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Hmmmm.......
- Thread starter Bongwater
- Start date
This is a pretty poorly written article. Anyone who follows radio knows that CC has been cutting staff for ten years. It's not a recent thing. And I have no reason to believe one dime of the money from local staff cuts is being used to pay down the debt. Just because a fired employee says it doesn't make it so. In fact, they just received an extension on their debt payments. Contrary to what the article says, the full $16B is NOT due in 2014. They could fire their entire staff, and still not have $16 billion.
As was discussed during the election, you can't cut your way out of debt. The staff cuts are more tied to the ongoing drop in radio advertising that began in 2008. It has become worse this year thans to comments made by Rush Limbaugh that alienated major national advertisers. This radio station is one of many small AM stations that is trying to get its costs in line with its revenues. It has absolutely nothing to do with the billions owed to Bain.
As was discussed during the election, you can't cut your way out of debt. The staff cuts are more tied to the ongoing drop in radio advertising that began in 2008. It has become worse this year thans to comments made by Rush Limbaugh that alienated major national advertisers. This radio station is one of many small AM stations that is trying to get its costs in line with its revenues. It has absolutely nothing to do with the billions owed to Bain.
microbob said:
Like who? I think Bain will keep extending the due date as long as the cash flow continues. Kick the can down the road. No one wants to buy a bunch of radio stations. Nobody can do a better job considering the current advertising situation. Regardless of owners or locations, stations are cutting costs. Just like every other business and the government.
microbob said:
Hearing from whom? The only folks cheaper than Clear Channel is Comcast, and they own NBC/Universal. If they bought CC, they'd be required to sell either TVs or FMs in the top markets. Don't know why they'd do that. NBC has already partnered with Dial Global for news and sports radio networks.
TheBigA said:
Good points. But by the same token, you can't keep blaming the recession for advertisers being skittish about radio forever. There's other factors. Including the fact that terrestrial radio has been on a steady decline for many years in favor of other tech. That's something most advertisers already knew well before 2008 and the Limbaugh fiasco.
But it's also beyond that. Conglomerate radio has also been shifting towards in-house networks with a corporate national advertiser base. The rise of the all-sports networks (ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS Sports Radio) are just a harbinger of things to come in every format. And inevitably, THAT will be the "final nail" in terrestrial radio's coffin.
Because the mood of the general public is they have had it with commercial terrestrial radio. The same formats, the same songs, the same talk blabber everywhere you go. Going down this path is only going to put that resentment on steroids. Radio listeners aren't dumb - many people outside of this industry are far smarter than those inside it.
They know commercial radio is mostly run by computers. Many can tell a voicetrack from a live jock when they hear it - often with stunning accuracy.
And they don't like being pigeonholed into a narrow selection of assumed categories. And for the life of me, I STILL can't understand what the hell the radio industry is doing driving precious listeners away to online sources. The internet has THOUSANDS of choices for listeners, not just iHeartRadio and Radio.com. And it's pretty easy to find them. They're only cutting their own throats.
But the bottom line is what's happening in the radio industry is exactly the same as what is going on in every other industry. A few at the top get rich while everyone else below pays the price. And if the news over the last few weeks and these days with Hostess and Walmart is any indicator, everybody is getting SICK of it. If you balance out the actual current revenue amongst the individual stations instead of the largess going to the very top, you'll find the crisis would actually be FAR smaller than what it is.
There IS a way out for terrestrial radio. But there's not much time. And it begins SOMEWHERE.......
Bongwater said:
Including, by the way, the MUSIC business. And I believe that the radio industry is getting lumped in with a general disgust people have right now with the quality of music because they don't really want to blame music. But music is part of the problem.
When people complain about radio, they don't complain about the salaries or the money. The complain about the music and the DJs. They don't like the music, and they don't like the people presenting the music. So the goal of a programmer is to fix the things people complain about. Play the music people want, or at least will accept. And find a way to present it that a large number of people will accept. You're never going to make everyone happy, because there simply are too many choices. So you program to the largest groups of people. That's what radio does, and why it's still successful after competing with lots of other devices, and that's why we're still talking about it on message boards.
Radio is NOT going to be everything to everyone. It's not going to please everyone. There are still a lot of people, 20 million to be specific, who'd rather get commercial free music from a satellite. And by the way, satellite radio uses that national "in-house network" concept you think will drive the final nail in radio's coffin. But it's what satellite customers want. It's 100 voice-tracked music channels, programmed by a compter. You say the public doesn't like computer driven formats, but that's exactly what millions of people are using at Pandora or Spotify. THIS is where the public is going. Not the old-style human beings sitting behind consoles spinning vinyl albums and reading liner notes on the air. That's exactly what the public is trying to get away from.
You bring up iheartradio and radio.com, and say they're cutting their own throats. But all they're doing is feeding the various tastes the people want. It's like Coke Classic Original Formula, Diet Coke, Coke without Caffeine, Cherry Coke, and all the other Coke products. Are they killing off Coke? Or simply serving multiple tastes?
That's where radio is. Radio isn't the device, it's the content. It's not the transmitters and the towers, it's whatever it takes to reach the public. So now radio is competing with lots of other devices. That's the new normal. Ignoring the new normal, and acting like it's still the 70s is madness. The only people who remember the 70s are over the age of 50. They're not in the target demo. For radio to survive, it needs to move on from the past. You said it begins somewhere, and THIS is where it begins. On air AND online. If radio isn't in both places, then it's dead. Because the public is going to go, regardless of what radio does.
And if you don't like what radio is becoming, there are hundreds of non-commercial radio stations who are still doing radio for other reasons. Not for profit. Hopefully, the public will continue to support those stations that provide programming to audiences that advertisers don't care to reach. There are also thousands of non-corporate radio stations. Lots of alternatives, all programming to the multitude of tastes. And ALL of it is called RADIO.
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