ScottBurns, I am sure not wanting to 'start something'. In fact, you are right on some points.
I find BigA tends to stick to his radio knowledge versus personal opinion. Yes, he will counter with the opposite of what you might post but I view that as somewhat like a teacher making the student see something from all sides.
You mention radio listening is down. It is compared to the 1970s when I got in this business. Even since 1995. Look at all the listening options and choices we have in 2022 that weren't as developed in 1995 or were even imagined in when people were going out to the disco. I'm rather shocked at how well radio has fared against the competition. Radio simply hangs in there only losing about 8% of it's audience in approximately 45 years. We were at 97% about 1978.
Revenue is down. Way down over the decades. When I started in radio my station was the only station in a town of 30,000. We were an AM/FM combo. Competition was a weekly newspaper. Today the market is 2 newspapers, a shopper, 5 additional radio stations and 2 TV stations (only one sells locally). The population has grown to 34,000. Back around 1980 that station billed about $45,000 a month. When I managed it in the 1990s I averaged about $17,000 a month. That revenue decrease is not due to programming or anything like that. The community has X advertising dollars, period. When it was just a newspaper and the station we got a big chunk. In the 1990s when there were 9 media reps pounding the streets we could only persuade $17,000 of those dollars to us.
Radio might seem boring to you today. I can tell you publicly traded companies that own a few thousand stations collectively, have spent enormous sums of cash to research just what people want from radio. Simply put, they refuse to risk their dollars on anything but a sure thing. Radio is now better researched and fine tuned for the audience than ever before. Remember radio is a business and every business is all about giving the customer what they want. Radio just has a crazy way of monetizing that: bring in the customer and then sell companies to talk to those customers (listeners). We think radio's strength is the fact radio's customers (listeners) get what they want for free and it's easily accessible.
Thank you for a thoughtful and respectful reply.
I appreciate BigA's knowledge and willingness to teach, but I wish it could be done in a respectful manner. Moreover, he/she does insert personal opinions at times. For example, he/she once disparaged live jocks as people who babysit consoles. I could give other examples, but I don't want to drag this out. I just want more respectful conversation.
You present some compelling numbers. I will note one more thing about the 1995 statistic that David mentioned. Even if listenership is down only slightly since 1995, the population has only increased. As such, the percentage of people listening to radio is down even more.
Sure, there are other options today. But I remember listening to Howard Stern, who knows a thing or two about good radio, talk about this very topic a couple of years ago. His argument was that radio needs to be more compelling in order to compete against new forms of media. Radio, he said, needs to give people a reason to tune in. Ownership and management have taken the opposite approach. Yes, research says that people don't want to hear jocks talking and that they want shorter segments. But emulating an iPod or other types of media isn't working. With listenership down and revenue down, why not try a different approach to attracting listeners? Why not think outside the box? If the current approach is not working - and given the revenue decline, I don't think it is - then why not try something else?
If radio is really giving people what they want, then why are fewer people listening? Why is revenue down, despite the bare bones operation that most stations are relative to the past?
Here's what I find boring about radio today:
1. Extremely tight playlists - it's appropriate for CHR, but playlists for Country, AOR, and AC are much tighter than they were two decades ago.
2. Jocklessness - even in big markets, nights are often jockless. Large swaths of weekend time are jockless. I am in the minority, but I love listening to jocks. They entertain me and make the music come alive.
3. Boring, liner-card-only jocks - this is not the fault of the jocks. This is all they are allowed to do.
4. Too much voicetracking across the dial - I don't want to hear the same three jocks on five different stations in a market. I know several markets in which this is the case. iHeart jocks tracking at up to five stations in a single cluster.
5. The loss of creativity in morning shows - see my posts earlier in this thread. Again, I don't blame the jocks. I know firsthand that jocks are not "allowed" the autonomy that they used to have.
6. Too many syndicated shows. There are too many stations in big markets that run syndicated shows every night of the week.
What you said in your additional post hit the nail on the head. How does anyone gain a competitive advantage if all stations are following the same formula?
