Or, as I put it: It's about revitalizing 'AM Business', not AM listening or "the band".
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2019 Radio Predictions
- Thread starter Y2kTheNewOldies
- Start date
Or, as I put it: It's about revitalizing 'AM Business', not AM listening or "the band".
Citadel was definitely the biggest and the deepest, but the downfall of the original Cumulus was death by 1,000 cuts. After Dickey took over for Weening (you really can’t make these names up) and moved the company from Milwaukee to Atlanta, his strategy was to buy with stock rather than cash. My former cluster fetched almost $40 million, but only about $1.5 million of that was cash. Around 60% of the Citadel deal was paid in equity. Lew ended up slowly giving his company away, and what really sunk him was that both the private equity firms and the banks came calling for their money at the same time.
By the way, I got out of Cumulus before it apparently installed cameras in the conference rooms to monitor sales meetings (and I didn’t work in sales in the first place), but I remember how most of the PD's complained about being told which songs to add and which ones to move. The brand managers weren’t known for tolerating pushback to any of their suggestions nor for listening to what their PD's had to say.
Definitely. As I understand, the next generation of the Cox family, much like the younger Appels with Susquehanna, has no desire to operate a broadcasting company. Some people will undoubtedly read it this way, but I'm not sure it's a case of the younger generation losing faith in broadcasting as it is a common generational pattern. The first generation makes the money. The second grows it, and the third spends it.
You know I've heard this rumor/anecdote before about the sales meeting cameras.
Like all good rumors...I wonder how much of this is true...and how much of the story took on a life of it's own.
Anyone have first hand experience seeing the cameras in operation for sales meetings?
("Not "someone I know said so...".)
I recall that was perpetuated by Jerry del Colliano. Never actually heard anyone conform it.
That's where I heard/read it too...before I stopped reading his DEPRESSING newsletter! ;-)
del Colliano came off as a sore sport who is sitting on the sidelines and sad that the industry has moved on.
(If someone would just call him, please call him, he's dying to be back in the game, because he has all the answers!!)
Norway is a DAB country and the number of channels available is limited. Many popular commercial FM's can not get onto the national DAB network. There is a sort of lottery each year or so to determine which of the popular commercial FM's get a slot on the national DAB network. So it is far from unlimited.
It's one reason DAB didn't take off in this country. The powers that be realized that in metros like LA there wouldn't be enough channels to allow all stations to have digital signals. With HD radio, any station, AM or FM, that wanted to install the equipment at least had the ability for digital broadcasting.
"Seems Del Colliano was insisting Cumulus would buy CBS. Lots this guy has been wrong about."
He was right about the then-CC mass firings 10 years ago and has kind of been living on that ever since.
He was right about the then-CC mass firings 10 years ago and has kind of been living on that ever since.
The powers that be did not want DAB for two reasons
Signal parity and room for more stations; nothing else!
Does Oslo have fifty FM stations?
How many bouquets are in Oslo and how many stations?
I suspect that this is only on one network of bouquets.
In the UK, eighteen 1.7 MHz wide blocks are spread across their old system-A VHF TV band.
London, and possibly the entire UK, has four bouquets with twelve stations each for a total of forty-eight stations.
Of course, unlike HD, non-co-owned DAB stations can purchase differing amounts of bandwidth to suit their individual needs.
Europe's L band includes twenty-three similar blocks across a 40 MHz wide spectrum.
UK & EU.
Sirius and XM are proportioned similarly to each other:
They each have 12.5 MHz divided into six bands of 1.8MHz each plus guard bands.
Each of these 1.8MHz bands contains the entirety of the service; all the channels.
They have about eighty-five music channels of varying quality and the vast majority are in stereo
plus an even greater number of reduced bandwidth information, comedy, and sports channels.
Extra services including GPS, traffic, weather, and other information are also thrown in.
The only reason I mention this is to illustrate how nearly two hundred digital channels can be compressed into under two MHz
and be made to sound good enough for people to pay to listen to, though they sounded better when they had fewer choices.
There's a reason why things get grandfathered. There has to be some benefit to having heritage, otherwise why bother?
The FCC had to deal with this the several times they redid channel allocations, and that was way before FM became popular.
From what I've read about those negotiations, they were very sticky and involved a lot of politics.
But when you start something from scratch, as was the case with satellite, you can do things correctly for that time.
Signal parity was vastly improved for at least two Miami TV stations when the analog to digital transition happened.
Most radio stations are not owned by their original owners, so maintaining an advantage of a legacy station only benefits it's most recent purchaser.
If HD ever dominates, then signal advantages will shift all over the place as each station has different first adjacencies to contend with,
PLUS most grandfathered stations will have only the greater of 1% of their analog power or 10% of what their analog signal would be if they were granted today.
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Several of my friends in the UK have who do not live inside the technical metros of any of England's larger cities have said the same thing: when they finally try to shut down FM they will discover that DAB does horribly in many structures, particularly in ground-floor rooms, in rolling hill areas, etc. FM does fine, but DAB, all report, is very erratic and in some cases, useless without an outside antenna.
These are real world reports from people who have been involved with ham radio or commercial radio for decades and know of what they speak. One made the comment, "we only have the inferior DAB because, again, the government thinks it knows what is best for us".
Canada, where the bulk of radio is commercial and the CBC can't order the industry around, tried DAB and they ended up shutting the system down.
There are some who've been putting forth the idea that maybe radio stations should own their frequency and do away with the licensing system.
Because as long as the frequencies are owned by the government, the process will remain the way it is.
I say “apparently” because I wasn’t there, nor was anyone I knew in sales by the time that was mentioned. Turnover at the cluster where I worked was horrendous under Cumulus, and it was already bad under the previous local ownership.
Del Colliano has always been the National Enquirer of radio, wrong on most stories but right on some very big ones on rare occasion. As someone who’s worked for Cumulus, that one sounded credible. From a programming standpoint, corporate micromanaged almost everything. That the corporate office would do the same to sales seemed like the natural progression at that place.
I'll have to ask a couple of friends what they know about it. I still know a handful of people there, though most of them are programming staff.
I became a proponent of that idea back when the government started auctioning off 'wireless cable' MMDS spectrum. Following that, the FCC divorced itself to spectrum management instead becoming a sugar daddy to Congress. Just as with what's happened with the now-darlings of wireless spectrum Cell and PCS providers; the FCC should just auction off all broadcast spectrum, then lift all the old restrictions on what the owners do with it.
Because no one who listens to hip-hop or hard rock wants it to be content edited; it is only the do-gooder types who would never listen to either who want to control what other people hear.
I believe that's what's hurting those formats in broadcast radio. When you hear the popular songs in those formats, you realize that few can be played on FM because of indecency laws. If they are, they're often heavily edited, which annoys the hell out of the fans. Even country music these days is being edited for certain content. Fans of Maren Morris were surprised to hear the FM version of Rich, because it was missing the "s" word. Maybe see if the FCC would allow such songs to be aired on HD Radio.
On the contrary, plenty listened to radio edits in the 1990's and 2000's, on top rated stations. Rap rock was edited, and got played. Nu-metal and grunge were often edited, and still got played. Many of them were huge hits.
Some videos on the internet of the same songs have language edited and still get thousands, if not millions, of views and plays. And those "do gooder" types? They do it to protect children.
You may not agree with it, but that is also the rationale behind radio edits.
People listened because they had no choice. Now they do. So they listen to sources that play the unedited versions, and FM radio loses.
I will tell you that when you go to a concert, the artists don't perform the edited version. Even the 80 year old Charlie Daniels.
From words they'd probably already heard in the neighborhood or before/after school.
The bigger question is why those words have to be in songs to begin with. The great songwriters and singers of past decades and centuries seemed to get their concepts and emotions across clearly and powerfully without such language. No one accused them of not "keeping it real."
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