Corporate FM Documentary

[TheBigA]

The money is there as long as you remain local in your programming.

Of course, you can't rely on that to support a station. In most small towns, there are plenty of Mom and Pop locally owned businesses. The local Chamber of Commerce is very active here and line up local businesses to sponsor their radio show. The Chamber in turn sends out email blasts encouraging members to support those sponsors and it works.

The problem is those small local businesses simply can't afford radio. That's driven spot rate way down from what it used to be. The local restaurant can afford a few spots, but the radio station wants them to buy a full plan. People mostly listen for short periods, so advertisers need to buy hundreds of spots, and they can't afford it. Doing local sports is great, but it's also expensive to staff and broadcast. I've heard some stations keeping costs down by doing the game on the telephone. That may work on a small AM, but sounds horrible on FM.

I think by now you've grasped the theme of my posts. Local Radio as we know it has pretty much died and it's sad.

Local everything is going away. The big box stores are shutting down because of online shopping. Those online stores don't buy local radio. You brought up Pandora and Apple. Where's the local content there? People seem to enjoy it regardless. Maybe all this emphasis on local isn't what people really want. At the end of the day, local costs money. If the people have gone online and aren't buying local, it also kills local media. I know you don't see it this way, but the people are the ones who are killing localism.

 

[b-turner]

TheBigA makes a very good point. It all revolves around the listener. Listeners equal dollars. Dollars are the tool for doing everything in radio.

Some will claim I proved their point that radio sucks but quite the contrary. National and online that is global is very different from radio. I recall a joke about a couple of traveling salesmen, a farmer and his daughter. There was something about 100 watermelons and 100 cherries. Let's just say there is a huge difference between the watermelon and cherry. A radio station is like a cherry versus online being a watermelon as far as the universe of listeners go. The online or national option can get by with a tiny fraction of a watermelon size audience potential. In other words it can be successful by being very niche. The radio station with a cherry for potential audience must find a way to embrace as many in it's potential audience to gather enough listeners to survive. If listeners are going to move toward the niche formats offered nationally and worldwide, the reach of the radio station gets smaller. Since listeners mean dollars, radio cannot play that niche game typically.

Because a radio station has very fixed costs as a base, covering that base each month means you have enough listeners to find those dollars. And sometimes those businesses that would provide those dollars are splitting their marketing budget in many slices, leaving radio with little money or the business has lost so much customer base to that national chain and online shopping they can't afford radio.

While it would be nice to be live and local, the listeners, the shoppers and the businesses all are making decisions that make that impossible. It's not just radio. It is happening in the print media. And while we are at it, not that many online options that are ad based are successful either. There are so many choices for about the same dollars (adjusted for inflation). I know of small markets where radio might have generated about $5 per $1,000 in retail sales in 1990. By about 2010 it might have been $2.50 and now it is more like about $1.35. To put a nail in it, that $5 compared to today's $1.35 is now split in more slices because there are more stations after those dollars today. The result is all about the share of listeners you can get and the greater number of options, the fewer dollars you have to keep that business going. So, it is much less about being live and local or the format. It is the dollars that say what you have to do or should I say, what you can do.

 

[davideduardo]

There are still quite a few locally owned restaurants in every market. People listen when the local jock live reads the daily special. It's not as effective when it's just a pre produced spot in the Bubba and Jim Bob Sat fed show. The local station I referred to earlier reads off lunch specials in the morning. Why? They aren't live during the lunch hour. Chances are that most people that hear the special of the day at 7:30am will have forgotten it by lunch time. If they hear it in the hour leading up to lunch, there's a good chance they'll pass up the Mac Burger for a Meat and Three.

The problem with your example is that local restaurants are notorious bad-debt generators. Many stations require cash in advance for at least the first months of a campaign. Lots of restaurant buys never pay or end up being trades.

Stations can't have live staff all day just to read the restaurant special (which also requires someone to call the restaurant and change the copy on the studio monitor). Add in the very few retailers who have some kind of daily sale or special, and there is just no payback.

It's been proven time and time again that live read spots are more effective. That's all there was in the early days of radio and TV.

Live spots, unless delivered by a glib, famous and talented spokesperson, are not particularly effective today and they sound old-fashioned next to slicker productions.

As has already been said here, the problem is not being live and it's not being local. What would most people rather see: a local amateur show or American Idol. It's about entertainment value. The problem is that there is vastly less local business in every market, large or small. Some local business is too small to afford radio at rates that will sustain a station. So costs of operation are reduced as the only way to stay on the air.

 

[tomservo]

The problem is those small local businesses simply can't afford radio. That's driven spot rate way down from what it used to be. The local restaurant can afford a few spots, but the radio station wants them to buy a full plan.

These statements are contradictory. If the spot rates are down, then it should be more affordable than ever to buy a schedule.

I'm also a big believer in the live read. It works so well for podcasting that just about every major podcaster does it. I've heard some of the more well-listened hosts talk about it and they all say it holds attention a lot better than a produced advert. I can't see why it'd be any different on broadcast radio.

 

[TheBigA]

These statements are contradictory. If the spot rates are down, then it should be more affordable than ever to buy a schedule.

That would be wonderful, but spot rates are down because of supply and demand. Lots of supply and low demand. If spot rates are down, it takes a lot more spots to cover someone's salary. Even with low spot rates, a small local restaurant can't afford the number of spots a large locally owned department store once bought before they were all put out of business. What I'm talking about is a downward spiral, where you have fewer and fewer advertisers buying fewer and fewer spots. Read b-turner's post about the kind of money we're talking about. Do the math and see how many spots a station has to sell in order to hire a full local staff.

So these small local stations sign network contracts with companies like Premiere where they get access to the big national advertisers like Home Depot who won't buy time on small local radio stations. By signing that contract, he has to give up local inventory, and sometimes required to run nationally syndicated programming. But he gets some national money that he wouldn't get otherwise. That's the deal these stations make even though they are locally owned. I've seen a list of the stations that carry these nationally syndicated music formats, and the majority of them are small local stations, not the big corporate stations.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

As has already been said here, the problem is not being live and it's not being local. What would most people rather see: a local amateur show or American Idol. It's about entertainment value.

As a listener, I have decided that I would rather not have local content at all than bad local content.
As a radio news guy, I have been responsible for quite a bit of bad local content. A lot of days I didn't have the resources at my fingertips to fill even two minutes of news, so weird wire filler got put into my "local" newscasts.

Of course "bad content" is in the eye of the beholder. But here's a few things that bug me:
- your newscast is wholly composed of police blotter items, like arrests, auto accidents, and fires
- your newscast is made up of wire stories that likely don't affect your community in any way
- your "news" at 12pm is exactly the same newscast at 5pm, because the newscaster couldn't be bothered to spend 3 minutes reading it again.
- related: the newscast at 5pm tells us about something that happened earlier in the day, in the future tense.
- the newscaster hasn't bothered to learn the pronunciation of local newsmakers or places

 

[Groove1670]

Great discussion.

I purchased a copy of the movie a few years back. In radio, there is no job security but the documentary makes you believe that it is. I had a programmer tell me what what you do when you get your first job in radio? Look for another one.

Automation. Every station I've worked for had some sort of automation operating a station in the building at one time or another. Today's systems sound just as good as filling off hours with a part time board op which will utter very few words anyway.

Format playlist? Color record sleeves, index cards. reels, paper log. There has always been some sort of format or rotation.

Change is sometimes difficult for those in our industry to accept, and this business is always changing. If you like a constant I would not reccomend it.

The 80-90 docket stations opened up a can of worms ( I was inviolved with two of them). It added more signal to an already crowded playing field.

Small markets = creativity. We sell sports, weather, news, NTR events. Live reads do well, and call ins on the morning show.

Advertising. We work with the client. Could be 8 second live read liners, 15 second spots or a saturation campaign two days a week each month. We also sell web desing packages, and create programming and promtional ideas for the client.

...and yes budget cuts are the new reality in any business today, and in most industries. Not just radio.

 

[radiokmac]

Point of view

I appreciate this thoughtful discussion.

A good example is the idea that consolidation took away DJs ability to "pick" the music they play. Of course, we know that tight playlist control goes back to the very beginnings of Top 40 in the early 50's and is more related to a drive for ratings than the number of stations a company might have owned. And the scenario was repeated in the early 70's, when most progressive or free-form rock FMs fell to tightly regimented playlists and presentations such as Lee Abrams' "Superstars" AOR format. Again, not about the owners.

The film does not advocate for the wild west of freeform rock radio. It suggests that playlists should be created at the local level with the inclusion of local bands if they are good enough. Imagine driving across America, where the top 40 in Baltimore is different from the top 40 on Austin. There might be a reason to listen then.

As you say, for every accusation there is an actual real reason but the documentary does not allow for either a contrarian or, in most cases, the real causes.

The film features the reasons/rational straight from the lips of Lew Dickey, CEO of Cumulus at the time. The other opinions are seasoned radio veterans who have watched an industry they love be sold for ever higher prices on the premise that it was worth more only if it was automated more.

 

[TheBigA]

It suggests that playlists should be created at the local level with the inclusion of local bands if they are good enough. Imagine driving across America, where the top 40 in Baltimore is different from the top 40 on Austin. There might be a reason to listen then.

The problem is that the music industry doesn't work that way anymore, and really hasn't since record labels moved to foreign ownership 30 years ago. The music industry, not the radio industry, is responsible for the music, and they oversee the Top 40 charts. The music industry, as evidenced by the recent Grammy awards broadcast, promotes the nationalization of music and music promotion. Radio is simply the messenger here. In the old days, some radio companies were actually owned by larger companies that also owned record labels, like RCA and Columbia. No more.

That subject alone is worthy of a documentary, because the loss of American-based major labels has really hurt local music and artist development. It's easy to decry the corporatization of radio, and blame it for the problems in the music world. But there is a much bigger problem with the corporatization and internationalization of the music industry, and how it's changed the way music is made and promoted.

 

[davideduardo]

It suggests that playlists should be created at the local level with the inclusion of local bands if they are good enough. Imagine driving across America, where the top 40 in Baltimore is different from the top 40 on Austin. There might be a reason to listen then.

The old model of a band or artist doing a demo and dropping it off at local stations is not nearly as valid today as in the 60's or 70's. Bands that want to expose their work think of social media first, not a local station.

And local stations are vastly more concerned about licensing, copyright and litigation and the likes, and are very concerned about recordings that come from sources other than recognized labels.

Local listeners do not spend a lot of time driving around the country to hear different songs. It's not how music discovery works. Local listeners want to hear their favorite songs and favorite artists. Generally, these are the same as what pops up in social media. And social media gives national exposure almost instantly, obviating the need for a "local" platform or launch pad.

Click your heels. You're not in 1967 anymore.

 

[gr8oldies]

If you lived in just the right place (let's say Detroit) with a major or upcoming record label, you might have a few regional or local chart entries. Back in that day, you might get an impromptu visit by the Supremes to lip-synch their latest single at your record hop. Those days are long gone.

 

[TheBigA]

If you lived in just the right place

I don't know...even in 1966, with a dozen local stars at Motown, Berry Gordy knew he had to get his artists on the road, and sell them face to face. The music business is like politics, how do you sell a million records? You shake a million hands. You play in front of a million fans. He had a hot promotion team calling radio stations across the country getting them to play his records. That's how he got rich. Now that little Detroit label is owned by a French conglomerate that has no idea how those songs became hits. But every time one of those songs is played, some American money is sent to France.

Every town has bar bands playing cover songs on the weekends, but just about every one of them dreams to be Justin Bieber or Beyoncé. The real money isn't made staying at home, but playing your music on the road.