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And look up how long people are considered "subscribers" after they terminate the service.
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Radio - dead and loving it (sorry Mel Brooks)
- Thread starter howdareu
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And look up how long people are considered "subscribers" after they terminate the service.
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OTA has a lot more to compete against these days. There's just so much content out there that I think it might overwhelm the average listener who just doesn't have the time to check out the latest new things online. In Fred Jacobs' blog today http://jacobsmediablog.com/2015/02/04/pyramid-scheme/ he talks about the old paradigm of RvR, radio vs. radio, where now it's RvE, radio vs. everything. But everything is limited by time. Once you have a family and a job, how much free time do you have checking out media content of any kind. Dull content will lose, no matter what platform it's on. At least there are alternatives to keep radio honest.
The truth is that those alternatives aren't well programmed.
Computers
So, what is your opinion of radio stations' "geo-blocking"?
It's something I hadn't heard of until recently. Where a radio station, say, in Seattle, blocks it's stream to any IP from over 150 miles away or so.
If it becomes more popular, a lot of the alternatives mentioned in other portions of this thread won't exist. People will be still stuck with their local radio stations.
It's something I hadn't heard of until recently. Where a radio station, say, in Seattle, blocks it's stream to any IP from over 150 miles away or so.
If it becomes more popular, a lot of the alternatives mentioned in other portions of this thread won't exist. People will be still stuck with their local radio stations.
And, if and when the tipping point where more listening is via streams than OTA, we will see how ISPs react to a captive audience.
My first cable bill back in the late 70's was less than $15. Now, I pay around $150 including Internet but with no premium channels. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon when they realized they had a captive audience with exclusive content. How much can ISPs charge for connectivity? Can they separate streaming into a bandwidth charge, just like the cellular phone companies charge by the minute and by the message?
Think of this: Pandora's current business model can't be significantly, if at all, profitable. But if they do the same thing via ISPs as the cable content providers, they can make the consumer pay for Pandora as part of the "Internet Service" part of the monthly bill; Pandora's revenue comes from the ISP charges. And if the FCC does regulate the Internet as a utility, I would expect the same kind of "pay for usage" service as the phone companies have had "forever".
As long as the local radio station makes no money from out of market listening and as long as there are local advertising markets, geofencing makes sense.
If I were a big company, I'd geofence the local stations and then do the major formats in a national version for the internet. If they can customize Seacrest for 100 different stations and formats, they can take their best talent and best bits and make a "national" show for the markets where they have no stations. In fact, they could fence the national show to exclude the markets where they had a comparable local format.
So... What happened when they started integrating tape and 8-track decks in car radios; was radio dead then as well?
I think of radio as being a fun and upbeat way to listen to music. No, you're not going to hear everything you like, and thats why you can listen to specific music via the method of your choice. I find it mind-numbingly boring to listen to a bunch of songs jammed together like a badly made mix-tape (sort of like you get off the cable music channels).
No, because back then you didn't have young people increasingly ignoring radio as a music entertainment source. It was a different era.
That is indeed true. Being a young person, I can attest to the fact that most people who compose our generation have the collective intellect of a plastic grocery bag, and the patience of a 4 year old at the DMV.
Perhaps they will grow in maturity and enjoy utilizing the radio for entertainment one day. Not very likely I assume...
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Couldn't have said it better myself...so true.
OTOH, TV started newspapers on a long, slow decline. The Internet turned that decline into a free fall. If there's one thing everyone can agree on about the impact of the Internet, it's that it has turned an awful lot of media and other major institutions (like the post office) into buggy whip manufacturers practically overnight.
Radio lost me I didn't want to lose it.
A few years ago the industry suddenly declared oldies were dead & everybody wants new music - well they don't.
The advertisers (who are the real MASTERS of broadcasting NOT the audience) wanted the young & gullible, radio had to comply.
The biggest problem has been for years the debt heavy corporate infiltration, that is the biggest negative. Less competition, less innovation, less talent is what it adds up to now.
A few years ago the industry suddenly declared oldies were dead & everybody wants new music - well they don't.
The advertisers (who are the real MASTERS of broadcasting NOT the audience) wanted the young & gullible, radio had to comply.
The biggest problem has been for years the debt heavy corporate infiltration, that is the biggest negative. Less competition, less innovation, less talent is what it adds up to now.
You probably can't ask your parents about this, but the exact same thing happened to them 35 years ago. The music they grew up on got replaced by that long-haired rock music. This kind of thing happens every 30 years or so. It's happening to you now, so it bothers you. But it happened to your parents, and their parents before them. I imagine if you broaden the discussion to the rest of pop culture, you'll probably say there's not much good TV being made any more, not many good movies, the music sucks, and the clothes being made today are terrible. It has nothing to do with debt ridden corporations, and nothing to do with competition or innovation. It just sucks getting old. Ask your friends. They'll all agree.
Truthfully, there's more variety now because of the ownership changes. Back in the old days, you'd have more stations duplicating the exact same format. Not so much any more. So you have more format variety. But a lot of those formats are aimed at a more diverse population, and people who are mostly younger than you.
What I find is when people say there isn't enough variety, what they're really saying is there aren't any stations for white men over 60. Which is fairly true. But it's not because of the lack of format variety.
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"Oldies", meaning 60's based pop music formats were, for the most part, transformed into 70's based pop music formats. Nobody said that the music was dead... just that radio could not make money with audiences that were predominantly over 55. So the stations eliminated the 50-year-old music and began emphasizing 40-year-old-music. There was no new music involved.
Radio must serve listeners to be able to get money from advertisers. Advertiser will simply let you know what audiences they want to reach. And right now, there is no agency / major advertiser radio money spent against geezer demos.
Stations had debt back in the 50's and 60's, too. Whether it was someone's first station or an additional station in a larger market, borrowing money to buy it has been the norm for the vast majority of stations going back 50 to 60 years.
Changed programming has much to do with audience preferences, as well budgetary constraints caused by the recession and other factors.
The thing that I remember most from Leonard Goldenson's biography about ABC was how the company came close to bankruptcy in the 1960s because of the conversion to color. This was at a time when ABC Radio had some of the most profitable radio stations. But the company was leveraged to death because of capital expenses. Ultimately, they sold out to Cap Cities, and it was like David eating Goliath, and it happened a long time ago.
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