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November 2025 Bay Area Radio PPM Ratings

michael hagerty said:
The race was on to create the digital version of the 1980s Sony Walkman (which could only have 12 songs physically in it at a time)
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Yeah, but it's not bad for 1980. Wasn't even too bad for 1990.

michael hagerty said:
(To an extent, you could do that with the Walkman, but how many cassettes did you want to stuff in your pockets?)
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Two or three would probably be all anyone would want or need (assuming an average of 30 minutes per side, that would be 2 or 3 hours worth of music). They'd be constrained to whatever is on the tapes, though, but an iPod would be constrained to whatever was uploaded to it at home too. People are spoiled rotten by the ability to stream everything from everywhere all the time.

c
 
cc333 said:
People are spoiled rotten by the ability to stream everything from everywhere all the time.
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Absolutely! They're spoiled rotten by all of the technological advances that have happened in the last 50 years.

And some people still think there were things radio could have done that would have changed the way things turned out. I really don't get that at all.
 
TheBigA said:
And some people still think there were things radio could have done that would have changed the way things turned out. I really don't get that at all.
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(Emphasis added.)

There's the problem right there. A failure to consider alternate outcomes, and a disdain for anyone who suggests that there's been such a failure.

We know what the situation is now. The question I ask is, could it have been different? And are there lessons that can be carried forward? If anyone has done that kind of work, I'd love to hear about it.

Otherwise, there are going to be a lot of stranded assets, and a loss of some desirable attributes. Maybe that's an inevitable outcome, but I find it appalling that we will get there without consciously realizing why it happened. Consumer demands are only part of the story.
 
Mark Roberts said:
...there are going to be a lot of stranded assets, and a loss of some desirable attributes. Maybe that's an inevitable outcome, but I find it appalling that we will get there without consciously realizing why it happened. Consumer demands are only part of the story.
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Are they really, though?

What could Western Union have done to blunt the telephone? (Okay---money transfers, which let them limp along until PayPal and Venmo).

484548403_1046832690797672_3103054558848740849_n.jpg

Honestly, apart from sending Dana Delaney to my house every day starting in 1982, I can't really think of anything...
 
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Mark Roberts said:
We know what the situation is now. The question I ask is, could it have been different? And are there lessons that can be carried forward? If anyone has done that kind of work, I'd love to hear about it.
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Here's what I know: Once the technology moved from radio companies such as RCA and GE to companies in China, we lost any control at all in the device we depended on for distributing our content. That happened almost 50 years ago. We were all very fortunate when the FM Walkman came about. That gave us another ten years. But after that, what new devices for content were released?

If you depend on another industry to distribute your content, and that other industry stops, then what? That's what happened to the music industry. They depended on physical product. Then it all went away. They lost $10 billion!!!! Or the concert part of the business shuts down for covid. They lost $10 Billion. That's why I say all this talk about what radio could have done is just plain silly. Unless radio was willing to get into the device business, they were going to get screwed. That's what happened.

One hundred years ago, the big tech companies were GE, Westinghouse, RCA, and Crosley. They owned radio stations. Today the big tech companies are Apple, Google, and Amazon. They are in the audio distribution business, but it's not radio. They don't own radio or TV stations. They build the devices we depend on to distribute our content. They don't make radios. Our formats or the staffing don't matter if people aren't buying radios.
 


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