Elvis Duran Says Radio Isn’t What It Used To Be...

[SCMcKinney]

What do you base that opinion on? Have you ever spoken with an executive at a radio company? Have you ever attended a radio conference? Have you recently visited a radio station and had an appointment with the PD or someone in charge? Those are a few simple questions.

And the simple (and probably obvious answer) is no. I am an interested listener making my observations from the outside. Especially on these forums I am perfectly happy to be set straight (and learn something).

In just the last few years, several radio companies have developed sports gambling formats that have attracted a lot of sponsorship dollars. In addition, iHeart launched it's BIN service. Both of them were new in formats other than music. The format you seem to like is game shows on the radio. The research I've seen is that would appeal to 55 plus, and would cost more than it would make.

I would suggest those are not viable formats if ratings and what I figure should be the following revenue are a factor. The ratings for any sports gambling station are always at the bottom. . Do sports book companies pay big money for a small group of dedicated gamblers? It would seem to me targeted internet advertising would be cheaper and better. BIN is an embarrassment if people really looked at it for what the mission was supposed to be, getting Black Voices Heard. I could think of several improvements there for which money wouldn't be a factor, as the corporate sponsors apparently don't care about ratings.

As a listener who wants to see your business succeed, the format I am interested in is what will get younger people tuning in, and I don't think they are. Can someone cite statistics that, outside of morning drive, the under 30 crowd listens to radio in significant numbers? (If you can't on this public forum because of proprietary reasons, I understand).

I would say the main area of growth for radio in terms of new products is in programming other than music. But most of that investment has been done in podcasting or streaming, not broadcast.

Do you figure that the revenue derived from streaming and podcasts does (or will) equal what that of OTA can (or could do)?

 

[SCMcKinney]

You ever heard of 98.5 the Sports Hub? #10 billing station in the country.

I think most sports radio was born on AM, and moved to FM primarily at the insistence of the Sports Teams they did play by play for, and because group clusters had an FM and had run out of ideas for what type of music would attract younger listeners. It was a good move, but not really a new idea. Sports radio has certainly evolved from what was, and that is what has made many of them really successful.

We call those "trade secrets."

And that is a very fair point. A public forum is not the place to talk about what plans are actually a-foot. But there must be a lot of retired radio professionals here with no dog in the fight who could armchair quarterback with actual experience behind them. If you were given control of 98.7 in New York, and were told that you had to program it without it being 24/7 music, what would you do? It might not be entirely a theoretical question. Whenever I have seen posts about post-Emmis ownership, radio people seem to be scratching their heads over what music format could be tried that hasn't already been done.

 

[TheBigA]

I would suggest those are not viable formats if ratings and what I figure should be the following revenue are a factor.

I would suggest that ratings are not the goal for radio formats. Revenue is. The reality is that a lot of these AM facilities simply don't have the signal to get ratings. Those that do seem to be holding up just fine with news/talk or sports.

Keep in mind that Nielsen only measures the content that's encoded. So Nielsen doesn't really tell us how a radio format is doing compared to Sirius or Spotify.

As a listener who wants to see your business succeed, the format I am interested in is what will get younger people tuning in, and I don't think they are.

We program to the people who listen. The people who don't have made their mind up, and that's their right. Perhaps when they get older, they'll come back. But the idea of creating a traditional radio format that will cause people to go to eBay and buy a radio is not very practical. If they're in the car, and they want to hear a live sports event, radio is probably the easiest option. If they only listen in the mornings, then we budget for that. We spend money where we have the best chance of making it.

Do you figure that the revenue derived from streaming and podcasts does (or will) equal what that of OTA can (or could do)?

Probably not, but radio revenues will never be what they were. Too many options. The numbers are going down, so the best way to make that up is to offer other packages of content you own on other platforms. Make money multiple times rather than just once with real-time radio. To spend money and staff time creating content that's only heard once when it's live is wasteful and impractical. If you put time into creating content, make that content available on-demand so people can hear it on their own schedule. And monetize it as many times as you can.

 

[davideduardo]

That's not what you said before:

Yes, it is. I am just using different demographics. You know we can get this data for any age range we want, right?

And you still can't seem to differentiate between "cume" and AQH listening.

Cume: total people who listen to a station or batch of stations at least one QH a week.

AQH listening: average number of people listening in any specific swatch of time. Example: Persons 18-49 6 AM to 10 AM M-F or Persons 12+ 6 AM to Mid M-Sun.

 

[davideduardo]

I think most sports radio was born on AM, and moved to FM primarily at the insistence of the Sports Teams they did play by play for,

You are putting the cart before the horse. Every AM sports station that added or moved to FM I can think of did so to improve their younger sales demographics. Teams, of course, liked the results and began to seek FM outlets.

and because group clusters had an FM and had run out of ideas for what type of music would attract younger listeners.

Sports as a 100% format is only about 40 years old, starting in the 80’s with WFAN. That station was on a mediocre NYC AM signal at first, then maneuvered to a better AM and then added FM. The driving force was the fact that it had become the highest billing station in the market.

As BigA has said, this is more about revenue than ratings. For its first 20 years or so, WFAN was about 15th in ratings but #1 in revenue.

It was a good move, but not really a new idea. Sports radio has certainly evolved from what was, and that is what has made many of them really successful.

It did not “evolve”. Jeff and Rick at Emma’s came up with a new concept for all sports and created WFAN. No evolution. Sports is not new on radio, but all sports was.

And that is a very fair point. A public forum is not the place to talk about what plans are actually a-foot. But there must be a lot of retired radio professionals here with no dog in the fight who could armchair quarterback with actual experience behind them. If you were given control of 98.7 in New York, and were told that you had to program it without it being 24/7 music, what would you do? It might not be entirely a theoretical question. Whenever I have seen posts about post-Emmis ownership, radio people seem to be scratching their heads over what music format could be tried that hasn't already been done.

If it were mine, I would do personality driven music for an unserved Hispanic audience, which is now identifiable and unserved.

In other words, there are music based options as well as talk based ones. Further, the disadvantage with talk among younger demos is that radio is rel time, and those under 30 or so have no habit of “tuning in” for a scheduled show and want to hear their content choices on their own personal schedules.

 

[Yabadabado1]

In the talk of AM sports formats moving to FM, what FM station was the first to carry a sports-oriented format? I'm assuming it was probably a Top 10 FM signal somewhere in the country. The AM station in my area [which also has an FM translator] run liners bragging that they carry the Cavs, Indi......err, Guardians, Browns, Ohio state games, tiddlywinks, whiffleball, curling, checkers, hopscotch [well, not the last few but just about] and they might as well add "Oh, we also play music" as an afterthought. They tried sports/talk format but that went into the toilet after a couple of years.

 

[vchimpanzee]

And that's to say nothing of every NPR affiliate. If they ever bothered with AM, it didn't happen in my lifetime, at least not in markets I've lived and worked in.

I've heard of NPR on AM but I can't remember details. Nashville may have had both an AM and an FM doing NPR.

 

[vchimpanzee]

In the talk of AM sports formats moving to FM, what FM station was the first to carry a sports-oriented format? I'm assuming it was probably a Top 10 FM signal somewhere in the country. The AM station in my area [which also has an FM translator] run liners bragging that they carry the Cavs, Indi......err, Guardians, Browns, Ohio state games, tiddlywinks, whiffleball, curling, checkers, hopscotch [well, not the last few but just about] and they might as well add "Oh, we also play music" as an afterthought. They tried sports/talk format but that went into the toilet after a couple of years.

WDAI in Myrtle Beach SC was heavy on sports talk in 1995 or so. I checked Wikipedia and someone found on newspapers.com that it was sports half the time.

Didn't last because no one was doing urban and when they tried that, they were very successful. Still doing it, but more hip-hop than R&B these days.

 

[b-turner]

I recall talking to a guy in a small town in a southern state (Likely Alabama or Georgia) that had an AM. His morning jock and news guy would talk sports after a newscast and it 'caught on' as people called in and advertisers wanted placement in their show. By the time I talked to him, he had 3 AMs and was running a fulltime Sportstalk format. He was thrilled he was billing over 108k a month and projected about $135k for the following year. We didn't talk his profit (if there was one) but he said people had called asking about the format. I'm not saying they had anything to do with WFAN but it seems a small market jumped in. And to be honest I 'didn't get it' and figured he'd change format in a year but man, was I wrong!

 

[boombox4]

BIN is an embarrassment if people really looked at it for what the mission was supposed to be, getting Black Voices Heard. I could think of several improvements there for which money wouldn't be a factor, as the corporate sponsors apparently don't care about ratings.

Beg to differ. I don't listen to BIN frequently, but I've had it on my radio from time to time, and I hear a lot of different features and opinions on BIN, including a conservative opinion at least once. It seems they are really trying to live up to their BIN acronym.

 

[davideduardo]

I recall talking to a guy in a small town in a southern state (Likely Alabama or Georgia) that had an AM. His morning jock and news guy would talk sports after a newscast and it 'caught on' as people called in and advertisers wanted placement in their show. By the time I talked to him, he had 3 AMs and was running a fulltime Sportstalk format. He was thrilled he was billing over 108k a month and projected about $135k for the following year. We didn't talk his profit (if there was one) but he said people had called asking about the format. I'm not saying they had anything to do with WFAN but it seems a small market jumped in. And to be honest I 'didn't get it' and figured he'd change format in a year but man, was I wrong!

In what year or period of time did that station move into sports?

 

[b-turner]

I think that was 1983 but may have been as late as the summer of 84 when I talked to the guy about Sports format. I know it would have been before August 1984. I was pretty clueless but I think it may have been what became Sports Talk. They guy was saying he had no clue there was so much demand from listeners and especially advertisers. After the success on the first station, he took his 'doing okay' other two AMs and went with the same programming with pretty much the same results as his first station. I don't know his name, don't recall the town but I'd know it if I saw it. I don't recall where I heard about his station but possibly Radio World. I don't think it was Broadcasting because I couldn't afford it for a couple of years, yet.

 

[SCMcKinney]

Beg to differ. I don't listen to BIN frequently, but I've had it on my radio from time to time, and I hear a lot of different features and opinions on BIN, including a conservative opinion at least once. It seems they are really trying to live up to their BIN acronym.

BIN is fine as far as sounding polished. The problem is that nobody hears it. It should be insulting to the people working on it to be given a tokenism pat on the head by the corporate sponsors who would not accept those non-results from any other content provider. National news is just a tough thing to do successfully, hard as it is for me to believe. An innovative addition to BIN that might get some Black Voices Heard would be to seek out and find writers who can expound on the black experience in America. August Wilson wrote a series of plays doing just that, several of which have been made into movies. Since the corporate sponsors don't care about ratings or revenue, why not take that largesse and get some radio adaptions of the plays on-air? With the permission of the Wilson estate, maybe create some series using the characters he created. That would be different, might get black and white listeners, and be good for broadcast radio as a whole.

 

[TheBigA]

An innovative addition to BIN that might get some Black Voices Heard would be to seek out and find writers who can expound on the black experience in America.

They actually do that, and the example I heard was sponsored by Bank Of America.

My understanding is they went to a group of advertisers and asked what would they be willing to support. This is what they said they wanted. They were told in advance that it may not get the ratings that a more controversial presentation might get. They were fine with that. So they know what they're getting.

 

[SCMcKinney]

Probably not, but radio revenues will never be what they were. Too many options. The numbers are going down, so the best way to make that up is to offer other packages of content you own on other platforms. Make money multiple times rather than just once with real-time radio. To spend money and staff time creating content that's only heard once when it's live is wasteful and impractical. If you put time into creating content, make that content available on-demand so people can hear it on their own schedule. And monetize it as many times as you can.

I tried looking over at the Internet Streaming forum and somebody asked a question about how those streams make money, and the comments there seemed to conclude that they really don't. Alexa Amazon Prime might be adding $10 a month (pocket change) to access commercial free music. I just think it is over for broadcast radio to make money from spinning tunes, especially when it comes to the next generations. Largely the same thing with Podcasts. They are essentially a fancy delivery of a tape-recorded program. The Podcast content providers can make some money selling subscriptions to their listeners. But any ads in the podcast can be fastforwarded, and there better not be too many of them.

People aren't going to buy transistor radios, because their radio is now already in their phone. NPR already makes much (most?) of its content available for replay on demand. A commercial program that follows a morning show as I described above could do the same thing. If it is any good, some of the younger listeners who otherwise tune out for their commercial-free music sources might stick around with the broadcast platform, (or come back later to the on-demand recorded show) where revenue can be made with creative placement of advertisements or sponsorships.

 

[SCMcKinney]

They actually do that, and the example I heard was sponsored by Bank Of America.

My understanding is they went to a group of advertisers and asked what would they be willing to support. This is what they said they wanted. They were told in advance that it may not get the ratings that a more controversial presentation might get. They were fine with that. So they know what they're getting.

I haven't listened in a long time, but I (and it is possible most people) have the impression that BIN is 'black news.' The idea was supposed to be getting heard. If BIN is doing something innovative, those corporate types should be dropping some money on billboards, internet ads, maybe even newspaper ads to let potential listeners - black and white - know what they are sponsoring, instead of just letting the content providers get to hear themselves on the radio.

 

[TheBigA]

I tried looking over at the Internet Streaming forum and somebody asked a question about how those streams make money, and the comments there seemed to conclude that they really don't.

The digital business model is based on multiple revenue streams. For Apple, the music streaming feeds the bigger business of selling hardware. Same thing with Amazon. Streaming music is part of the bigger business of selling products, such as their Echo and Alexa. That's the kind of business model radio needs. Right now, the bulk of the radio business model is based on selling broadcast advertising. The public doesn't like that model. Too many commercials. So radio needs to replace that revenue with something else. So they're diversifying into podcasts and other digital content.

If BIN is doing something innovative, those corporate types should be dropping some money on billboards, internet ads, maybe even newspaper ads to let potential listeners - black and white - know what they are sponsoring, instead of just letting the content providers get to hear themselves on the radio.

Once again, they know what they're buying, and they're getting what they want. If they wanted mass audiences, they could buy ads on conservative talk stations. But that's not what they want.

 

[boombox4]

I haven't listened in a long time, but I (and it is possible most people) have the impression that BIN is 'black news.' The idea was supposed to be getting heard. If BIN is doing something innovative, those corporate types should be dropping some money on billboards, internet ads, maybe even newspaper ads to let potential listeners - black and white - know what they are sponsoring, instead of just letting the content providers get to hear themselves on the radio.

Great ideas, yes, but Radio in general doesn't advertise its medium off platform. The general thinking is that the ROI isn't worth the money expended to advertise off platform to gain listeners.

And advertising budgets are tight. BIN's own advertising and promotional budget may be tight. it's just the way it is.

 

[TheBigA]

Talent coach John Shomby put together a list of things a radio personality does today:

What Today’s Radio Air Personality Job Really Looks Like - Radio Ink

From production skills to podcasting and social strategy—today’s radio air talent has a lot more to juggle. Do you meet the new expectations?

radioink.com

It's a good list. Even if you can do it all, it's no guarantee the station can keep you on the payroll.

 

[Theater of My Mind]

Talent coach John Shomby put together a list of things a radio personality does today:

It's a good list. Even if you can do it all, it's no guarantee the station can keep you on the payroll.

All that for terrible pay and less than zero job security.

Anyone thinking about getting into the business today would be better off becoming a social media influencer. Same skills, better future, and you can be your own boss.