Leading Online Radio Service AccuRadio Will Stay on Internet, Realizes That Radios Don’t Have “Skip” Buttons

CHICAGO (4/1/21) -- AccuRadio, one of the two leading brands of pureplay online radio in the U.S. and featuring over 1,100 curated and personalizable channels of music, announced this afternoon that it would NOT be shutting down its online streams and moving to various AM radio frequencies, as it had announced earlier today.

“We appreciated the outpouring of concern from listeners who were afraid they might not live in one of 38% of U.S. markets that would have an AccuRadio AM transmitter,” noted COO Ben Husmann. “We thought would cover almost everybody, but we have realized that some of our listeners might indeed not be in an AccuRadio AM market, nor willing to move to one.”

In AccuRadio’s original plan for its move to broadcast radio, all 1,100 of AccuRadio’s curated music channels were going to be available on the broadcast version of AccuRadio, albeit only one on any given day. “Some listeners were also dissatisfied that, given the fact that we would be cycling through 1,100 channels, their favorite AccuRadio channel would only be available for one day every 3-1/2 years, which some listeners felt was insufficiently frequent,” Brand Manager Todd Manley noted.

The deciding factor, however, noted Senior Music Director and Social Media Manager Eric Bowden, was the realilization that AM radios typically do not have a “skip” button. “We just assumed that was a base requirement for an audio product in the modern era,” he noted.

In conclusion, CEO Kurt Hanson noted there would be no change in the AccuRadio user experience going forward, except for its usual continual improvements.

This morning, the company announced that the small number of AccuRadio listeners who live outside of those 38% of U.S. markets that were going have an AccuRadio AM signal could order their favorite AccuRadio channel on a set of forty 90-minute stereo cassettes. All orders received on the first of April will be promptly refunded.

Read the original 3/31/21 press release here.

About AccuRadio.

Launched in the summer of 2000 by radio researcher Kurt Hanson (with FM radio programmer Paul Maloney), who hoped to encourage broadcasters to embrace the variety and personalization made possible by Internet delivery of radio, AccuRadio has grown into an easy-to-use, curated for “tune in and leave it on” listening by a team of human music lovers, musicians, and genre experts (not algorithms). Now featuring over 1,100 personalizable music channels (which can be blended into over 47 trillion possible combinations), AccuRadio has online music's most upscale and loyal audience.