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Poll: Live & Local Making A Comeback?

R

RD Operations

Guest
At last week's NAB Radio show some industry leaders proclaimed voice tracking as passé, and that live & local content is the way for radio to thrive in a time of unparalleled competition.

Will owners make the investment for live content? Vote in the poll above, and post your comments in this thread.
 
RD Operations said:
At last week's NAB Radio show some industry leaders proclaimed voice tracking as passé, and that live & local content is the way for radio to thrive in a time of unparalleled competition.

Will owners make the investment for live content? Vote and express your thoughts here.
Click to expand...

Express your thoughts WHERE? There is no form, there is no link.
 
Either nobody's voting or the votes aren't being counted.

I wish it were so. The suits keep moving away from live and local. If things changed now, it's probably too late.
 
FredLeonard said:
Either nobody's voting or the votes aren't being counted.
Click to expand...

Or maybe the questions introduced such extreme bias that nobody would touch the questionnaire.

Owners who use voice tracking or on-demand talent (like Premium Choice inside Clear Channel) are making the best use of much more limited resources.

Radio billings are still off by nearly a third compared to pre-recession years.

Technology allows us to do things easily and well we wished we could have done 40 or 50 years ago.

"Live" is now meaningless to listeners... they are used to "Live from Hollywood" which really means "we recorded this live in a studio earlier today".

"Local" is meaningless as most people under 50 or so have a sense of community created by Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and the like.

There is a huge mass of listeners who don't want chatty DJs.

Maybe it's not being "cheap" but, instead, being practical and pragmatic.

I wish it were so. The suits keep moving away from live and local. If things changed now, it's probably too late.
Click to expand...

"Too late" for what? The trend by actual users is towards iHeart and Pandora and on-demand content. Radio can't move forward by moving back to the practices of the 60's and 70's.

A rephrasing of the questions to reflect this, and you should get a few votes (although traffic on this board is a mere shadow of the past usage).
 
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As I said in the other thread, for most owners, live talent never left. CBS, Entercom, Cox, Townsquare, Hubbard, Beasley, Alpha, Wilks, and many more continue to use local talent. Live talent can't make a comeback if it never left. Sure, the two biggest companies are the exceptions. But they're clearly in the minority. Will they change because of what someone said at the radio show? No. But we shouldn't give so much attention to something that's obviously not an issue.
 
I have a feeling it's going to come to this: Local radio was the ORIGINAL mass social networking platform. And it's one that's gotten ignored for far too long. The public criticism of the industry, when reading any article in the mainstream media is hard to ignore. And while most in the upper ranks tend to automatically dismiss it as jaded older listeners, mad that fewer stations are playing songs they grew up with, I don't think it can be explained away that easily.

While many corporately owned stations still have live and local air talent, the hard truth is they are micromanaged to the point of irrelevance. And unless you play exactly according to their formulas (many of which are outdated anyway) the chances of really getting mass public attention are slim. And thus (save for the often music-free morning talk show) the death of the radio star.

Corporate management also isn't willing to take chances. They like to keep it status quo. They don't care how much or how far they have to cut as long as they get their bonuses and keep the shareholders and the PPM samples happy. To hell with anyone else. They don't see any farther than that. And it's painfully obvious to anyone who spends enough time listening. So format choices become narrower, targeting listeners who are too young to remember when radio was truly different than it is now or apathetic enough not to really care and casting off everyone else to the internet streams. Because creativity and innovation is too dangerous to the bottom line. But with no risk comes no reward.

And so radio accepts this role. Preaching to it's own choir of PPM samples, ad agencies, shareholders and inside management. And to everyone else as bland audio wallpaper. It's about as insular as it gets.

Has it gone too far in this direction that there is no return? Maybe. But who's going to take any chances in finding out? When every new idea (or very good old one) is automatically shot down without even TRYING it - even on a trial basis by people too afraid to step out of the conventional mindset, it doesn't speak well for this medium. And it's not going to happen anyway if the ones controlling the purse strings aren't going to make some kind of serious effort towards that.

But I don't think this would have even have been brought up if it hasn't been noticed by others. And while it's highly doubtful we'll see anything in the near future, at least the writing is on the wall.
 
stewie said:
Wouldn't it be great if we could get back to the way things used to be? Not a chance IMO.
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IF we could, the next thread would be: Just how far back did you want to go with "the way things used to be?" Did you want to go back to a station with an auditorium and an announcer standing at a mic wearing a suit and tie, with one hand cupped over his ear as he bellows into a 44-BX "Good Morning, ladies and gentlemen... Welcome to The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill!"
 
GRcowboy said:


IF we could, the next thread would be: Just how far back did you want to go with "the way things used to be?" Did you want to go back to a station with an auditorium and an announcer standing at a mic wearing a suit and tie, with one hand cupped over his ear as he bellows into a 44-BX "Good Morning, ladies and gentlemen... Welcome to The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill!"
Click to expand...

Good point. The days when the DJ's job was to play music and entertain, not be an IT guy. :) Yeah, I know, I'm being extreme.
 
stewie said:
Good point. The days when the DJ's job was to play music and entertain, not be an IT guy. :) Yeah, I know, I'm being extreme.
Click to expand...

O.K. We're both being a bit extreme. ;) Being a DJ in 1986 was considerably different than being a DJ in 1956. (My earlier picture was being an 'announcer' in maybe 1950?
 
Here's how it used to be: Wolfman Jack got hired for his first job because he had a FCC 1st Class engineer's license. He could operate the transmitter. All the other stuff came later. We over-romanticize how it used to be.
 
This is the dilemma the owners and programmers face. There are all these people out there who each have their own little mental image of what radio should be, and programming has to be done in such a way as to attract the biggest quantity of ears from big assortment of expectations.

You like Don Rose from late 1988.

I love radio like it was in Moberly, MO in 1963. But a quick scan of the dial indicates I may be the ONLY human on the face of the earth who craves such a diet.
 
Not on some Cumulus-owned talk stations.

Several of them, including WLS-890 Chicago, will cancel local afternoon-drive talk shows in January to pick-up a live feed of Michael Savage, whose live show is moving to 3-6 P.M. EDT/EST.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised (unless he is about to retire) if WLS also drops it's morning drive show for Don Imus (unless he's about to retire), since Cumulus syndicates his show, too.

Besides, sister station WABC-770 New York is pretty much 24-hour syndicated fare.
 
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The new reality is such that many corporate owners are simply not willing to absorb the cost of compliance with every aspect of life as we know it unless they are making unimaginable amounts of money for being part of that big, compliant picture - in the background, of course.
 
well alot of people apparently think voicetracking will continue, sadly, local and live should make a comeback, as i posted a thread on the Los Angeles board a couple hours ago, there is a local DJ, who splits her time at a local college radio station and her DJ job at KCAL. quote.

"ive placed 9 students at KCAL and KOLA"

see local radio does matter, its just a matter of finding the right people for the job.
 
450 of some of the most powerful stations in the biggest markets. And that 12,000 figure includes translators, repeaters and boosters, not solely individual stations.
 
Radio is irrelevant to most people under 30. This is especially true for AM radio, which will not be with us in its present form when the older generations still tuning in to it eventually die off.
 
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