How many times have I said "radio has a structural problem"? Quite a few. That's my IT-architect-way of saying that radio, being a linear, time-constrained medium, has great difficulty accommodating today's predominant consumer preferences. But statements such as "There's no music radio could play, no hosts they could hire, and no changes they could make that would reverse something that began 30 years ago" imply an absolute level of hopelessness. Might as well turn in the licenses if that's the case. (By the way, traditional TV has the same problem.)
Maybe the issue is semantic. I suppose it's possible to
partially reverse the attrition---but you'll never
undo it. At best, maybe you get the people back who abandoned ship but didn't embrace a replacement for audio---haven't bonded with a new technology. And if you got them all back tomorrow, that number goes down every day, because they're all of a certain age, and they're gonna eventually die. Meantime, there's no steady stream of younger people taking their place because...why would they?
Fundamentally, the shift has been about technology. You're not going to abandon your DVR and go back to setting a VCR, and you're certainly not going to go back to "We have to be home and in front of the TV by 8 or we'll miss it." You're not going to throw away your cellphone, re-install a landline and keep a bunch of quarters in the cupholder of your car for payphones.
It also begs the question: what could have been done 30 years ago? Radio may have a structural problem, but it also had a content problem. It clearly wasn't satisfying the desires of some potential consumers. Apparently there were more such consumers than radio professionals were willing to admit. Perhaps programming dogma that prevailed 30 years ago, or even farther back, was wrong. Maybe research was badly constructed and led to misleading conclusions. Sure, you can't turn back the clock. But people still in the business could at least try to learn what happened, instead of saying "gosh, darn, we can't do anything to get more listeners so we'll just cry in our soup until the sheriff's deputy comes with the eviction notice"...or instead of hoping for more consolidation which just papers over the problem. Is anyone figuring out what traditional radio can do that streaming (etc.) can't do? And, yes, reinvention is tough. I've seen two companies close-up that have tried to do that (in other fields). One has had a measure of success, though it's not as successful as it once was; the other failed miserably. But if you don't try, the result is pretty obvious.
My opinion? Programmers did what listeners told them they wanted. The research was right. So radio---in an attempt to be what the majority of potential listeners said they wanted---stopped doing anything that you could only get on radio.
Radio's best chance at fighting off streaming would have been to be able to say---"we give you value that streaming will never be able to match (probably hyper-local stuff)."
But honestly, the vast majority of the audience didn't care. Ask every really good hyper-local midday talk show host who ended up Limbaugh's roadkill.
Music? Beloved personalities with 40 shares back in the day weren't getting the other 60 percent (who probably thought the beloved personality was a blowhard who should shut up and play the damn music).
If programmers had ignored the research, they might have lost fewer people---but they still would have lost the majority of the audience---the ones they were ignoring---and they'd long ago have passed the point of being profitable enough to provide the locality, liveness and service that would set it apart from streaming.
I used this analogy on this board 15 years ago: Radio is a garden hose. Only one thing comes out of it at a time. Streaming is like one of those Coca-Cola Freestyle machines---100 flavors, no waiting.
radioinsight.com
