centered around the listeners taste and not that of a national, regional or local sales director.

The possibilities are almost endless and if the Pandora sales force, which I assume will be current or ex radio station sales people or advertising account sales people, understands their local advertiser than sales will increase almost immediately. Surgical targetability in advertising has been promised via Internet for years, now it is physically possible to pinpoint your audience and sell directly to that audience needs.

The advertising and programming business as created by CBS Radio / Clear Channel Radio is now changing and the slowest company to change will be the loser. Now is the time to create your company to develop programming and think of new ways to deliver advertising to this audience.

The future is yours to command.