Actually, I interpreted Mark's comment entirely different, as in, if the product/programming stinks, it's not gonna be better on-line than it is OTA. It'll reek on both platforms. The only difference is, those outside the OTA signal range will also know it's bad.
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Buffalo-Niagara Falls Persons 12+ April 2021
- Thread starter Rusty Bridges
- Start date
No one says that it will. But you're making a subjective judgement on a show that's been syndicated in a lot of markets for over ten years. Someone apparently likes what they do.
But the online content where Townsquare makes its money isn't simply placing the air signal online. So no, I don't think that's what he was talking about. He's concerned that the low ratings from this one station in this one market brings down the entire spectrum, and I don't see that as valid.
No matter how you slice it, a move that takes your share from a 3.x to a 1.5 is a bad economic move, especially when you hire live and local airstaff to do it.
Great, blame the local talent.
The morning show isn't local. Are middays and afternoon drive voice tracked? The afternoon guy is the Program Director/Operations Manager. He may be local, but the format came straight from Corporate. I would blame them...
Doesn't matter if the talent is local or not if the programming is crappy. TSM would have been better off jettisoning the Jack branding and roll their own version of variety hits, giving it names like "Jimmy Griffin", "Frank Sedita" or "George Arthur", for example...
That requires a PD with a lot of scheduling experience, a V/O talent, plus a writer for liners and so on... the Jack "franchise" fee for under-market-50 stations covers all that. There is literally no production, programming and voicing cost with the service.
I think the criticism is of the fact that they are spending more and trying to be local, but they have not created a brand and the cost and effort, so far, seems wasted.
Why is voice tracking per se bad?
One of the problems with music shifts outside of AM drive is that jocks get bored sitting there waiting for "another non-stop 20 minute music sweep" to be over.
If a jock has any up to date "automation" system they can do "tips & tails" and create fresh, excited and happy transitions and well done liners for a 4 hour shift in well under an hour. Then they can also use the time to do weekends or overnight shifts, too.
In 1979 in a Top 15 market I had the equivalent of a Hot AC and a Country station and, other than mornings, the stations were 100% voice tracked. One had a 13 share, the other got to a 42.5 share. There were 30 fulltime, full signal stations in the market. The jocks who did the "live but recorded" shifts spent time working on promotions... they did school visits, career day appearances, street promotions, even agency visits (most agency media staff had never met a real DJ), even participating in marches for causes we believed in and all kinds of other stuff that was fun for them and, importantly, kept them in contact with "the street". And that last point is one that can't be overemphasized, as air talent can easily become mentally isolated from "real" listeners.
What was the timeline for Jack in Buffalo? I wanted to check the ratings, and my friend at SparkNet is away for the long weekend... just out of curiosity I'd like to do a deep dive on this.
(A) Persons familiar with the station say music was always scheduled by a local PD. The station had an active promotions department. Jack FM was prominent on billboards and local TV. Liners were tailored for Buffalo.
(B) IIRC, Buffalo Jack-FM debuted in 2005 when WBUF was owned by Infinity. Howard Stern may still have been on morning drive in the first few months before leaving for Sirius. Maybe. That was 16 years ago. BTW, Toronto also had a Jack-FM on 92.5. Toronto Jack could be heard in some parts of the Buffalo MSA and Buffalo Jack could be heard in parts of the GTA. Very weird. IIRC, Toronto Jack a few years later flipped to Country and then to CHR, Kiss FM CKIS, which remains today.
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It may have started in 2006.
(See previous post. Maybe 2005)
As for Voice Tracking, I never said it was necessarily bad. It often is if it sounds lifeless and bland. It also depends on the format. WBUF clearly has a content problem(Burned out music and nothing compelling)...
The magic of radio - and relatability - is immediacy. You lose that with voice tracking. The closest you can come is "live-tracking," tracking close to real time, which is how many stations have operated during the pandemic.
Bean counters love the idea of paying somebody one hour for a four or five hour show. Perhaps giving live and local talent more opportunities to entertain than the canned station promo voice will help them stay engaged while they do a show, keep up with local weather & traffic, interact on social media, and scan multiple sources for "what's happening now" while they keep up with the latest news on the artists they're playing.
Not having to hustle records, carts, or CDs isn't the problem with keeping talent engaged. Having them do a live and local show while VTing multiple out-of-town markets is.
Bean counters love the idea of paying somebody one hour for a four or five hour show. Perhaps giving live and local talent more opportunities to entertain than the canned station promo voice will help them stay engaged while they do a show, keep up with local weather & traffic, interact on social media, and scan multiple sources for "what's happening now" while they keep up with the latest news on the artists they're playing.
Not having to hustle records, carts, or CDs isn't the problem with keeping talent engaged. Having them do a live and local show while VTing multiple out-of-town markets is.
And DJs just love the idea of sitting chained to a console for a 4 hour show, doing 20 minutes of work, watching the computer do all the work, and the rest of the time listening to the same songs over and over again. If you're full time, you're not getting paid by the hour. If you're getting paid to do VT, at least you're getting paid. It beats the alternative. It also means you're being heard by two or three times the audience you would be if you just did one station. Most DJs want to do VT. It's not something forced on them. Some talent I know have the brand of automation in their contract. You don't need to be engaged to the music. You've heard those songs more times than the musicians who sang them.
Certainly some formats require you to be present for the entire shift. Sports talk needs to be live, especially on the weekends when the games are being played all day. Of course if you're full time, you don't want to work weekends. You want to be with your family. Doing the 7 to midnight show isn't prime time for radio. It's the time when everyone is out living their lives. They don't want to spend that time locked in a studio talking to themselves.
I understand there's a lot of romance about being on the radio. It seems to those who listen as the ideal job. Getting paid to listen to music. That only works if you're the one picking the music. The job itself can be pretty boring. It helps to have a co-host. That makes it interesting if you like the co-host. Or even more if you don't. Coming up with funny or creative things to say isn't always easy when the job is mainly routine. But hey, that's the magic of radio, right?
Spoken like someone who hasn't been in a studio, standing behind a mic six days a week, then doing a few hours of production before heading out for personal appearances. The good people make it sound a lot easier than it is. Yes, a lot of people have had multiple-station voice-tracking shoved down their throats. That doesn't mean that they like, that it's fair, or that it's the best programming for out-of-market audiences.
VT & syndication is mostly good for top management bonuses and to hopefully reduce the debt load caused by overpaying for stations in the first place. Virtually all of the dopes who overpaid have now gone through bankruptcy and lost control of their "empires." Now the money-lenders who ended up with the stations are trying to figure out how to maximize their return while the stockholders who took it in the shorts are investing their money elsewhere. Reality is that it's all about content, no matter what the delivery system. TSL and overall ratings (not shares) are down because the product isn't as fresh or relatable as it once was.
How would you know? Personal appearances? DJs won't do them unless it's in their contract. Let's talk about all the bad habits DJs picked up in the old days. The number of DJs who developed cancer from sitting in a studio when smoking was allowed. All those DJs who fell asleep during their shifts. Not a problem any more. The local DJs who do bits on their morning shows that get them fired. But you're right. They couldn't pay me enough to sit in a studio six days a week. I have better things to do with my time. Thankfully I get paid very well and still work in radio.
Once again, nobody is complaining about getting to reach more people, and not having to wait for a song to end so they can give the time, temperature, and call letters. They know what they signed up for. Nobody is getting this "shoved down their throats." It was all in the job description. If they didn't like working, they should try another line of work.
There are fewer and fewer "dopes" buying radio stations. That's why they end up getting sold to EMF, where they have no local studios or talent. But then again they have no debt either. Or let's talk about the streaming companies. Apple Radio is all VT and all national. I saw where Spotify is looking to hire a national morning show. Likely will be all VT. The shows at Sirius are all national and mostly all VT. So it's not just the "dopes" who are doing radio on the cheap. In fact, you yourself pointed out that Townsquare hired some local talent when they replaced. Jack. So yes, they're "dopes" for doing that.
The real issue is that groups are not creating formats that are platform agnostic.
A good format should be one that works, with local customization (such as weather, traffic, news, contests, etc) in each market where a station is owned and also works as a stream online to "fill in" the rest of the nation.
And what, specifically, is "immediacy" in a music format outside of AMD?
"Relatability" is part of the jock's personality. The person who wastes 95% of a shift waiting for songs and stopsets to end is going to be bored, sick of most of the songs, and hoping the shift ends soon. With voice tracking, one can keep up the enthusiasm, build break-to-break momentum and just have more fun.
Movies are not filmed in real time. They are done in disjointed pieces, where a scene near the end may be done before the opening one. Actors don't wait around on a set for their scenes to come up; they just do their bits and pieces and don't show up for the parts where they do not appear.
Actually, management looks at who the best talents they have are, and use technology to optimize the use of their time. The rest are SOL.
The same thing happened when the FCC eliminated a lot of technical rules about licensed operators at directional transmitter sites. People who sat and watched the transmitter (most being told "never touch it, just watch it") who had a meaning less FCC license lost their jobs because technology made systems more stable and equipment better able to manage transmitter compliance.
Cart machines finally eliminated the need for board operators who assisted DJs, making "combo" operations possible everwhere unless the union insisted on antiquated procedures to protect unneeded jobs.
Today, the jock does not have to load carts, cue records, hit a button for each sounder, spot and song, follow a music log, pull music carts and lots of other stuff. So they sit and wait for that "uninterrupted ten in a row" music sweep to end, bored out of their skulls, to talk a few times an hour.
I will say that the one missing element is the ability to do listener interaction, those "fake" instant requests and the like. I have mixed emotions here, as the value of requests in an era of instant on demand music services ("Alexa, play Brown Eyed Girl") is minimal and contests can be done with the insertion of an audio bit of the winner by a promo staff member. But, overall, a skilled voice tracker does a better show that one where 90% of the time is wasted "waiting" for something to end.
It's better if they VT all of them.
And, today's listener does not, outside of some morning shows on some stations in some formats, care at all about "local". We are in an Internet world, where our Facebook or other social network site has no foundries or borders and where "local" has pretty much zero meaning unless you are over 50... or maybe 60.
Trying to sell "local" today is like a car dealer in Phoenix pitching those heaters you can start from inside the home before you get in the vehicle.
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One more comment about "all of the dopes," because we know them all by name. Their biggest mistake was that they all over-valued radio at a time when it was declining. That's the biggest mistake you can make in finance. So contrary to the usual financial advice, they bought at the top of the market, and watched as the value declined to near bottom. They did so because they were blinded by their own experience in radio. They thought the 80s and 90s would last forever. They didn't. Consider Faris Suleman's situation while he was at Citadel. He offered a price for ABC Radio, and before they accepted, he could see that the company had already dropped in value. So he fought to lower his offer. It turned out it was still way too high. Same thing with Lew Dickey and Citadel. The right price should have been half of the $2 billion he paid, because those assets were declining. A few years ago, Mary Berner sold several of those overpriced ABC stations to EMF for a much lower price. Compare that to Jeff Bezos who bought another declining asset: The Washington Post. He factored the amount of investment he was going to have to make, plus the fact that the newspaper market had not hit bottom. He came up with a price of $250 million that many thought to be a bargain. Or look at the deal Verizon just made to offload AOL and Yahoo to Apollo. They ate a $5 billion loss. That's what should have happened when Farid bought ABC, or when David Field bought CBS. But they were blinded by their love for radio, and the belief that they could fix it. Obviously they discovered that a declining asset doesn't change regardless of who owns it.
Thanks for that information. I'm going to look at the numbers now.
And, since 2005 the ability of a syndicator or ad hoc network (one that delivers bits and pieces rather than a constant timed-out flow) to do it all and just let the station insert the ads and local stuff has improved greatly.
So a Jack station outside the top 50 markets can get the music pre-scheduled along with the insertion of liners and such from the provider.
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