Note: This story has been corrected since it was first published.

From Digital Music Forum West 2006. That was the forecast proffered by Billboard Radio Monitor editor Paul Heine, at the conclusion of a Digital Music Forum panel that included representatives from the commercial, public, online and mobile radio sectors.

Gerrit Meier, the SVP and GM of terrestrial radio giant Clear Channel's Online Music and Radio unit, likely has the most work of any of the panelists to do to bring his company into radio's digital future. The broadcaster owns over 1,200 radio stations, and is starting to extend its programming and station "brands" — two of Clear Channel's major strengths in the digital and online radio markets, according to Meier — into on-demand and digital multicasting formats that will offer original niche programming like bluegrass and gay-themed channels not available otherwise.

Yet Clear Channel took some shaky first steps into its digital future, according to AOL Music Now GM Gary Cohen. Cohen joined AOL when it acquired his company MusicNow (formerly FullAudio), which powered an earlier incarnation of the online music service offered by Clear Channel that Cohen frankly termed "a complete and utter failure," adding, "It was really tough to get people to go from car to Web."

Johnie Floater offered the veteran perspective of an old media-turned-new media executive, having worked at a Top 40 station in high school and later served in management at KCRW and Radio Express before landing his current gig as General Manager of Media at Web radio broadcaster Live365. The service's users have created and are serving up wildly eclectic programming on over 10,000 of their own online stations. But Floater believes the future of radio is somewhat out of focus, with its fixation on delivery platforms over programming — which he believes as does Clear Channel's Cohen is radio's inherent advantage over other methods of consuming music. "We never used to talk about the size or our antenna," said Floater, who was, however, grateful of the enhanced measurement capabilities that digital technology has brought about. Webcasters now know more precisely how many people listen to a particular song at a particular time, and, crucially, to accurately compensate artists whose less-frequent or non-existent spins on commercial stations used to earn them nothing at all.

Aside from Clear Channel's Cohen, the only other current terrestrial radio figure on hand was NPR's Maria Thomas, the public radio broadcaster's VP and GM of Digital Media. But Thomas said NPR, which in late August announced a "Blueprint for Growth" that includes the launch of a digital music service in the first half of 2007 and "Newsroom of the Future" initiative, views the digital future as "an enormous opportunity for NPR rather than a challenge."

NPR.org got on the podcasting bandwagon fairly early on, and saw 9 million
podcasts of programs like "All Songs Considered" downloaded in just four
months last year. The company has already partnered with Seattle-based Melodeo (which recently opened its DRM source code) to deliver mobile podcasts in the U.S. and Canada.

Dave Ulmer, head of Marketing and Digital Media Services at handset maker Motorola, also spied what's ahead for radio in the "repeater stations in everyone's pockets," aka the mobile phone. A query of the gizmo-coveting crowd found that none carried a handheld satellite radio, and a couple had an MP3 player on them, but all had a cellular repeater station.

The panel agreed that a shared goal for radio broadcasters, regardless of format, should be to reduce the number of steps consumers must take between hearing a song on the radio and purchasing it from a digital retailer. Motorola's Ulmer believes he has it winnowed down to one click, on an iRadio-enabled phone. That view was shared by Tim Bucher, the chief executive of Mountain View-based start-up ZING, whose first application performs that same feat on the new Sirius Stilletto handheld satellite radio.

Mark Hefflinger