After many months of absence, I have returned to Radio Info. I've finally gotten over my initial displeasure over the changes that took place, though I must add that this site still feels very sluggish to me. Unfortunately, I was unable to get back into my old name "Mark_Ericson" so I guess I'm starting over. Anyway, without further ado, here's an essay I wrote yesterday.
Open Letter to Big Radio: You Are Dying, Here's Why
By: Trip Ericson
I've always been a fan of radio, and hopefully always will be. Radio makes it possible to communicate to a large audience very efficiently, and radios are so common and cheap to make that they are everywhere. Radio has a potential that it used to use very well, but now has been squandered and likely will cause the death of radio.
What's Wrong
The simple problem with big radio is that it exists in a different time. When music-oriented radio came around in the 50's and 60's, portable music was hard to come by. Record players wouldn't fit in cars, and you definitely wouldn't drag a cart with a band behind you to play music. Radio filled this void by providing music to listeners who wanted to hear it. Perhaps it was not exactly to everyone's tastes, but it was certainly better than nothing.
Enter the 1980's and audio tape. Audio tape was the first sign of what should have been a giant flashing billboard to the industry. Albeit annoying and limited in length, audio tape allowed people to carry music around with them. They could hear the music they wanted, when they wanted it, and without worrying about losing signals as they moved from place to place. It didn't catch on that widely, though, mainly because of size, cost, and relative inconvenience of having hundreds of tapes floating around to have all of a person's favorite music on.
The 1990's saw portable CD players. The CD is one of the best things to ever happen to the music industry as far as I'm concerned. Granted, I'm someone too young to have heard a record player and all its supposed “analog clarity,” but the simple size of the discs and how much more durable they are should be enough to outweigh that benefit. Besides, digital encoding not only preserves all audible frequencies in the music, but allows for computers to manipulate and handle it, and allows for error correction that analog can only dream of. This too, however, did not kill radio, though radio started aiming the pistol at its foot around the time the portable CD player was getting big. The problem of carrying around cases of CDs was the same problem that hobbled magnetic tape, and the size of CDs certainly didn't help for people who might like to carry them in their pockets.
Fast forward to today and it's plain to see that all the disadvantages of magnetic tape and CDs have been wiped out. Portable music players such as Apple's iPod are small, have space to hold all of a person's favorite music, are easy to add music to, and have no FM receiver in them. No swapping out of memory cards or any such thing is required, the audio quality can be phenomenal given the right conditions. Further, much to the music industry's dismay, people can acquire music on the internet illegally, thus easily completing their collection of music.
And what does radio do for people these days? It duplicates this function, except the listener does not choose their favorites and often hears the same music over and over, they worry about signal problems, and they put up with an ever-increasing amount of commercials. I'll admit my own guilt in this matter, I too own a portable music device, a Cowon X5L which does have a built-in FM receiver. I use it regularly both for FM when it works or I need news or something and for its musical function to listen to recordings of my favorite band, Rush, or one of the countless independent artists I enjoy that get no airplay.
Ten or twenty years from now, when portable internet access becomes faster and cheaper, internet radio will continue to eat away at the audience still listening to radio, and I imagine will take bites out of satellite radio as well.
IBOC* Radio: Exchanging the Pistol for a Shotgun
* I refuse to call it HD Radio, as it's misleading people into believing it's “high definition” radio.
While I don't live in a market with enough commercial stations doing IBOC to have it being promoted heavily, living in a rural area between four markets, I get the advantage of hearing stations from many surrounding areas. And what I hear is a marketing blitz like none other for IBOC radio. Without fail I hear a consistent set of advertising about how superior the audio quality is of “HD” radio and how you get “additional channels.”
I'll make another confession, I already own an IBOC-capable radio. It was Black Friday of 2006, and I was visiting relatives in New Jersey, a few miles outside of New York. Radio Shack had an Accurian radio on sale for $90, and I jumped on it. I figured that if I was going to criticize something, I might as well actually listen to it first.
I'll just make a list of problems with the unit. I know not are all the fault of IBOC as a concept, but in my mind are indicative of problems people will see.
In New Jersey, mere miles from New York City, the dipole antenna which came with the unit would drop the signal constantly, shifting between digital and analog, or digital and silence (subchannels).
At home in Virginia, only two stations are doing IBOC, the NPR station and what was until recently my favorite rock station. The NPR station is WVTF, a C-class station on a Poor Mountain 79 miles away, right along with all my local TV stations. The analog signal is wonderful and clear, nothing short of interference or big pieces of metal will kill the signal. The digital won't stay locked in for more than a few seconds at a time without being hooked to my roof antenna. Granted, I like the all-NPR and BBC subchannel, but it's near impossible to listen to.
The other is rocker WROV, a C1-class station on Cahas Mountain 70 miles away. Their signal is impossible to decode without the roof antenna despite being plenty powerful on analog, and the digital subchannel seems like more of the same as the analog, with perhaps a bit more obscurity.
At college in Charlottesville, Virginia, two stations are doing IBOC. One's the NPR station, B1-class WVTW, the other is A-class AAA station WCNR. Neither one decodes in my dorm room with the dipole antenna despite having perfectly clean analogs. I can see the tower from the window in the hallway.
Trying to push this horrible disaster on people is simply not helping anything. The subchannels I've heard outside of the NPR ones are useless music jukeboxes that are easily replaced by the aforementioned portable music devices, and the NPR ones are impossible to hear because of signal problems. Further, the service on the NPR subchannel is simulcast on various analog translators and could easily be broadcast on regular full-market signals if the non-commercial band wasn't flooded with stations pulling broadcasters in Idaho and California off a satellite dish and pushing their take on God at me.*
*I suppose this isn't entirely fair in my specific case, as the religious stations here are mostly locally-owned and that's acceptable to me, although having the same programming simulcast on 90.3, 90.5, 91.1, and 91.3 seems a bit excessive. This is entirely true in some other markets I've seen, however. In addition to those, there's other independent religious broadcasters in my area on 88.3, 90.9, and 91.7 on the non-commercial band, with another coming soon on 90.5 off a dish most likely and another applied for on 88.7.
IBOC is unnecessary and provides no benefits in terms of audio quality either. When the station already plays horribly compressed and “loud”-sounding music, having that music in digital-quality doesn't really add to its appeal. Especially since the music side of the argument is already over because of portable media devices.
Station Move-Ins: Exchanging Your Foot for Your Head
I chose the “shooting yourself in the foot” analogy for a good reason, because it can be morphed into shooting yourself in the head and the analogy still makes sense. Yes, station move-ins provide “diversity” in the “marketplace” and provide a short-term revenue boost, but in the long term, will lead to the death of radio.
I had a lot of free time over my Christmas break, and started to make myself a huge map of all FM stations. I started to become extremely disgusted when I got to Ohio, and had been upset for some time. The station move-in thing was the most disgusting thing I'd seen, and watching the FCC reason it away as “providing a first local service” is an utter joke. Here's a list of the ones that were bothering me the most.
Here's where it gets disgusting.
That's where I took my hands off the keyboard and decided to write this essay. I haven't touched my map since.
These moves only dilute the already shrinking pool of listeners. Putting more music formats that fewer and fewer people are going to listen to on the air does nothing for anybody.
The worst part is that a lot of these moves, once they're made, cannot be undone. They either have short-spacing problems that the FCC won't allow to occur again, or other stations take advantage of the hole they leave, either with new stations or upgrading existing ones, though not to the power of the old station. It may not be quite so obvious what the down side of all these moves are yet that one would even want to undo them, but trust me, it's there.
The Way to Save Radio: Localism
The one thing that can save radio is to be local. Play local musical talent that won't find an audience on satellite or on internet radio, air local news and sports that can't be put on an iPod, and allow local people to make their voices heard on your airwaves.
I know how monumental a concept this is, but there's lots of truth in it. When I ask people about radio, they talk about how they can get a better selection of music on their iPods or other portable music devices, which is true. Most people who still listen to the radio either do not have portable music players because they cannot afford them, or only listen to NPR, local sports, and talk shows!
Of course, what this means is that Columbus, which has to have about a zillion stations by now, will not be able to support them all. The biggest and most powerful signals, with the most local content that appeals to people, will eventually top the ratings and bring in the most money. The rest of the stations on the band will either move away again, or go out of business.
That's not to say that the future is all talk on the FM band. No, there can still be music, but it has to be infused with some kind of localism, be it local news or local sports broadcasts or something. People aren't going to want to hear the same music they already can hear, or they'll tune out.
Essentially, the radio will become useful for a few key things:
But radio as it exists, is dying, and my greatest fear is that it will die off completely rather than adapt to the changing market.
What makes radio unique over satellite radio, internet radio, and portable music devices, is that it's free and ubiquitous. I know I've already said it, but it bears repeating. You can not only hear the same broadcast on multiple radios at the same time, it's free on all of those radios without restriction. When you add in the fact that radio is the only audio medium that is capable of being truly local in every sense of the word, even if it isn't today, you begin to see what I see: A bright future for radio, if it's allowed to come to pass.
Open Letter to Big Radio: You Are Dying, Here's Why
By: Trip Ericson
I've always been a fan of radio, and hopefully always will be. Radio makes it possible to communicate to a large audience very efficiently, and radios are so common and cheap to make that they are everywhere. Radio has a potential that it used to use very well, but now has been squandered and likely will cause the death of radio.
What's Wrong
The simple problem with big radio is that it exists in a different time. When music-oriented radio came around in the 50's and 60's, portable music was hard to come by. Record players wouldn't fit in cars, and you definitely wouldn't drag a cart with a band behind you to play music. Radio filled this void by providing music to listeners who wanted to hear it. Perhaps it was not exactly to everyone's tastes, but it was certainly better than nothing.
Enter the 1980's and audio tape. Audio tape was the first sign of what should have been a giant flashing billboard to the industry. Albeit annoying and limited in length, audio tape allowed people to carry music around with them. They could hear the music they wanted, when they wanted it, and without worrying about losing signals as they moved from place to place. It didn't catch on that widely, though, mainly because of size, cost, and relative inconvenience of having hundreds of tapes floating around to have all of a person's favorite music on.
The 1990's saw portable CD players. The CD is one of the best things to ever happen to the music industry as far as I'm concerned. Granted, I'm someone too young to have heard a record player and all its supposed “analog clarity,” but the simple size of the discs and how much more durable they are should be enough to outweigh that benefit. Besides, digital encoding not only preserves all audible frequencies in the music, but allows for computers to manipulate and handle it, and allows for error correction that analog can only dream of. This too, however, did not kill radio, though radio started aiming the pistol at its foot around the time the portable CD player was getting big. The problem of carrying around cases of CDs was the same problem that hobbled magnetic tape, and the size of CDs certainly didn't help for people who might like to carry them in their pockets.
Fast forward to today and it's plain to see that all the disadvantages of magnetic tape and CDs have been wiped out. Portable music players such as Apple's iPod are small, have space to hold all of a person's favorite music, are easy to add music to, and have no FM receiver in them. No swapping out of memory cards or any such thing is required, the audio quality can be phenomenal given the right conditions. Further, much to the music industry's dismay, people can acquire music on the internet illegally, thus easily completing their collection of music.
And what does radio do for people these days? It duplicates this function, except the listener does not choose their favorites and often hears the same music over and over, they worry about signal problems, and they put up with an ever-increasing amount of commercials. I'll admit my own guilt in this matter, I too own a portable music device, a Cowon X5L which does have a built-in FM receiver. I use it regularly both for FM when it works or I need news or something and for its musical function to listen to recordings of my favorite band, Rush, or one of the countless independent artists I enjoy that get no airplay.
Ten or twenty years from now, when portable internet access becomes faster and cheaper, internet radio will continue to eat away at the audience still listening to radio, and I imagine will take bites out of satellite radio as well.
IBOC* Radio: Exchanging the Pistol for a Shotgun
* I refuse to call it HD Radio, as it's misleading people into believing it's “high definition” radio.
While I don't live in a market with enough commercial stations doing IBOC to have it being promoted heavily, living in a rural area between four markets, I get the advantage of hearing stations from many surrounding areas. And what I hear is a marketing blitz like none other for IBOC radio. Without fail I hear a consistent set of advertising about how superior the audio quality is of “HD” radio and how you get “additional channels.”
I'll make another confession, I already own an IBOC-capable radio. It was Black Friday of 2006, and I was visiting relatives in New Jersey, a few miles outside of New York. Radio Shack had an Accurian radio on sale for $90, and I jumped on it. I figured that if I was going to criticize something, I might as well actually listen to it first.
I'll just make a list of problems with the unit. I know not are all the fault of IBOC as a concept, but in my mind are indicative of problems people will see.
- Expense: The radio was $90. It tunes AM, FM, and IBOC. That's an insane amount for something so limited, and “superior” devices are currently over $200.
- Interference: The radio has a huge, bright, annoying screen on the front. Don't keep it in your bedroom like I did, it'll be too bright to sleep. Worse, the screen interferes with the reception of the radio, as I found out later on. And this same hideous screen is on a number of other, more expensive devices I've seen. Supposedly, this is mandated by IBOC. If so, it's incredibly stupid.
- Inferior: The hardware is terrible. It's large, bulky, and has no internal battery, so every time the power fails the clock has to be reset. I believe this was a cost issue, especially if iBiquity gets $50 on each radio, as I've heard.
- Reception: Reception was and remains awful! I'll expand on this below.
In New Jersey, mere miles from New York City, the dipole antenna which came with the unit would drop the signal constantly, shifting between digital and analog, or digital and silence (subchannels).
At home in Virginia, only two stations are doing IBOC, the NPR station and what was until recently my favorite rock station. The NPR station is WVTF, a C-class station on a Poor Mountain 79 miles away, right along with all my local TV stations. The analog signal is wonderful and clear, nothing short of interference or big pieces of metal will kill the signal. The digital won't stay locked in for more than a few seconds at a time without being hooked to my roof antenna. Granted, I like the all-NPR and BBC subchannel, but it's near impossible to listen to.
The other is rocker WROV, a C1-class station on Cahas Mountain 70 miles away. Their signal is impossible to decode without the roof antenna despite being plenty powerful on analog, and the digital subchannel seems like more of the same as the analog, with perhaps a bit more obscurity.
At college in Charlottesville, Virginia, two stations are doing IBOC. One's the NPR station, B1-class WVTW, the other is A-class AAA station WCNR. Neither one decodes in my dorm room with the dipole antenna despite having perfectly clean analogs. I can see the tower from the window in the hallway.
Trying to push this horrible disaster on people is simply not helping anything. The subchannels I've heard outside of the NPR ones are useless music jukeboxes that are easily replaced by the aforementioned portable music devices, and the NPR ones are impossible to hear because of signal problems. Further, the service on the NPR subchannel is simulcast on various analog translators and could easily be broadcast on regular full-market signals if the non-commercial band wasn't flooded with stations pulling broadcasters in Idaho and California off a satellite dish and pushing their take on God at me.*
*I suppose this isn't entirely fair in my specific case, as the religious stations here are mostly locally-owned and that's acceptable to me, although having the same programming simulcast on 90.3, 90.5, 91.1, and 91.3 seems a bit excessive. This is entirely true in some other markets I've seen, however. In addition to those, there's other independent religious broadcasters in my area on 88.3, 90.9, and 91.7 on the non-commercial band, with another coming soon on 90.5 off a dish most likely and another applied for on 88.7.
IBOC is unnecessary and provides no benefits in terms of audio quality either. When the station already plays horribly compressed and “loud”-sounding music, having that music in digital-quality doesn't really add to its appeal. Especially since the music side of the argument is already over because of portable media devices.
Station Move-Ins: Exchanging Your Foot for Your Head
I chose the “shooting yourself in the foot” analogy for a good reason, because it can be morphed into shooting yourself in the head and the analogy still makes sense. Yes, station move-ins provide “diversity” in the “marketplace” and provide a short-term revenue boost, but in the long term, will lead to the death of radio.
I had a lot of free time over my Christmas break, and started to make myself a huge map of all FM stations. I started to become extremely disgusted when I got to Ohio, and had been upset for some time. The station move-in thing was the most disgusting thing I'd seen, and watching the FCC reason it away as “providing a first local service” is an utter joke. Here's a list of the ones that were bothering me the most.
- WSNJ 107.7B in southern New Jersey became WRNB 107.9A in Philad—excuse me, “Pennsauken NJ.”
- WPST 97.5B in Trenton became WJJZ in “Burlington” with its transmitter at the central Philly tower site.
- WROG 102.9B in Cumberland MD is becoming 93.3A in Chambersburg PA.
- WOGH 103.5B in Steubenville OH is moving to “Burgettstown PA” which is a rather odd way of spelling Pittsburgh.
Here's where it gets disgusting.
- WMRN 106.9B in Marion OH became WRXS 106.7B1 in “Dublin OH” which is an interesting way to spell Columbus.
- WHIZ 102.5B in Zanesville OH is becoming WHIZ 102.5B1 in “Baltimore OH” which is another odd way to spell Columbus.
- WLZT 93.3B in Chillicothe OH is moving to “Asheville OH,” yet another way to spell Columbus.
- Those were each city's only B-class station. A couple of A-class stations are moving into Columbus as well. There are a lot of strange ways to spell “Columbus” these days.
- WSRW 106.7B in Hillsboro OH has moved to 106.5A in Chillicothe OH.
- And worst of them all, WHIO 95.7B in Piqua OH currently targets Dayton from 30 miles north of that city, and has applied to become 95.7A in “Sharonville OH,” an unusual spelling of “Cincinnati,” from a transmitter 30 miles south of Dayton.
That's where I took my hands off the keyboard and decided to write this essay. I haven't touched my map since.
These moves only dilute the already shrinking pool of listeners. Putting more music formats that fewer and fewer people are going to listen to on the air does nothing for anybody.
The worst part is that a lot of these moves, once they're made, cannot be undone. They either have short-spacing problems that the FCC won't allow to occur again, or other stations take advantage of the hole they leave, either with new stations or upgrading existing ones, though not to the power of the old station. It may not be quite so obvious what the down side of all these moves are yet that one would even want to undo them, but trust me, it's there.
The Way to Save Radio: Localism
The one thing that can save radio is to be local. Play local musical talent that won't find an audience on satellite or on internet radio, air local news and sports that can't be put on an iPod, and allow local people to make their voices heard on your airwaves.
I know how monumental a concept this is, but there's lots of truth in it. When I ask people about radio, they talk about how they can get a better selection of music on their iPods or other portable music devices, which is true. Most people who still listen to the radio either do not have portable music players because they cannot afford them, or only listen to NPR, local sports, and talk shows!
Of course, what this means is that Columbus, which has to have about a zillion stations by now, will not be able to support them all. The biggest and most powerful signals, with the most local content that appeals to people, will eventually top the ratings and bring in the most money. The rest of the stations on the band will either move away again, or go out of business.
That's not to say that the future is all talk on the FM band. No, there can still be music, but it has to be infused with some kind of localism, be it local news or local sports broadcasts or something. People aren't going to want to hear the same music they already can hear, or they'll tune out.
Essentially, the radio will become useful for a few key things:
- Showcasing new music
- Showcasing local music
- Delivering local news and information to the community of license
- Airing local sports for those who cannot attend
- Airing of talk shows, both national and local
- NPR (Okay, it's already mainly useful for this one)
But radio as it exists, is dying, and my greatest fear is that it will die off completely rather than adapt to the changing market.
What makes radio unique over satellite radio, internet radio, and portable music devices, is that it's free and ubiquitous. I know I've already said it, but it bears repeating. You can not only hear the same broadcast on multiple radios at the same time, it's free on all of those radios without restriction. When you add in the fact that radio is the only audio medium that is capable of being truly local in every sense of the word, even if it isn't today, you begin to see what I see: A bright future for radio, if it's allowed to come to pass.
