Is Music Streaming Services Going to Replace Traditional Radio in Malaysia?

Ooi, Zi Shan (2019) Is Music Streaming Services Going to Replace Traditional Radio in Malaysia? Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

A study by Musonomics highlights that radio will be died in 10 years because digital services come into the play to take over the old-fashioned radio. However, the radio industry as a whole is actually exploding. The content of radio has become more diversity with the combination of news, music and personal stories. With the aid of digital, radio diffuses into the society through social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Technology advancement is making the content creating much easier than the past which also raising the stiff competition from music streaming services to radio. Music streaming services performed well in Malaysia with the revenue of USD 3.07 million generated in 2015. Both radio and music streaming providers are proofing they are actually doing better than another, so what makes them to survive is the main question that poses in the research. This research aims to find out the factors that bring to the survival of radio in digital era, exploring how radio supply to meet the demands of listeners and analyse the consumption pattern of the music streaming users. In this research, two focus groups are formed from music streaming users and radio listeners with six members in a group. Besides that, researcher interviews two radio practitioners from Astro Radio, one personnel from Ripple Media and another one from KKBOX S.E.A. to gather their opinion on the development of radio and music streaming services. The study found out that radio is still relevant today and Malaysians access to radio through the car radio set most of the time. Other than that, radio is significance in today’s market because it is now transforming into brands, providing both audio and visual enjoyments. The incorporation from digital platform ease the access to the radio brands from audiences where podcast, online streaming and mobile applications are readily available for them. The study also found out that music streaming services are only served as an extra commodity for the users, they use the services because it is free and convenient. Music streaming users do not think music streaming services are replacing the radio because both platforms give different content that they want. Based on the finding, the correlation between radio and music streaming is quite weak; for both platforms to be merging into one has to go through challenges such as regulatory, privacy and copyrights issues. Other methodology such as survey is recommended for future research to collect wide range of opinion from both radio listeners and music streaming users. Since digital content is exploding, future researchers can look into the field of video streaming, and thus study effectiveness of digital content from radio brands, by analysing how the content produced is match with the preferences of audiences