Re: Enthusiasm or ignorance?
> > Please don't question my passion and enthusiasm for Radio.
>
> I'm not saying this is necessarily true in your case, but
> maybe some people got knocked around a little bit too hard
> in that hard-knocks world of radio, and when someone like
> Mike comes along they see a little bit of themselves in him,
> they see a little bit of what they used to be like, and they
> remember some of the idealism that they once had.
I do not see any idealism in Mike´s posting. All I see is ignorance of the reality of radio... a reality that has existed for at least as long as Top 40 radio has existed. Since the first Top 40 station dates to August of 1952, that means 3 years over a half-century!
I began in radio not quite that far back. I was enthusiastic. I looked for every opportunity to hang around a radio station, so I could learn from pros. I took coffee, cleaned toilets, filed albums. And I was able to talk to the PD, the chief engineer, the announcers.
I hung in the lobby of WLS to be able to talk to Art Roberts and Sam Holman and Dick Biondi, among others. I went to WABC, KBTR, KFWB, KEWB, KOBY, WHK, WTAC and other Top 40 stations when I could. In each, I tried to learn something about the craft of radio, just as an apprentice does in a trade.
It was not my mission to trash everything being done in radio. I did not know how to do radio, and I was aware of it. I read Broadcasting and Sponsor from cover to cover. I studied for the First Phone license.
Fortuitously, I was able to intern at a large cluster in a market of 10 million, where I was told, "you don´t speak unless spoken to and you do what you are told to do. In exchange, you get to be here." I learned more.
A year later, just before his death, I met Todd Storz, the inventor of Top 40. I did not tell him how wrong playing only 40 songs over and over was. i asked him how it was done, and why. Since I was 17, and not a competitor, he told me... for several hours on a visit to WQAM in Miami, one of the great Top 40 stations of the US.
Mike tears down and rants against the ways that thousands of us have discovered work to make stations part of our listeners´ lives. I was a radio geek for many years, and all I wanted to do was be inside a radio station. But I respected the craft, and realized that individual tastes were overridden by the collective taste of our listeners... in my longest station stay, at an R/B station where we were very clear on who did and did not listen and what they wanted.
The hundreds of thousands who have worked in radio over the last 5 decades can not be all wrong just because Mike thinks some obscure garage band from Ashtabula that cut a tune in ´66 deserves play today.
Bill Drake, Todd Storz, Gordon McLendon, Mike Joseph, Buzz Bennett, Ron Jacobs, John Kluge, Scott Shannon, Jack McCoy, Paul Drew, Chuck Blore, Lee Abrams, Kent Burkhart, Rick Shaw, and many others were and are my idols. Even the odd ones like Max Richmond, Don Burden, and Richard Eaton were pieces of my radio lore.
Don´t tear down the foundations of radio. Learn from the past. Playing junk tunes no one wants to hear is hardly reinventing radio... it is prostituting it for the sake of one´s ego gratification and self-satisfaction. It is flipping the middle finger to the listener, saying, ¨you will listen to what I want.¨
: But then
> they learned some hard, cruel lessons along the way, things
> didn't work out as they had hoped, and now they for whatever
> reason feel compelled to try and bring him down as hard as
> they were once brought down.
Translation: they learned listeners did not give a crap about our personal taste, and wanted to hear what they liked all along.
> I don't know, I may be a fool, but I've been fighting
> what I consider to be a "Good Fight" for years now, and I'm
> not about to give up. No ones given me a chance yet but I
> believe in Lance Armstrong and I believe in miracles, and
> someday someone somewhere is going to give me an opportunity
> to really make a difference in this business.
Pardon me, but that whole Lance Armstrong thing sounds like something out of Little Mermaid. Maybe it is the effect of having Disney 4 blocks down the street from me... but when the artificial smoke clears and the pretty fish swim away, radio is a business. we exist by giving listeners what they want, causing many of them to come to us if we do it right... and then we sell advertising. If we do it wrong, or put our egos in front of the listener needs, we generally get s---tcanned and are out of a gig. Usually, it takes about one of these cannings to make you realize that this is not a game, it is not a pure art form, and it is a business.
> "You may say
> I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one". And yes, Oldies
> Cat, "I hope someday you join us"!
>
Oh, my gawd. A John Lennon quote. Pardon my cynicism, but you definitely are dreaming. Myself, I recognize some of the stations I deal with are worth upwards of $400 to %500 million, and I treat the investment and our listeners with dignity and respect... and realism.
I'm still a radio geek. I am enthusiastic about radio... I love it!
> > Please don't question my passion and enthusiasm for Radio.
>
> I'm not saying this is necessarily true in your case, but
> maybe some people got knocked around a little bit too hard
> in that hard-knocks world of radio, and when someone like
> Mike comes along they see a little bit of themselves in him,
> they see a little bit of what they used to be like, and they
> remember some of the idealism that they once had.
I do not see any idealism in Mike´s posting. All I see is ignorance of the reality of radio... a reality that has existed for at least as long as Top 40 radio has existed. Since the first Top 40 station dates to August of 1952, that means 3 years over a half-century!
I began in radio not quite that far back. I was enthusiastic. I looked for every opportunity to hang around a radio station, so I could learn from pros. I took coffee, cleaned toilets, filed albums. And I was able to talk to the PD, the chief engineer, the announcers.
I hung in the lobby of WLS to be able to talk to Art Roberts and Sam Holman and Dick Biondi, among others. I went to WABC, KBTR, KFWB, KEWB, KOBY, WHK, WTAC and other Top 40 stations when I could. In each, I tried to learn something about the craft of radio, just as an apprentice does in a trade.
It was not my mission to trash everything being done in radio. I did not know how to do radio, and I was aware of it. I read Broadcasting and Sponsor from cover to cover. I studied for the First Phone license.
Fortuitously, I was able to intern at a large cluster in a market of 10 million, where I was told, "you don´t speak unless spoken to and you do what you are told to do. In exchange, you get to be here." I learned more.
A year later, just before his death, I met Todd Storz, the inventor of Top 40. I did not tell him how wrong playing only 40 songs over and over was. i asked him how it was done, and why. Since I was 17, and not a competitor, he told me... for several hours on a visit to WQAM in Miami, one of the great Top 40 stations of the US.
Mike tears down and rants against the ways that thousands of us have discovered work to make stations part of our listeners´ lives. I was a radio geek for many years, and all I wanted to do was be inside a radio station. But I respected the craft, and realized that individual tastes were overridden by the collective taste of our listeners... in my longest station stay, at an R/B station where we were very clear on who did and did not listen and what they wanted.
The hundreds of thousands who have worked in radio over the last 5 decades can not be all wrong just because Mike thinks some obscure garage band from Ashtabula that cut a tune in ´66 deserves play today.
Bill Drake, Todd Storz, Gordon McLendon, Mike Joseph, Buzz Bennett, Ron Jacobs, John Kluge, Scott Shannon, Jack McCoy, Paul Drew, Chuck Blore, Lee Abrams, Kent Burkhart, Rick Shaw, and many others were and are my idols. Even the odd ones like Max Richmond, Don Burden, and Richard Eaton were pieces of my radio lore.
Don´t tear down the foundations of radio. Learn from the past. Playing junk tunes no one wants to hear is hardly reinventing radio... it is prostituting it for the sake of one´s ego gratification and self-satisfaction. It is flipping the middle finger to the listener, saying, ¨you will listen to what I want.¨
: But then
> they learned some hard, cruel lessons along the way, things
> didn't work out as they had hoped, and now they for whatever
> reason feel compelled to try and bring him down as hard as
> they were once brought down.
Translation: they learned listeners did not give a crap about our personal taste, and wanted to hear what they liked all along.
> I don't know, I may be a fool, but I've been fighting
> what I consider to be a "Good Fight" for years now, and I'm
> not about to give up. No ones given me a chance yet but I
> believe in Lance Armstrong and I believe in miracles, and
> someday someone somewhere is going to give me an opportunity
> to really make a difference in this business.
Pardon me, but that whole Lance Armstrong thing sounds like something out of Little Mermaid. Maybe it is the effect of having Disney 4 blocks down the street from me... but when the artificial smoke clears and the pretty fish swim away, radio is a business. we exist by giving listeners what they want, causing many of them to come to us if we do it right... and then we sell advertising. If we do it wrong, or put our egos in front of the listener needs, we generally get s---tcanned and are out of a gig. Usually, it takes about one of these cannings to make you realize that this is not a game, it is not a pure art form, and it is a business.
> "You may say
> I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one". And yes, Oldies
> Cat, "I hope someday you join us"!
>
Oh, my gawd. A John Lennon quote. Pardon my cynicism, but you definitely are dreaming. Myself, I recognize some of the stations I deal with are worth upwards of $400 to %500 million, and I treat the investment and our listeners with dignity and respect... and realism.
I'm still a radio geek. I am enthusiastic about radio... I love it!