AccuRadio is an independent, multichannel Internet radio property founded in 2000, and based in Chicago, Illinois. It currently offers over a thousand pre-developed 'music channels', covering an extremely wide range of genres and sub-genres, including pop, rock, folk, urban, alternative rock, indie rock, country, new age, Americana, bluegrass, show tunes, Christian, jazz, electronic, oldies, standards, classical and romantic music. Some channels also highlight music from different locations around the world. The first three channels on Accuradio were "Swingin' Pop Standards", "Piano Jazz" and "Modern Rock Classics". AccuRadio is currently available internationally and reaches two million listeners per month, averaging in at about 500,000 listening hours per day. Between January 2015 and December 2015, AccuRadio listener traffic grew 80%, making it the fastest-growing personalized music webcaster in the U.S. All of AccuRadio's audio channels provide continuous music streaming with talk limited to occasional commercials. While a song is playing, album cover, artist, song and album or mixtape information appears on screen. AccuRadio programmers select the music from the database available to them based on what they think is suitable. In September 2014, NantWorks LLC, a company headed by Patrick Soon-Shiong, invested US$2.5 million into AccuRadio.
Background
AccuRadio, based in Chicago, was founded by CEO Kurt Hanson, a University of Chicago alumnus who founded and continues to publish RAIN: Radio and Internet Newsletter from AccuRadio headquarters in the Loop. Their Executive Vice President of Sales is Michael Damsky. Their Vice President of Technology is Arun Kambhammettu. Their COO is John Gehron. The company also works with former broadcast radio personalities like Tommy Edwards, Barbara Prieto and Steve Cochran. In 2015, AccuRadio rebranded itself as "better radio for your workday" by adding 77 "workplace moods" channels to better target the 35-to-64 demographic of daytime office workers, and saw listener traffic jump nearly 35% in a single month.
Features
A station is centralised by a specific genre or theme, or a combination of multiple items of any kind. Unlike many other internet radio competitors like Pandora, Slacker and Jango, AccuRadio users can customise one of its programmed channels, but cannot build their own channels. Each track played can be rated on a scale from 1 to 5 stars, which determines its future airplay. If a listener has rated 4 or 5 stars for at least 20 tracks, a special 5-Star Radio is unlocked. Several genres have the "Listeners Top 100" station, an artist-specific station, a "HitKast" station playing current songs, or a year-specific station. An artist or song can be banned on an individual station, but not overall. No response is applicable to musical attributes or to albums. Clicking the thumbs down or skipping feature is unlimited and will stop the current play of the track once either of them is used.
Transmission standards and quality
AccuRadio uses HE-AACv2 at 24-32kbps for its audio streaming. On Sonos, it's 128 kbps AAC.
Web streaming
Based on the latest monthly report from Triton Digital's Webcast Metrics service in March 2018, AccuRadio is the ninth most-listened-to web streaming service among all U.S. broadcast groups that stream online, with 21,908 Average Active Sessions. Listeners average 2.38 hours per listening session, nearly quintuple the session time of leading competitors such as Pandora and Spotify. The service offers apps for iOS, Android, Roku, and webOS, all of which have been downloaded over half a million times and are highly rated at around 4.6 stars on the Apple, Android, WebOS Nation, and Roku app stores. In January 2013, AccuRadio partnered with Aha by HARMAN to makes its content available via Aha apps in an Aha-supported automobile dashboards. The service differs from its competitors in its curated-channel approach to music streaming, with popular channels such as "HitKast", "Today's New Country", "Classic Hits", and "Smooth Jazz" attracting thousands of listeners each day.
Awards
AccuRadio won the People's Voice award for Best Radio in the 2006 Webby Awards, the AccuTunes interface built by AccuRadio won Best Radio again in 2008, and the AccuRadio IOS Handheld App was named an Honoree for the Best Streaming Audio category in the 2016 cycle.
