TheBigA said:
I hate to bring facts into this, but as someone who has been in this business for 35 years, and worked at dozens of stations, I can tell you that programmers NEVER EVER ran the industry. They ran the programming, but not the industry. And when the owners didn't like the programming, they clamped down on the programmers. So let's not rewrite history.
Back in the 7/7/7 days (I go back to the 5/5/5 days) there was only limited competition. You had two groups of radio stations. You had the top performers, who all got double digit shares, usually owned by big companies like ABC or insurance companies. And then you had everyone else, who had no money, no budget, and often no ratings. And every now and then, David might slay a Golliath, but WMCA never beat WABC, no matter who claimed to have the most Beatles per hour. It simply never happened. So WMCA just fought as hard as it could, with their Good Guys, and ultimately had to give up. I wouldn't call that competition.
Thank you, my friend, for helping me to see and to recognize something so very basic that is driving much of the contentious conversation we have on these boards. From your earliest days in radio you have observed radio and participated in radio that was played under a set of rules and assumptions tied to METRO area radio.... radio as it existed in NYC, Boston, Philly, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Some of us established our early views of radio by what was going on in Wichita, Fargo, Amarillo, Springfield MO & Springfield IL, Little Rock, Moberly, Alexandria LA or Jackson MS. We stood in awe of Farm Directors who had more political clout than most state legislators. I worked as News Director for a man who during the tenure of the previous news director went head to head with the most dominant business man in the area. He ordered us to NOT mention his divorce trial on the air. We reported it, and the station owner endured a cold war (no advertising) for seven years or so. Some of us had dreams that some day we would own the station in a county seat somewhere and a generation later people would tell newcomers that one of the reasons the community was great was because a great radio station helped make it so.
Your early exposure was to radio that once television arrived basically became a giant juke box punctuated with personalities who had the job of making their jukebox sparkle a little better than the Wurlitzer down the street. My early exposure was to radio that looked up music as some flotsam that you chinked in between the logs and bricks like insulation to fill voids between the local news, the weather, the farm markets, etc.
In a sense, you have experienced ONE radio revolution.... the shift from the old 7/7/7 rules to the consolidation of today. Some of us buffoons have actually experience TWO radio revolutions and we haven't sometimes recognized them as distinct issues. Our first radio revolution was simply part of another revolution where Walmart and Home Depot and Best Buy and Olive Garden and Citi-bank and Master Card and USA Today made us nothing more than one more suburb of New York City, even though we still had tumbleweeds rolling down main street. No longer were we selling advertising to the son of the guy used used to own the home grown hardware store with FIVE FRONT DOORS..... someone who grew up locally and knew that news and ag reporting made us a powerhouse... now we were trying to sell advising to some chain store manager who grew up in St. Louis or Chicago and this is just a stepping stone town to him as he seeks to become district manager. He is sophisticated and he knows that radio is nothing but a wireless jukebox and he expects us to forget about news directors and farm directors and get with the program. THAT was our first radio revolution.
Then came the day when we were just one of FIVE radio stations in our county seat followed by the consolidation that you share in your experience in radio. Those of us who lived through TWO revolutions in radio don't even recognize the industry any more. We don't even understand where the battle lines were during the confusion of TWO distinct revolutions. We just stand here in the smouldering battleground trying to salvage a few spoils of war.
