> An absolutely wonderful explanation of the state of radio
> today!
>
h> ttp://www.walkerpub.com/radio_consultants.html#anchor5187099
>
Excellent article Blart, but not historically accurate. Consultants were around before deregulation, a natural development as broadcasters wanted to duplicate the success they'd heard about elsewhere.
Gordon McLendon traveled to Kansas City and sat on a wastebasket in the WHB studio to learn about Todd Storz' success with Top 40, then broadcasters from all over traveled to Dallas to listen to KLIF and to LA to listen to Chuck Blore's KFWB Color Radio. And so it was in other formats, too. I remember a promo line on KILT in the early days, taking a dig at KNUZ: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."
Sooner or later, it was inevitable there would be someone coming around with a brief case saying 'I've been there and I can save you the trip because I can tell you how it's done.' And programming started to be viewed as a science rather than an art which is also part of the problem. There was a recent thread about this on the Buffalo-Rochester board and Siroxalot, who has obviously been a program director, had one of the best lines I've ever heard about radio: "If there had been marketing consultants (music tests, focus groups) in 1954, Rock and Roll never would have been born." (I'm paraphrasing - I can't find the thread to cite it now).
Deregulation and the resulting decline in locally owned and programmed stations is the bigger culprit, but don't forget about the natural desire to duplicate what's been tried and proven successful elsewhere. The article makes the point about local owners being involved in the community and in the music. They may not have been great innovators like McLendon, Storz or Blore, maybe they were just trying to copy what they'd heard about elsewhere, but they weren't just running cloned stations dictated by some national programming hierarchy, voice-tracked from thousands of miles away.
Every business has at least two sets of clients it has to keep happy - the end users of the product or service and the suppliers who provide the raw materials. In radio, this works out to the listeners and the advertisers. Peripherally there are also the record companies who think the only reason God created radio was to sell records and sometimes the GM's or owner's wife who couldn't stand some particular artist or song. Deregulation introduced two more sets that have turned out to be the proverbial bulls in a china shop - investors and the corporate hierarchy. Over the last several years the focus of the industry has been on pleasing the advertisers by programming to particular demographics, making sure Wall Street is impressed (see Mel Karmazin's famous quote that all he had to do every morning to find out if he was doing a good job running the second largest broadcasting company in the world was pick up the paper and turn to the stock exchange listings), and, for many programmers, climbing the corporate ladder of success. The listener's needs have been shortchanged for years in the rush to please advertisers demands, the stock market and the 'economies of scale' demanded by the huge corporations that control radio now and radio is now scrambling to figure out what to do to get the listener's needs back in the picture. <P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">
Edited by oltheimmer on 06/28/05 11:49 AM.</FONT></P>
