Throttle House is great. So's Jason Cammisa at Hagerty (no relation):
But he's got a healthy budget, too.
A friend and former boss called our jobs "managing the decline".
He said that a decade ago.
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Is live & local radio dead?
- Thread starter rtruskey2
- Start date
Throttle House is great. So's Jason Cammisa at Hagerty (no relation):
But he's got a healthy budget, too.
A friend and former boss called our jobs "managing the decline".
He said that a decade ago.
What is it now?
In another decade, I'm afraid it's going to be "driver." Picture a hearse with the traditional landau bars and untinted windows, but lengthened like the longest stretch limo you've ever seen. The deceased passenger inside: a red and white AM tower lying on its side.
On the other hand, it might also be a digital content business with a radio station attached. It depends on how much effort they put into the new business now. Some companies are more than halfway there now.
That is not exactly true. While there are more incidents of in a car listening, the episodes are generally short. It only takes one person who listens often on all day at home or at work to make up for a dozen people listening for just a quarter hour or two in their car. So closer to half of all radio, listening to a.m. and FM and streams is not in the car.
The challenge, whether it be to gain exposure from traditional radio, or streamed “stations”, or in television and other video platforms, is to get the initial play of your song and hope that it is well liked and noticed enough for others to find out about it and try it out.
Ah yes, that super P1 listener who has the meter and listens to the station all day at work, at home, and even in the car. Big fish if you can catch one.
But that big fish is becoming (like many fish) a vanishing breed. The number of people who have a "favorite radio station" that they choose to the exclusion of all other sources is shrinking and has been shrinking for a long time. As Mr. Hagerty said above, it's just "managing the decline."
As I've mentioned before, music comes up often where I work. Last night, we had a couple of young women from our local ops team working in our office, and one of them said "I love music from the 70s! Best decade for music, ever!" I'm guessing she's maybe on the cusp of aging into the 25-34 demo, and I'd also hazard a guess that she doesn't listen to the radio at all, let alone stay glued to a classic rock or classic hits station all day long in hopes of hearing a 70s song. She's gonna go to Spotify or some other streaming service to get the sweet sounds of Yacht Rock or Disco.
How would you turn her into that super P1 listener that makes everything better?
You can't.
I mean, you could go all Plur1bus on her...
...but all her other choices, the way she's hearing those songs now, are still gonna be there and are likely to deliver a listening experience she prefers.
This is not a popular sentiment on this board, but we have progressed. Giant metal towers sticking out of the ground broadcasting content supported by 14 minutes of advertising per hour is no longer the best, most efficient way of sharing news and entertainment with a mass audience.
It wasn't too long ago (maybe 10 years or so) when I would have been on the side of "you don't understand...radio is still a vibrant, thriving medium that people love!" Change is difficult, especially if you've dedicated your life to an industry, and I understand that all too well. I was fortunate to land in a different industry that's still relatively new and it changed not just my career path, but my way of thinking. As I said in other comments, the thought that's constantly in our mind is "how does this scale?" Where are we going to be a year from now when we've got ten or twenty or a hundred times as many customers? How will we handle that load from a logistics standpoint? This also means staffing up as opposed to cutting back, and paying more to veteran talent to keep them from being poached by other companies also looking to scale (something I'm reaping the benefits of at the moment). In Q3 and Q4, we're looking at doubling the number of team members in my office.
Where is that happening in broadcast radio? Near as I can tell, it's not, and Q4 is probably bringing another round of the dreaded holiday layoffs.
That's why broadcast radio has to change to fit what most people want. It's clear that most people just want free music. Give them that, and they're happy. 34 million people pay money to hear Sirius. How many would pay for AM/FM? None.
I said this earlier: Would people sit through music they don't like to hear live & local personalities? The answer is no. They want their favorite music for free. Everything else is optional.
What does that change look like, though?
And it's more than just music. It's content. A former PD I worked for in country radio said "anyone can play the latest Garth Brooks song, but what are you doing to keep them listening to us and not the station across the street?" People will pay for music (Sirius and streaming services) and will sit through sponsor breaks on podcasts and YouTube videos ("let me tell you about Surf Shark VPN while I guzzle a glass of AG1 and slip on these great new shoes I just happened to find from our sponsor"), and in some cases will support these content creators via platforms like Patreon. Then there's streaming on platforms like Twitch. It might not be local, but there are streamers who make a living "broadcasting" content all day long, then taking clips of their streams and uploading them to YouTube, Tik Tok, and other platforms and generating revenue beyond the live stream.
If the content is compelling, not only will people stay, and they'll support it, but it has to be more than "coming up after the commercial break we'll tell you the latest gossip about Ariana Grande! (that you can find with 10 seconds of Googling while we play 10 minutes of spots)"
Again, what is radio (and I know you don't like the generalization) doing to bring that 20-something female I work with back into the fold and give her a reason to listen? More importantly, how can you accomplish this task when the downward pressure from "corporate" is to constantly cut staff and "do more with less?"
You keep asking that.
People just want the music. If they want talk, there are different stations for that. If they want sports, there are different stations for that.
It's not the 60s anymore. There are 16,000 radio stations and they don't all have to have live & local staff.
Some may. Most won't. They content was compelling in the 90s, and people started leaving when they had other options for free music.
Compelling means different things to different people. You need to tell me what "compelling" looks like. How do you personalize broadcasting?
Once they're gone, they're not coming back. What radio needs to do is go where they are. That's not listening to AM & FM. They don't even own an AM/FM radio. So give up on that idea completely.
I feel like we've already had this conversation a few times. You keep asking the same things. The future won't be like the past.
We have indeed had this conversation, and by now you should know that I believe - unless something changes drastically - radio is going the way of the phone book. I know very well that the future won't be like the past. I've been working in "the future" for years now...doing a job that didn't even exist a decade ago. Part of my job is on the R&D team, testing new features and software branches and constantly evaluating and asking questions. "How will this work in the real world away from the test track? What SOPs will we need in place when this feature is rolled out? Where are the bugs? What's the fall back if it doesn't work?"
I "keep asking the same things" in no small part because I have an emotional attachment to the radio business after dedicating half my life to it. I don't want it to die off, but I don't see any indication from the people still "on the inside" that anything substantial is being done to do anything other than "managing the decline."
That's not something that keeps me up at night, and again, it's up to you and other people still in "the business" to figure out. I ask these questions and the responses I hear are "you can't," and "you won't," and "they're not coming back." When I ask "what does that future look like?" the response is "I don't know" or "you keep asking that."
The answers I get are...not confidence inspiring, to put it mildly.
Edited to add: A quote from a former co-worker ...
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Oh well. The big companies have already gone bankrupt. What's the worst that can happen?
That business is gone. It ended while you were still employed. You just didn't realize it. But it ended with the PC.
You can see what they're doing. You don't need me to tell you. Everybody is focusing on creating content for the internet. Podcasts, YouTube video, that kind of thing. That's where the money is. The radio companies have amortized their towers and transmitters. They'll keep using them while people still listen. But when they stop, they just turn in the license, and it's someone else's problem.
You want someone to bring back the 80s? Not gonna happen. The future won't look like the past.
Realistically, how many of these listeners exist *and* have a meter? And at what point would this much listening trigger the outlier policy and actually be a negative for the station?
I'm at a loss to understand how you still think I want to bring back the 80s. Or the 70s. Or the 90s. I don't. It was fun while it lasted.
Indeed.
Here's what you asked:
What does that question mean other than bringing back the past? What can radio do to get that 20-something to throw away her phone? Nothing.
There isn't a single thing. No music they can play, no live & local hosts they can hire, no format they can invent. Nothing. She's happy with her phone.
Oh, I dunno...finding something new that offers appealing programming to that 20-something? No, she's not going to "throw away her phone" because phones do a lot more than just play music. You keep saying "the future won't look like the past" but you also are making the case that radio has no place in that future. On that we (apparently) agree. On that level, it appears that you are the one clinging to the past...trying to squeeze the last of the juice out of the turnip that used to be radio.
I'm done with it. I don't listen anymore. I don't look for radio jobs anymore. I have fond memories of my time in radio, but those days are long gone and I've moved on to other things. It's not up to me to "save" radio. That's up to the people who are still "managing the decline" if you choose to try and do so.
Don't mind me I'm just hear to watch Big A & Deus Ex Machiato arguing Lol
Why am I here? I've already explained a bit, but it's like a parent who's frustrated with their adult kid couch-surfing and moving from low-paying job to lower-paying job, I still want them to turn things around and succeed, but the kid (radio) doesn't seem to have any ambition beyond "just getting by."
I'd love to stumble across a radio station that's doing something genuinely different than voice-tracked jocks reading the modern equivalent of liner cards and then leaving the studio to drive Uber which probably pays better.
I'd love to stumble across a radio station that's doing something genuinely different than voice-tracked jocks reading the modern equivalent of liner cards and then leaving the studio to drive Uber which probably pays better.
That makes sense but some of us are in the business and it's literally voice-tracking or nothing. Listen to www.kgaf.net and tell me what you think of our jocks, especially 6am to 3pm Central.