So basically the terrestrial radio of the future is; Rich Boomer Bros, Political Spooks, Public, LPFM and Religious network radio of some kind?
Lovely.
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How Long Does Radio Have Left?
- Thread starter AM-FM-DXer
- Start date
Lovely.
I think you mean big "one", singular. Or actually two, because NPR has a good presence.
But among the big radio companies, who else has any real digital traction? Audacy still seems to be trying to find its way. Cumulus and Townsquare, I don't even know if they have digital platforms or what they are. It's a pretty tall order to try to get in the game now and compete against the established players.
Cumulus is a major podcaster. It has several in the Top 10. Cumulus streams via iHeart. So does Beasley. Townsquare says more than half of its revenue comes from digital. They're an owner of several highly-trafficked music sites. Audacy inherited Radio.com from CBS. They're just coming out of bankruptcy, and we'll see what changes their new management will make.
Well, sure, they run websites like PopCrush, Ultimate Classic Rock, etc. I'm not sure that counts as a digital audio strategy, unless the strategy is to exit audio and run websites as your business.
And there aren't that many Rich Boomer Bros out there. You've got Cats in NYC, Moses Znaimer in Toronto and ... who else? Tavis Smiley? (/sorta sarc)
What is missing in that argument is the dual factor of the age of listeners and the amount of free time they have.
My suspicion is that the older people get the less time they will spend on playlists. They may have some favorite song lists, but will also used curated music when they find a source that meets their taste.
There also may be a free time factor, where people with demanding jobs, an active family or social life or other responsibilities may just not prioritize things like new music discovery and personal playlists.
That brings us to the other point you mentioned previously, which is the difficulty in accepting ad-supported media in an era filled with service with no ads or much fewer ones.
What keeps me from listening to local radio and using either Sirius/XM or streams is the overabundance of ads, most of them poorly produced local spots that are annoying and tedious.
There is an interplay between those sites and traditional radio shows. There's a Taste of Country radio show that feeds the website, and vice versa.
Do you see anything else? Ever since the bankruptcies there's no investment money to fund this kind of acquisition. Cox Media is on the market now and there's no money. Plus the government is trying to take money away from public radio. It's become so bad that religious radio can be selective in what it buys. For them, it's a buyer's market.
The bad news is for most of these stations, it's their only revenue stream. Plus it's a declining revenue stream. So it doesn't provide enough revenue to sustain the content, which leads to staff layoffs. This is why non-com radio, including religious, is so successful.
Local TV is barely hanging on. (Their respective networks aren't helping with all their streaming crap and ATSC 3.0 in smartphones can't get here fast enough.) But dealing in visuals, which is what everybody in advertising wants, it has a natural leg up on radio.
What is slowing down the movement towards an online subscription for over-the-air broadcasters is that if they they go to a subscription service, then the fees they pay to the recording industry will rise per song per listener based on listener payments.
Music is only a portion of what radio companies do. They don't own music, but they own the news & talk content they create. They have a better partnership with sports teams than they do with music. So there are more things they can do digitally that don't involve music.
My best guess is that radio will die a slow death within the next two-to-three decades. It won't be one day all radio is here and the next day all radio is gone; rather, it will be a slow process, speeded up perhaps, should the big players decide to stop all of their broadcasts all at one time,but I really don't think it's going to happen that way. It will more likely go the way we saw with Cumulus and Townsquare last month--shutting down a handfull of stations at a time and then waiting to see what happens.
What concerns me about the switch to an Internet-only model is news and information. We now know from Russia, China, and iran that dictators have found ways to block those trying to get opposing information into their countries through the Web. We also know that the current leader of the U.S. is a fan of these dictators even if he doesn't like some of their policies; therefore, we could see him try to limit Internet access to information criticizing him in the not-too-distant future.
In addition to all of that, Someradioguy noted in this thread that should the network of public radio stations in Alaska he oversees go under, there is no replacement either on- or off-line for the local information his stations provide. In the long term, we may see local information not only in Alaska, but in myriads of small towns in many areas, whether sparsely or densely populated (i.e. suburbs), disappear altogether. And, ultimately, that will bring about the end of democracy at the local level as the voters will have no reliable information on which to make their electoral choices.
We are definitely heading into a brave new world, whether we like it or not.
The party in power now is using its licensing power to intimidate public radio and the networks. So no platform is safe from a dictator.
There's many reasons to blame for the decline of local TV—the disappearance of syndicated programming, rampant consolidation, the remaining owners wanting wall-to-wall news even in markets that cannot support it—and honestly, ATSC 3.0 feels like another HD Radio dud that was 10 years too late and is not what the marketplace wants.
The industry failed to innovate, which is rather bitter irony considering the medium was borne out of it.
The way to innovate is to create and support new platforms, not simply continue with the status quo.
The old platform of local TV is simply too small to contain all of the content the industry can create. Time to move on.
Sure, sure. Digital radio is the almighty savior. Yes sir.....the left vs. right nonsense day and night in every market in digital and happy days are here again, right? Stupid ownership and management raised the middle finger to the LOCAL market and the local market raised their middle finger back to them. You'll NEVER get back what was screwed over. THEY ARE FINISHED!
Local news is the only way to fill the spots.
Not true. What really happened is the residents of local markets embraced national retail, and there was no local ad base left for local media. This isn't just a radio story. It already killed local newspapers and now it's killing off local TV. Those local markets love nationally based streaming.
But the good news is that local public radio is still locally owned and operated. Can they survive the loss of federal funding? That's up to the local markets.
There are also non-Spanish speaking foreign language stations that actually have AM audiences. Those will probably continue to work in some places.
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