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Sun sets on radio morning shows

JJSPC said:
In today's world if there are people listening for local elements in a morning show, it's likely going to be for weather, traffic and possibly even short newscasts.
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And it's more than likely that they're people who grew up with radio stations giving them "traffic and weather together" every 10 minutes or so.

It's like "comfort food." A reminder of simpler times before "the kids today" had all that stuff on their phone. Are the kids today into Steve Harvey?

I'm sure he has a solid, loyal audience, but he's 67. I'm not being ageist, but where's the talent that's coming up to replace him?
 
TheBigA said:
Have you heard Charlamagne Tha God? There are lots of others.
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Yes, I have heard of him. Honestly I didn't even know he had a radio gig, because his brand is so much bigger. Is the radio show his primary gig? Are all those others looking up to him and saying to themselves "wow, I really need to have my own show on the radio!"? Who are all those others that have the morning radio job as the centerpiece of their career?

I get it. This is your business and you're naturally defensive and willing to die on the "no, you don't understand, radio is here to stay!" hill. You do you.
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
Yes, I have heard of him. Honestly I didn't even know he had a radio gig, because his brand is so much bigger. Is the radio show his primary gig?
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It's not the 1920s anymore. Even in the golden age of radio, the big stars knew that radio wasn't the be-all and end-all. Was radio Casey Kasem's primary gig? Hardly. Was it Howard Stern's primary gig? He was the King of ALL media. That was 30 years ago. Radio has always been best when it's PART of a multi-platform media career. Bobby Bones does a daily radio show, does TV work, a podcast, and even has a band with a record contract. How about Ryan Seacrest? Ever hear of him? For all of them, it began with the radio.

Deus Ex Machiato said:
I get it. This is your business and you're naturally defensive and willing to die on the "no, you don't understand, radio is here to stay!" hill. You do you.
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That's not me. I'm the guy telling people they need to become multi-platform. If you can't do TV (face for radio) then write books or do a podcast. If you're a creative person, that creativity has applications in other areas. No, don't DIE on the radio hill. That's stupid.

My view is the big mistake radio made in 1996 was trying to run radio-only companies without any second revenue stream. Radio was strongest when it was owned by electronics companies, insurance companies, department stores, car dealerships, and TV networks.
 
TheBigA said:
That's not me. I'm the guy telling people they need to become multi-platform. If you can't do TV (face for radio) then write books or do a podcast. If you're a creative person, that creativity has applications in other areas. No, don't DIE on the radio hill. That's stupid.
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Was driving home from a weekend in OshKosh, Wisconsin last night.
During the 15-hour drive, I had a lot of time to dial around SXM channels and landed on the "Progress" political talk channel. The host, Dean Obeidallah, was doing it right. He invited listeners to reach out to him via the usual social media channels and said 'If you friend, follow, or invite me, I'll do the same back.' And I thought to myself, that's how the game is played. Talent connecting with their audience has to be connected with their listeners even when they're not behind the mic. If you're one of those old-guard radio folks who think their job is over when you leave the studio, you might want to start looking for a different career path.
 
SomeRadioGuy said:
i could be very very wrong here but my observations on radio with regards to this

It doesnt have a ton to do with commute time, i think its listeners perferences changing.

Morning shows are full of bits and chatter.. but thats not always local info chatter....

Listeners want a genuine connection, a best friend on the radio.. and unless youre like an AC or country station, you dont have that type of presentation.

I'm very average at best as a jock, but listeners like me... because i share those random thoughts about food, music and the community.. tell a short funny story

I think, among radio people.. morning shows have had this impression of being loud and zany... and i dont think the average listener wants that anymore. While im not your average listener, i want to laugh but i also want music... and alot of morning shows dont play a ton of that

I'm not always the most eloquent with the written word but I hope i made some sense
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This, pretty much.

In my market, we still have a couple of live-and-local morning shows, but they are the same old jocks still doing the same old crap they did in the 1990s - it's all wacky zany morning zoos, prank calls, six people all yapping over each other. This stuff was played-out in the '90s and I don't really want to revisit it in 2024. I don't care if it's live-and-local if it's crap.

My commute is only 20 minutes in the morning, 25 if the lights all turn red on me. I only do it two days a week. If the radio is yapping for most of that, then you've got the commercials, the news, more commercials, the traffic - I might hear part of one song on my entire commute. So I found a couple of local stations that are jockless in the mornings, which is an improvement, but then sometimes they play a sequence of tunes that's not great, and I don't commute for that long, and don't want to hear songs I don't like. So in the past few months, I've been streaming on Spotify.

This is the pipeline listeners are heading down, and Tracey, Dave and Producer Bob's Wacky Morning Zoo isn't going to bring them back - I miss the shows that were just one jock, connecting with the listener, empathizing on a cold dark morning commute while playing a few tunes. That's gone, so why listen to morning radio?
 
Miss Tuned said:
I miss the shows that were just one jock, connecting with the listener, empathizing on a cold dark morning commute while playing a few tunes. That's gone, so why listen to morning radio?
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Maybe it's time to bring back that type of morning show. You know what some people say, everything old is new again.
 
Many of the morning shows in Yakima are syndicated. KATS airs Free Beer & Hot Wings, which has very little music - just a lot of morning zoo chatter, strange stories, occasional calls.
Brooke & Jeffrey are on KFFM.
KXDD's morning show is local, and has giveaways and a little chatter, but there is quite a bit of music during each hour.

Cherry FM (100.9) has a local morning show with one personality (Steve Rocha), who does little tidbit segments during the show. Strange Internet News is one of them. He also has an "on this day" segment.

Interestingly, Positive Life Radio (which I listen to the most in the mornings) has a local morning show that I highly believe is pre-recorded, Chris & Liesl. They usually have a set topic that is discussed during the stopsets, sometimes about a way to be the hands and feet of Jesus (helping the homeless, good deeds, etc.), sometimes they share feel-good stories from the Internet as well. I don't even think the two of them are in Walla Walla together either. Much of their lineup is voicetracked from elsewhere.
 
TheBigA said:
My view is the big mistake radio made in 1996 was trying to run radio-only companies without any second revenue stream. Radio was strongest when it was owned by electronics companies, insurance companies, department stores, car dealerships, and TV networks.
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Radio was strongest when it was owned by those companies because some of them were willing to sustain losses in operating the radio stations if they brought in money elsewhere. Electronics companies and department stores owned radio stations to increase sales in their stores. Car dealerships owned stations to showcase the radios in their vehicles. Insurance companies used radio to make sure their customers knew when bad weather was coming so they might put their vehicles in the garage and their tractors in the barn. One of the two companies that became the foundation block of iHeartMedia was INSILCO, the International Silver Company. Turns out, when you mine silver, you tend to also find a lot of copper. What to do with such a worthless, at the time, metal? The answer was to market it to AM radio stations for their grounding. INSILCO owning its own stations showcased what it could do with the copper it found.

Miss Tuned said:
In my market, we still have a couple of live-and-local morning shows, but they are the same old jocks still doing the same old crap they did in the 1990s - it's all wacky zany morning zoos, prank calls, six people all yapping over each other. This stuff was played-out in the '90s and I don't really want to revisit it in 2024. I don't care if it's live-and-local if it's crap.
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That sounds like a Top-40 station. If you were listening to it 30 years ago, you're not in the target audience anymore. You're probably too mature to want to spend much time listening to prank calls and morning zoos.

crainbebo said:
Many of the morning shows in Yakima are syndicated. KATS airs Free Beer & Hot Wings, which has very little music - just a lot of morning zoo chatter, strange stories, occasional calls.
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One of the problems morning radio has is that people don't listen to it like they used to report it in the diaries. The original school of thought was that a talk-heavy morning show would get a larger audience because there was a larger and more diverse listening pool, and playing less music meant fewer opportunities for tune-outs. In the diary era, most people filled out their diaries in retrospect and wouldn't take note of when they hit the button. PPM showed they hit the button a lot more than they reported, and the audience that wanted music in the morning was much greater than originally estimated. Morning shows have had to adapt or perish.
 
SomeRadioGuy said:
Listeners want a genuine connection, a best friend on the radio.. and unless youre like an AC or country station, you dont have that type of presentation.

I'm very average at best as a jock, but listeners like me... because i share those random thoughts about food, music and the community.. tell a short funny story

I think, among radio people.. morning shows have had this impression of being loud and zany... and i dont think the average listener wants that anymore. While im not your average listener, i want to laugh but i also want music... and alot of morning shows dont play a ton of that

I'm not always the most eloquent with the written word but I hope i made some sense
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I don't get up early enough to hear him any more, but where I live, a man came back to where he used to live and bought a 1000-watt radio station and switched it to soft oldies mostly from satellite, and did the morning show himself. His son was on some in the afternoon and didn't quite have his father's musical taste, and he would substitute for his father in the morning. The father would say things like "I want to be the first one to say good morning", meaning his would be the first voice you heard on the radio. There was network news followed by some local news. There would be announcements of birthdays and sometimes a person having a birthday would be given a certain amount of time to call in for a prize. There was something like "name that tune" and trivia contests. I listened to some of the show because Paul Harvey was on until his death, then the people who took over, then Mike Huckabee got the slot permanently. The show ended with "Mr. Lucky" by Henry Mancini after the man said how much he had enjoyed spending time with us. although that has since been replaced by "May Each Day" by Andy Williams. The music changed to America's Best Music when there wasn't a local DJ after four years, when the satellite format the station was using was dropped and replaced with something other area stations were already using. Still, if the son was on he would play .38 Special and REO Speedwagon. Sometime after America's Best Music dropped DJs the station changed to Good Time Oldies and the explanation was only people in their 70s liked that other music. The man who owned the station still runs it and hosts the morning show but he sold it.
 
TheBigA said:
I'm the guy telling people they need to become multi-platform. If you can't do TV (face for radio) then write books or do a podcast. If you're a creative person, that creativity has applications in other areas. No, don't DIE on the radio hill. That's stupid.
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Is there a compelling reason nowadays for one of those multiple platforms to be radio? If you're a creative person, and you have a podcast, a YouTube channel, Insta, TikTok, books, and accounts across multiple socials, what does radio do that those other platforms can't? What does radio offer that is unique and indespensible to the budding career of a creative person?
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
Is there a compelling reason nowadays for one of those multiple platforms to be radio? If you're a creative person, and you have a podcast, a YouTube channel, Insta, TikTok, books, and accounts across multiple socials, what does radio do that those other platforms can't? What does radio offer that is unique and indespensible to the budding career of a creative person?
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What radio offers is reach and visibility. It still reaches most everybody at least once-a-week. Granted, almost no one spends as much time listening to radio as they did 20 years, nor does anybody use it as often as 20 years ago either. The reach, however, is better than what most people will get on podcasts and social media. I know a handful of people who went on to having their own voiceover/voice acting businesses and production companies, and those opportunities wouldn't have been available without radio. No chance they'd be doing those things with just a podcast and social media. Even locally, nobody would've known who they were without radio.

Radio also offers a paycheck. You're not guaranteed that with a podcast and/or as a social media influencer. There are thousands of podcasters and influencers, and only a handful of them make enough money to support themselves. Most of them have tiny audiences. Plus, online ads are usually sold in blocks of 1,000, and the cost per thousand is usually in the $35-50 range. You have to have a large audience just to buy dinner once-a-week. If you're not a celebrity or the child of one, good luck.
 
Kent said:
What radio offers is reach and visibility. It still reaches most everybody at least once-a-week.
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Radio is a great way to push people to your podcast, social media, or other platform. That's why they do it. People like Ben Shapiro were successful podcasters before radio, but having that additional tool to push potential listeners is quantifiable. I also know some former morning show hosts who thought they could take their act online as a podcast or internet station, and without the daily push of the on-air show, they went out of business very soon.
 
boombox4 said:
I think one possible issue here is that with the dominance of the internet, the concept of what is "local" has changed. Do people in my metro, Seattle, really care all that much about hearing about Seattle stuff by a DJ or talk host when they may already have national and international connections, via social media, and friends in other places? Social media is international in scope, and most Americans use it a lot. I don't think it's replacing radio, but the concept of "local media" seems to be fading as the internet gets more dominant in its importance.

I could be wrong, though....
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Given that Seattle has its own culture and challenges and experiences, you'd like to think they care. Maybe they don't, but if they don't that's not saying much good about the state of human nature and engagement with the place they actually live and things that matter to people's lives. Can't change it but still is on some level sad. If "local" doesn't matter, then what makes any city or community unique at all?
 
Andy Travis said:
If "local" doesn't matter, then what makes any city or community unique at all?
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Good question. I'll ponder that while driving past all the national chains that have replaced local businesses, while listening to music by national artists, promoted by international record labels. There's very little that's truly local anymore. People in Buffalo used to think their chicken wings were unique. People in Seattle thought their coffee was unique. Not anymore.
 
TheBigA said:
My view is the big mistake radio made in 1996 was trying to run radio-only companies without any second revenue stream. Radio was strongest when it was owned by electronics companies, insurance companies, department stores, car dealerships, and TV networks.
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Most of the owner types you mention got out of radio well before consolidation.

Earle Anthony and Sears left radio in before the full transition from network content to local music and talk had taken over. The radio companies started TV stations, not the other way around. And insurance companies looked at radio first as promotion, and then as a safe and sure investment; when returns diminished companies like Nationwide got out.

And RCA was an amalgamation of radio manufacturing and content provision to encourage people to buy radios. Radio lasted longer than RCA, in fact.

The biggest owners of stations in the earlier era were newspapers. A huge number of major papers and even small town ones had a radio station, as they wanted to have a dominant position, first, as a defense. World's Greatest Newspaper would be the best example, along with WWJ, WTMJ, WHK, WSB and many others.

How are newspapers doing today?
 
DavidEduardo said:
The biggest owners of stations in the earlier era were newspapers. How are newspapers doing today?
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Call it Nixon's revenge. It was his FCC that wrote the newspaper broadcast co-ownership rule. Some got waivers, such as Cox and Belo. Others, like the Washington Star, did not. The Star shut down not long after it was forced to sell WMAL AM/FM/TV.
 
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