And yet we still have people on this site celebrating the kind of insane corporate consolidation where big, bloated, dead bankrupt companies have killed competition, killed this once-great heritage brand, killed the jobs, killed the creativity, homogenized programming, driven audiences down the drain, need I go on? Congratulations on your retirement, you are beyond lucky to be out of it.
Most everyone knew formats were going to change when the Telecommunications Act was signed into law. People had differing opinions on how it might shake out and what the best way to handle it was, but most markets had entirely too many country, AC, and oldies stations. Everyone knew that. New Yorkers were somewhat insulated from that because the market had so many stations, but most markets weren’t so well-equipped.
Nobody likes to see this. Good people who did nothing wrong are losing their jobs. The color green, unfortunately, is what matters in business. I'm not saying the bottom is going to drop out soon, but, maybe, the end of news radio is closer than we realize. Why do we need it when we have push notifications directly on our phone telling us about breaking news? Want the details? Tap the notification, and you can read the story when you want. Most of those stories even have audio and video so you can hear it if you’re not in a good position to read it. Why even bother turning on the radio and waiting up to 30 minutes to hear it when you can have instant gratification?
Everything has a beginning and an end. Remember when New York had easy listening on 93.1 and 105.1? Seems like there was a third easy listening station, too, but I can’t remember which station. The market also had two commercial classical stations until the early 90’s. It had an FM station that specialized in Yiddish, Greek, and Italian programming until 1989. It sauntered over to AM and continued for a few more years, but a for profit operation can’t be a charity service forever. All of those stations saw their audience age out and no longer be in demand from advertisers. Maybe the younger generation doesn’t want to get its news off the radio anymore, and news radio is going the way of those stations. Every great radio station eventually ends up on the broadcast tower in the sky.
If you want to say consolidation didn’t achieve the desired results, knock yourself out. When the four largest radio companies have gone through bankruptcy, I can’t put up a great argument against that. Just know that the alternative was the auto industry. Twenty years ago, we had too many Ford, GM, and Chrysler dealerships, too. The Great Recession hit, and roughly half are gone now. That was the alternative to consolidation. If you wanted that for radio, more power to you, but most people wouldn’t agree.
I just wanted to put to bed a tangent here that I saw about Canada. Wishing for Canadian media is like a death wish. It's an emaciated industry struggling with the pace of change, with American competitors in the streaming sector, and with the extent that vertical integration (read: really expensive cell phone service) has become necessary to sustain it. Corus might belong on the endangered species list. If anything, the CRTC is lumbering.
Canadian radio is also more consolidated than US radio. In 1990, when half of US stations were losing money, about 60% of Canadian stations were operating in the red. It's not the situation there that most Americans think it is.
