When two things happen at the same time, it's easy to confuse them. But consolidation didn't create the internet. They are two different things that happened at the same time. So don't blame what's happening in radio on consolidation. The reason people get laid off is because they aren't attracting money. There are a lot that can still bring in dollars. They are the ones getting paid a lot, and they work a lot. The company paying talent the most money now is iHeart. Audacy is also investing a lot into talent and programming. I think those two companies could handle a few more stations in major markets.
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More Consolidation is Not the Answer to Poor Business Decisions
- Thread starter Theater of My Mind
- Start date
When talking about Hubbard, the key words in your post are here and there. From what I understand, that was the nature of the business even well before I was born. If they could buy up every station in the country and continue to gradually cut, more power to them. This seems to be the strategy Townsquare takes. No, I don't like how much they rely on national programming, but we rarely hear about cuts from them. When we do, it's a few here, and a few there. Compare that to iHeart, which as Clear Channel, started the mass layoffs in 2009, and has gone through one round a year almost every year since. It is to the point now where even the larger markets only have local shows in drive time and out of market trackers the rest of the day. In most markets below about 70, there is little to no local content at all. I am now bored by what once were acceptable, if not good, stations, and rarely listen to anything out of them anymore.
The media only reports the layoffs. You never hear about all of the hiring because it happens one at a time. But they often rehire the people they lay off. I have a friend who has been rehired many times. The prefer to rehire because former employees are in the system already.
The have local hosts in drive time because that’s where advertisers are. How many local hosts does Hubbard have at the Bull?
In other words, station owners are running (at least publicly) with the idea that most of their costs are fixed costs; i.e. they will pay the same cost no matter how many stations they wind up owning. This is why voicetracking is used, for example. If I pay one person the same amount for him/her to work at two stations instead of one, then that person has become a fixed cost to me; that is, I will pay him/her the same amount of money, no matter how many stations he/she voicetracks. And this means that having more radio stations allows me to earn more money without having to hire extra assistance to run them.
What broadcasters are not publicly discussing are the variable costs associated with owning large numbers of stations. Variable costs refer to the costs tied to an individual station that would go away if you got rid of the station. One example would be the cost of overseeing the transmitting towers for an individual station. While paying your engineers may be a fixed cost (the same, no matter how many stations you own), the cost of keeping transmitters and towers repaired and in good shape can be variable with each station or station cluster you own. This is part of the reason why Cumulus chose to cancel the licenses of its two AM Savannah stations--the variable cost of transmitter and tower repairs versus what the AM stations could supply in terms of profit made it a relatively easy decision to make.
That's not in practice how it works. Most VTers get paid per station. On the other hand, if they get paid for a 40 hour week, and are only on the air for 20 hours (5 days of 4 hour shifts), how much should they get paid? You tell me.
No, and I'm not suggesting that there is. There also isn't anything a broadcast station can to cause people to slowly throw away their digital devices, either.
Broadcast stations need to figure out what they can do to get some of those people to spend some time listening to their OTA signal, their streaming platform, or otherwise consume their content. What will make them competitive?
In the space I work in now, everyone is talking about "scaling." We've got an idea, developed a product, and it works on a certain level. How do we scale it up? What does this look like in 1 or 2 or 5 years? How many more people are we going to have to hire? How are we going to train them? What processes and structures are we going to need to implement and put into place when we're 10 times bigger? A hundred times bigger?
Broadcast stations and broadcasting companies seem to be focusing on scaling back. Consolidating. Doing more with less. Becoming smaller and smaller in response to other platforms taking away listeners and market share. How is that going to work in the long run?
Yes, for independent voice trackers, But in many station groups, one employment contract may cover voice tracking for multiple stations with no additional salary or compensation.
Concerning your last three sentences, I don't know if it's still true, but it used to be that, outside of college stations, people who worked as radio personalities actually worked for 6 to 8 hours a day even if their on-air shifts lasted only 3 or 4 hours. There was usually show prep before a show and before and after onair work, there were always (or nearly always) promotional announcements and advertisements to record. And, if you worked for a small town station, you may have done two or more jobs--say both on-air personality and traffic director.
You're looking at the wrong side of the equation. If other platforms are taking away listeners and market share, how are they doing it? What are THEY doing that is causing our listeners to go there? Are they hiring more on-air staff? They are trillion dollar companies, so they have no shortage of money. They could hire more staff if that's what is taking away listeners. But that's not the reason. Do you think Spotify isn't trying to figure out how to do more with less? Do you know anyone who works there? Because I do. They're not looking to hire on-air talent to baby-sit consoles. It doesn't seem to be hurting their user base.
When I worked in DC, people joked about government work. It was seen as easier and better paying than working for private companies. I know people who left working for radio companies to take jobs at VOA. They thought it would be more secure than working at a for-profit. Until now. We now have a government that is run like a business. Have you noticed what they're doing?
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It depends on the job. If you're hired to do multiple stations, you get paid accordingly. That's your job. You know how many stations you're on, you only do what you need to do for each station, you do work parts and not sit at a console for a real-time shift. Unless you do a network show, which can be a real time show. Working as VT at a radio station isn't a one-size fits all thing.
If you're an on-air talent, your goal is to reach more people. In the old AM days, that meant moving to bigger stations. Maybe going from a 1K AM to a 50K clear channel. Reaching more people meant making more money. That's what you want to do, right? In the FM world, there are no 50KW clear channels. But you can still reach more people if you add more signals to your show. That's what these people are doing. As for getting additional compensation, that's why people join unions. The union has rules for that kind of thing. Or you negotiate your own personal services contract. Do you think Bobby Bones or Ryan Seacrest are complaining about how much money they make? The people I know who work for those companies and do that kind of work aren't complaining about being overworked and underpaid.
A friend of mine works at a condo management company. He manages hundreds of condos and similar properties. Do you think he complains when they add more properties to his list? It happens all the time. You want your job to grow and get more responsibilities.
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Things are not like "used to be." They never are.
Spotify pays what some consider very low royalties per stream to their listeners, their CEO made more one year than the biggest pop star in the world, Taylor Swift, and they're pushing AI generated music into new music and discovery playlists, particularly for genres such as electronica and jazz, in the hope more people will stream those tracks and lower their overall ratings payout.
It's perhaps in that case not so much doing more with "less" as getting "more than more." Which ultimately, has a negative impact on actual human beings in the music business, including actual human artists.
The answer to your first question is not "how are they doing it" because they've already done it. The barn door has been open for years and the horse is long gone. Radio (as a whole) ceded the high ground to streaming services a long time ago. Yes, they are trillion-dollar companies now, but they didn't appear as such fully formed. They invested in their product, and some companies fell by the wayside before they could become something like Spotify.
As far as your crack about "on-air talent to baby-sit consoles," of course they aren't hiring them to do that. Why would anyone hire a talented, creative person to push a button and read a liner card about a text to win contest coming up in 5 minutes? You hire talented, creative people to provide entertaining, compelling content. You pay them enormous sums of money to do that podcast that everyone is talking about, even if it is hosted by a credulous nut who used to do stand-up and host a gross-out TV show. Yes, they "do more with less" in many ways, but also spend money when it makes them money. No, I don't know anyone who works at Spotify, but I'm guessing it's not a company staffed with a half dozen monkeys pushing buttons for minimum wage.
As for the government, I'm not gonna risk getting too political, but I think we're all going to find out soon that a lot of these allegedly lazy government employees were actually doing very important work, and firing tens of thousands of people because you don't understand what they do and why it's important is going to come back to bite us in the backside much worse than radio ignoring the threat of streaming services ever did. Maybe "running government like a business" is a good idea, but judging by the way the market is reacting, we've put the wrong businessmen in charge, to put it mildly.
So you're saying it happened while radio stations had full local staffs. How exactly did they "cede higher ground?" People were converting from physical music collections to online streaming. It began with Napster and downloading files. How was radio involved in that? Once their music was in their portable devices, there was no need for an additional device. Had there been a combination mp3 player/radio, it might have helped. But that's not where the technology was going. Enter the smart-phone, and that changed everything.
I'll say it again: There is no radio format, no amount of local staffing, no investment in product that was going to get people to throw away their digital devices and seek out radios. People are going to Spotify for uninterrupted music. The way for radio companies to compete is to get into the podcast business, which all of them have done.
Name all the compelling content on Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. Sirius is the only digital service that offers traditional radio, and they're suffering from the same audience losses as traditional radio. People are moving away from linear, real time programming. It doesn't matter if it's broadcast, digital, audio, or TV. As I said, iHeart, Audacy, Cumulus, and even NPR are all in podcasting, and they are among the top companies in a very crowded and competitive field.
They don't need monkeys. It's all run off computers. Fully automated. All national, just like K-Love. That's what people want.
We put a reality TV star who played a businessman on TV in charge.
Fair point, though cuts here and there at smaller businesses can really add up as the labor pool was smaller from the beginning. I will say, however, that I do largely agree with your overall point. I have worked for large publicly-traded conglomerates and small-to-medium sized operations both inside and outside of radio. My experience has usually, though not always, been that the smaller and medium operations have been better places to work. I never got as good of benefits and didn’t have as many opportunities to make money, but the stability and working environment were worth something. With the big corporations, we saw layoffs, reduced benefits, and/or pay cuts every time the stock price dropped below certain levels. Sure, we had the co-worker in our office who took the entire department out for dinner and drinks one evening because his stock options went up $60,000 in a week working for the big business, and we never saw that working for smaller organizations. We also, however, didn’t experience universal dread, anxiety, and fear that we'd lose our jobs or that our friends would be out of work when the stock ticker showed us going down. Making $60,000 on your stock options is awesome, but it's funny money. That won’t get you far if you find yourself on the wrong side of budget cuts as the the stock price plummets.
Since we're talking about Hubbard, here's a story from September when their station WTOP laid off six people:
Just a reminder that WTOP is the #1 highest billing station in the country. Yet they still lay off staff. Why? Because an all news station is expensive to run, and advertising simply has not been enough to cover the staffing. That's what this is all about. It doesn't matter if you're owned by a big company or a small family company. If the station isn't bringing in enough money to pay the staff, you get layoffs.
It depends on what you do with your stock money. I used mine to buy my first house. I would never have been able to do that on a radio salary. But also owning stock in the company paid off. I cashed out my stock, bought my house, just in time for the stock price to crash and the company go through layoffs. Luckily they didn't affect me, plus I still had my house.
The reason I call stock options “funny money” is that you have to be able to exercise them to actually get the money. Can’t remember if my co-worker cashed his in when he made that $60,000, but, if he held onto them thinking they would go up further, he likely was disappointed if he held on much longer. I watched my options go up several times, but I didn’t stay with the company long enough to cash in on them. Plus, by the time I left, the options were higher than the stock price on the open market. I sold the stock I had in the company I had gotten at a discount through the employee stock purchase program two or three years after I left the company and even lost money on those shares.
The same big corporate conglomerate also offered tuition reimbursement, which is a benefit I’ve never seen at smaller companies. Having said that, you had to be able to get to the benefit to be able to use it. I never had any success getting approved the few times I tried to take advantage of that perk.
Re: streaming services.
I'm 31 and have a fairly large music collection, though it's not as big as I would like. When I want uninterrupted music with no talk, I go to that. I may be somewhat unique in terms of the general public in that any playlist I'm playing, I've spent a significant amount of time hand building. No, there is no imaging, though us radio geeks, myself included, would probably buy imaging for such playlists if we really wanted. When I simply want music, that's what I put on. I listen to the radio more often than my music collection though because there's always something new to hear, and my music collection can't compete with what's available on the radio, though I would like it to eventually. I suspect radio will still be a big part of my life when my music collection gets to the size I want because it's still where I discover much of the new music I like.
That being said, radio still needs to be compelling, and I don't find much of the radio out of the bigger companies to be compelling. Stations like WJZQ/Traverse City, MI are a good example of the kind of radio I like but is getting harder and harder to find. They always have at least one contest going on, they are all local in most dayparts, and I get a sense of the market by listening. This does work on a national level as well with programs such as Open House Party and Throwback 2K. When I listen to any of those stations, whether local or national, I feel like I'm part of a community, even though I'm not interacting directly with anyone. I remember the things referenced in the imaging on Throwback 2K, I enjoy hearing a small slice of someone else's life when they call into Open House Party, or hearing something I can relate to from a local voice in an area of Michigan I probably will never visit.
I'm 31 and have a fairly large music collection, though it's not as big as I would like. When I want uninterrupted music with no talk, I go to that. I may be somewhat unique in terms of the general public in that any playlist I'm playing, I've spent a significant amount of time hand building. No, there is no imaging, though us radio geeks, myself included, would probably buy imaging for such playlists if we really wanted. When I simply want music, that's what I put on. I listen to the radio more often than my music collection though because there's always something new to hear, and my music collection can't compete with what's available on the radio, though I would like it to eventually. I suspect radio will still be a big part of my life when my music collection gets to the size I want because it's still where I discover much of the new music I like.
That being said, radio still needs to be compelling, and I don't find much of the radio out of the bigger companies to be compelling. Stations like WJZQ/Traverse City, MI are a good example of the kind of radio I like but is getting harder and harder to find. They always have at least one contest going on, they are all local in most dayparts, and I get a sense of the market by listening. This does work on a national level as well with programs such as Open House Party and Throwback 2K. When I listen to any of those stations, whether local or national, I feel like I'm part of a community, even though I'm not interacting directly with anyone. I remember the things referenced in the imaging on Throwback 2K, I enjoy hearing a small slice of someone else's life when they call into Open House Party, or hearing something I can relate to from a local voice in an area of Michigan I probably will never visit.
bobdavcav I think you nailed it. I think about what I miss in radio and it's that feeling of being a par of the community or another word might be 'club'. Sure music discovery is there but there are many sources of new music. It's feeling a part of the community that winds up being missing from much of radio I hear today. I know that won't work on every station but I think hat is the 'human' part that makes the difference.
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