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This topic comprises 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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Author
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Topic: what is wrong with the radio industry?
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Jack Ondracek
Film God
Posts: 2348
From: Port Orchard, WA, USA
Registered: Oct 2002
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posted 07-03-2012 12:08 PM
Some good answers here... and a lot of opinions from the listener-side of the equation. It's interesting, that many of the expert opinions come from people who spend most of their time on satellite-based subscription services.
In his short post, I think Louis probably hit the nail best.
For many of the rest, a romantic view of radio's past is about as likely as bringing back 35mm arc-based changeover booths.
Yes, consolidation has had an effect, and the result is centralized, cost-efficient but bland programming. Bring back local, personality-based programming, you say? Great idea. Problem is, there are a LOT more entertainment options out there... many of them with much lower overheads than terrestrial radio. The audience is much more fragmented, so your likelihood of pulling in great numbers is much more limited than in the past. Like the gross over-screening of our communities, there are many more signals on most dials than the available listening audience will support.
When I was young, the area's dominant rock station (AM) regularly pulled in 30+ shares of the available market. There were maybe 15 stations in the whole market, more or less... 5 commercial TV stations and two Non-Comms... no internet, no satellite anything, no cable, DIAL telephones, party lines (yuck), and all theatres were big and single-screened. If you were able to get into any of those businesses, you were likely to make enough to pay the bills. Now, a 5 or 6 share pretty much makes you "number one".
Today, "live" means expensive. It's just that simple. If the listeners and advertisers won't support it, the owners won't program it. Admittedly, it's a chicken-and-egg scenario, depending on which side of the microphone you're on, but that's largely the problem. You're not likely to listen to a high-school kid, making minimum wage, cut his teeth on the local teapot station. Livable wages for the really good personalities are like major-league sports positions... there aren't many of them, and you have to have huge numbers on the consumer-side to pay for them. In addition to the live personality, program directors, research, payroll and local sales efforts all add to the cost of a live format. It's comparable to the difference between a single projectionist - single screen scenario and one guy who can run a multiplex.
Yes, companies like CC have had a huge effect on broadcasting (being nice here). However, independent owners struggle to compete, and local programming doesn't always translate into bankable dollars. It takes a lot more to impress an audience.
AM is a band that has undeniably fallen on hard times, when viewed from a traditional standpoint. However, in areas with few FMs, they can still be relevant. In my area, close to Seattle, news, talk, sports and ethnic programming formats have largely replaced music on AM. Except for one well-produced "adult standards" station (read: 'Frank Sinatra'), there's no music on the AM dial that's not ethnic-oriented, and at that, there's a short list of them... Spanish, Korean, Black Gospel and Hindi is about it. A very recent effort by a major company to bring back oldies on AM fell flat. The format went back to talk within 4 months.
It's easy to zero in on this industry and ask, what happened. But step back and look at local broadcast television, local movie theatres, the music industry and 'record' stores (of course it's your right to download those songs), video, porn (!), the foodservice business, gas, oil, fishing, airlines, Greyhound buses (are those still around?), KODAK(!), Polaroid, LOCAL THEATRE SERVICE COMPANIES, a certain company that sells film cleaning supplies, etc, etc, etc. The march of "progress" has affected us all.
One thing's for sure... your chances for survival go up by figuring out how to adapt to reality. Romantic memories of the past are fun to replay, but that's about it.
I own a drive-in, for cryin' out loud. It can easily be compared to owning a local radio station. If I ran my place based on the memories of my past, I'd have a changeover booth, one screen, window speakers, in-car heaters (maybe), cartoons, bingo, sub-run bookings, carload pricing, a 7-item concession menu, a little RCA turntable with half-a-dozen 45s for pre-show music and one phone line with an old "Code-A-Phone" machine hooked up to it for showtimes. Some combinations of the above might work in a very few isolated cases, but it would spell instant death for my place. Would it be fun? For a couple of weeks, maybe, but that business model sure wouldn't work today.
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Pravin Ratnam
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 844
From: Atlanta, GA,USA
Registered: Sep 2002
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posted 07-03-2012 02:26 PM
Nothing wrong with nationalized streams mixed in with local stuff. It saves costs and you can spread the expertise of a great DJ to more people. Problem is the great DJ doesn't seem part of this formula for many of the mega corporation run stations (like the Clear Channel ones).
Problem is the programming is very cautious when the state of radio dictates that the prudent course would be to take more chances because you are really not losing much with declining revenues. Sure, as much as we want to say we are bored by radio, there are many sheep out there who will switch the station if they dont hear something very familiar. Take the state of rock stations programmed for 35-45 year old white women . The usual name of such stations starts with RIVER something. Playlist is the same ole fucking Eagles(and add to that solo Henley), Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Goo Goo Dolls, Shania Twain BS. I used to like those songs, but got sick of it by mere channel surfing past these stations. The mere snippets of these songs drive me crazy now.
There is a way to keep your listeners tuned in. Mix familiar with some of the less familiar. But take it in steps. I would have a DJ helmed program introduce the more adventurous but less catchier cuts to give the listener some context. And don't just play all obscure stuff at one time. In the radio, you can play obscure stuff that is catchy. Maybe even introduce some of the less catchy ones in snippet montages.
Then you got the old classic rock stations that have morphed into some weird hybrid of 70s and 80s rock with a sprinkle of some of the safer cuts of 90s so called alt rock. I love Springsteen, but you would think that these idiots would only hear about Hungry Heart or Born To Run from Springsteen's immense 70s collection. or that the Kinks actually played something other than You Really Got Me. It took me that Wes Anderson Darjeeling movie to get me to realize how great some of the lesser played Kinks songs were.
And then you got the rock for tough young men category which plays the same freaking Metallica type stuff.
I think Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson make for better DJs than our actual radio DJs with their mix of old, familiar and obscure cuts played in their movies. Compare the Kinks songs played in Darjeeling Ltd to the same old Kinks songs (lola and You Really Got Me) played on oldies radio(which is no more in most cities). No wonder oldies radio is dead.
I have Sirius radio by the way. Came with my car 4 years ago. Took a lifetime membership for 399 or so. I would strongly advise anyone with Sirius or XM paying full price. Bargain down to 6.99-8.99 a month. Anything more is a waste. Sound quality is not very good and music choice is not as diverse as advertised, but still preferable variety to what you get on radio. I love the fact that you can still hear 50s and 60s music on radio as that kind of music has disappeared on free radio. I get to hear old school rap and new rap. The playlists need to expand, but I will take what i can get and look for the rest online.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 07-06-2012 01:50 PM
I have fond memories of listening to DJ's in the 80's. I can still remember some of the routines, jokes, and pranks that they pulled to this day. Now? I'm not even sure the radio tuner works in my home or car audio devices.
The end of radio for me was about 8 years ago when I was working on a remodeling project and I had the radio tuned to a local station that played mostly 80's and early 90's music, with some late 70's thrown in for good measure. After a couple of days, it became painfully obvious that this radio station had a very limited playlist, as I was hearing the same music played over and over again, and that was just in the course of a couple of hours!
When MP3 players became popular, listening to the radio diminished greatly. Why be limited to what a radio station chooses to play, especially when there was no local talent, or at least none worth listening to?
Then Pandora radio came along. It was a like a dream come true! A service that played music that you liked, but then introduced some variety that it estimates you might also like, and then adjusts accordingly.
I have 71 stations programmed, so I can choose whatever I'm in the mood for, and I'm not limited to a handful of basic genre stations that can be found on broadcast FM. In a further "up yours" to the generic radio conglomerates, I pay Pandora $36 a year to eliminate the commercials and get a higher bit rate on the desktop app. I can access Pandora on my PC, smartphone, iPod, iPad, Squeezebox, and even the new Denon receiver I just picked up. It's almost more available to me than AM and FM are!
Now, I utilize three options for music. My own music collection (I still buy CD's whenever possible, not MP3's), Pandora, and silence. Broadcast radio is a last resort.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 07-24-2012 08:52 PM
In case anyone cares, as of today, Clear Channel has now turned WFNX (alt-rock station with a somewhat marginal singal, where the DJs actually knew something about music and where 100% of the programming (except for the music, of course) was produced locally) into WHBA-FM "The Harbor," a "variety hits" station that sounds automated. Way to go, Clear Channel.
I guess that this is better than Spanish-language talk, but not by much. We already had this format (WMKK, "Mike-FM") and it got replaced with sports talk (a simulcast of an MA sports talk station, no less) two years ago.
As far as I know, this move means that the Boston market (#10 in the US) is now without a single radio station that produces all of its own program material. WBZ-AM (news) comes fairly close, but even they have some syndicated programs.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 07-25-2012 08:46 PM
On all these stations that are computerized, I never have understood why they severely limit the number of songs played by certain artists. On 70s stations, just to pick one group I like, Fleetwood Mac....they'll play Go Your Own Way, Don't Stop, Dreams and Rhiannon over and over and over, while completely ignoring the half-dozen other top-forty hits they had, not to mention great album tracks that even though they weren't chartbusters, people still love them.
I also hate they way they pigeonhole things by decade. I grew up in the 70s but I like a lot of the 80s and 90s music by the SAME ARTISTS that were popular in the '70s. To use the Fleetwood Mac example, they had at least another dozen chart records in the '80s, but no '70s station would ever play those songs because they didn't come out in the '70s.
I'd like to see a station devoted to an era's artists rather than just the era's records. That way if the Mac comes out with a great new record TODAY, it could get played.
God help an artist that had one top-ten hit and seven or eight mid-chart hits. They'll beat the top tenner into the ground and ignore all the others, even if they're familiar and well-liked by many people.
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