The short answer to the question posed originally in this thread is, “yes”. The real question though is “WILL radio be fixed and regain it’s dignity?” and the answer to that question is a resounding, “no”.
This thread is a breath of fresh air, because most people on this board simply defend terrestrial radio blindly and fail to see the burgeoning problems in the industry. I could write the list of problems and go on for days, but the big ones are easy to spot.
Music stations (CHR especially) have stifled local personalities to the point where listeners can no longer connect with a “show” or timeslot. Instead, a jock comes on, reads from a liner card and front-sells the song all in a nice 12 second intro. On a rare occasion, if the program director has decided to ignore the pleading of his consultant, they’ll allow a jock to do a phoner or two, but even these are contrived, easy pieces of innuendo that a 12 year old could easily think of. Of course, this assumes that a live jock is even on the air, voice tracking certainly is a significant possibility—and by the way, I’m not talking about small market stations here, I’m talking MAJOR (top 20) markets pulling these shenanigans. Example: Kiss 108 in Boston have a voice tracked midday host—don’t know if that’s still the case, but it was for a while.
Over produced and continuous imaging barraging listeners with fancy Chase Cuts and Killer Hertz noises while telling us how “we’re getting you back to the music faster” really breaks up the momentum of any music set, naturally, the pattern of 3 songs, spots, 2 songs, spots, 3 songs, spots doesn’t really do a lot for momentum either. Don’t get me wrong, I love well produced, fancy imaging—I make some myself, but at some point one has to rope in the 45 second top of the hour ID.
The recent situation at KDND in Sacramento is another fine example of what’s wrong with radio—and fits nicely into the category of the overall dignity of the medium. I wouldn’t come down too hard on the jocks in that situation however, middle management (including the program director and GM) are more responsible for the outcome of that disgrace than anyone. PD’s and GM’s feel enormous amounts of pressure and subsequently pass that along to the personalities… they tell them to push the envelope to any means necessary and if you don’t, you’re canned. Since everyone wishes to be a poor Stern imitator, they follow suit and low and behold, listeners get injured, defrauded on contests or die. Obviously, in the aforementioned case, the people participating in the contest do hold some of their own liability, but if stations weren’t in such a state of disaster, such a situation would never come about in the first place.
The FCC and special interest groups are the main contributors to the problems with radio today. When a station can be fined for “indecent” material and yet the FCC, nor stations themselves can identify what “indecent” even means, then there’s no doubt that trouble is on the horizon for free speech. A station being fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for instances of arbitrary “indecent” material spells doom. Of course, the FCC is funded by congress and congress has individuals like Ted Stevens from Alaska who feel that we need to return to the 1950s and that any kind of ‘edgy’ radio is best left off the air.
Obviously I’ve left off the 800 pound gorilla in the room, other media competing with terrestrial radio. Satellite, internet and various portable devices (ipods, et al) are slowly eroding the TSL and audience from terrestrial radio. People are learning that the homogenized content they’ve been given on their radios for the past 10-15 years has many alternatives, and they are flocking to them.
This brings about another issue. While I am not against deregulation of the business entirely, I must say that it has certainly had profound (and mostly unfortunate) consequences for terrestrial radio. As stated earlier, formats are becoming homogenized, KISS FM being the greatest example, but other ‘concept radio’ ideas are also a big detriment to the industry. Some of these ‘concepts’ that homogenize markets include the ever present CBS Radio disaster that is FREE FM, where syndicated hosts give us the exact same show with different hosts (in most cases) 24 hours a day. Of course, they don’t even have enough of a 1) budget or 2) talent to fill 24 hours, so at least 1/4th of the day (at least here in Phoenix) on FREE FM is rebroadcast material. Of course, there are other failed concept radio models, such as JACK-FM, which is dead in most markets, New York being the primary example—although to be fair, Jack does pretty well in L.A. At any rate, you get the idea.
All of the above and much more contributes to why terrestrial radio is an empire that (while it will never fade away) will become as obsolete as the laser disc –IF- current trends are not reversed.
