chrisdanger said:
We were innovators with the like of Gordon McLendon, who innovated radio in this and other countries (He even ran an pirate radio in europe, amazing story BTW) Ron Chapman, and many many others. Yet, today we're a shadow of what we used to be.
But how much room is there for innovators in today's corporate radio environment? And I don't necessarily mean this as criticism as there are powerful and understandable motives for such companies to want to "play it safe." Acquiring and operating radio stations costs a lot of money and those in charge are under enormous pressure by stockholders and other investors to bring in a return on their investment. Unfortunately, sometimes it is a lot less risky to stick to tried and true conventional wisdom and defend mediocre results than it is to stick your neck out and try something that you think has the potential to become the next big thing but, if you are wrong, could become an embarrassing or even career ending flop.
Gordon McLendon, on the other hand, only had to justify any risks he took to himself (and, early on, his daddy).
I think you will also find that periods of great innovation in radio tend to coincide with periods of financial uncertainty. Radio in the early 1920s was a money losing proposition for a few years which brought about the innovations of deriving revenue through advertising and the big coast to coast networks - innovations that made radio's golden age possible. McLendon's innovations came along during a period of great uncertainty when all the popular radio programs and their audiences were moving over to television. Many at the time were convinced radio was finished - but amidst that uncertainty and downsizing innovators such as McLendon created an entirely new audience for the medium. FM in the 1960s was floundering with stations either simulcasting their successful AM counterparts or were little more than afterthoughts devoted to high fidelity easy listening or classical music. The fact that the stakes were not as high opened doors those who thought outside the box to offer the sort of programing that eventually caused young people to abandon the AM dial in droves. AM radio seemed pretty much finished in the late 1980s when Rush Limbaugh defied conventional wisdom and created an entirely new audience out of millions of people whose opinions had previously been either ignored or looked upon with scorn and derision by the mass media. Love the man or hate him, you have to admit that the success of Limbaugh's program the others that followed as a result revived and breathed another two decades of life into the AM dial.
Today, the AM dial seems to be in a similar boat that it was in during the late 1980s and terrestrial radio in general (and all forms of mass media) is in a situation that is not dissimilar to where radio was shortly after the advent of television. So if history is any guide, radio is ripe for another period of transformative innovation.
And there IS a lot of innovative programing going on today. But much of it is happening on the Internet. Heck, I will even be so shameless as to point to myself. Check out my .sig line at the bottom of the post. What corporate gatekeeper would have ever allowed such a format to exist 15 years ago except for perhaps a few hours in a dead time slot on a non-commercial station? Thanks to the Internet, I did not have to beg and plead my case before someone who had managed to obtain an FCC license and had a business to run for a chance to follow my passion. Today the barriers to entry are low enough that anybody who has a passion for something can take it online. Sure, much of the stuff online is mediocre or outright crap. But some of it isn't. And because there are no gatekeepers, people have a freedom to experiment and innovate that a corporate or even a mom and pop radio station would never be in a position to provide.
If I, through a highly unlikely course of events, were somehow put in charge of a terrestrial radio station, I would regard the Internet as my laboratory and be constantly trying to scour it for up and coming talent and for ideas and innovations that could be successfully moved (perhaps with a few tweaks) from the niche world of the Internet to the larger, more general audiences of terrestrial radio. I have no idea if people are doing that right now or not - but, if they are not, my guess is they eventually will be once things become desperate enough.
Finally, even when the next innovation/rebuilding of radio comes about, many of us probably will not notice until after the fact. My guess is that during McLendon's heyday an awful lot of veteran radio observers were decrying how horrible things had become and were waxing nostalgic for the pre-television golden age when radio was at the pinnacle of its cultural influence. Many of them were probably either blind or indifferent to the innovations that were taking place right in front of them.
