What Radio Needs to Do

[johnbasalla]

How about this as a competitor of sorts to radio? Cell phones. Lots of radio listening is done in the car. Somebody who is listening to radio in the car gets the jingle of their cell phone. Guess what they do. They turn the radio down or off and proceed to the phone call. Banning cell phone use while driving could be a good thing for radio as well as safety.

 

[Casey]

I had not really thought about how radio competes for time with things completely unrelated to music, but that is an interesting point. Perhaps radio should try to figure out a way to not only compete for a persons time, but be better integrated with other things that consume a persons time. People who spend time playing video games, as was brought up, are probably not listening a lot to their local radio stations while gaming. But if they are listening to music while gaming, there is a good chance that they listen to a digital source of music of some kind since they are already connected to the internet. Perhaps radio should try harder to become that source. If they are not listening to music, then radio should try to convince them to. Last.fm has done so fairly successfully on the xbox 360. If TuneIn became available in more places, all radio stations that stream could more effectively compete for a persons time.

There is nothing easy about competing with Spotify and Pandora. But it is not impossible either. From what I see, one of the greatest advantages these services have is the feeling of personalization. If radio stations made it easier for listeners to request their favorite music, or simply give input, that could help give the illusion of personalization and that is important. A listener needs to be able to feel connected. This seems to be ignored all too often these days, at a time when society tells us we need to be connected to everyone more than ever. This is especially important with the youngest generations. And nationally syndicated shows and voice tracking simply do not effectively allow for this. At least not in my opinion.

For the AM band, give up HD radio and redevelop the stereo broadcasts. I actively see out the stations broadcasting in stereo (thank you WLS and 1630 KCJJ).

KCJJ sounds pretty good. Unfortunately I don't really have much of a need to listen to them.

 

[KyDXIn]

Simple, have the fcc rules revert to they way they were back in 1975...and give large corporations one year to divest there stations, or lose them. Now, for you youngsters who are wondering how the rules were differant back in 1975...here is the way things used to be:
1) All on-air people needed a fcc license and pass a simple test (mostly rules and power formulas) for it, this was the third class license with broadcast endorsement. and all engineers also had to pass an engineering test (first class license), also ALL stations had to have at least one licensed engineer on staff. plus jocks around the clock to take meter readings.
2) Require that corporations follow the old 7-7-7 rules, which stated any single corporation could ONLY own 7am stations, 7 fm stations and 7 tv stations MAX nationwide, and no more than 1am, 1fm and 1 tv in ANY SINGLE MARKET. This would return us to the days when kids received training and built their skills at small market station and worked their way up to bigger markets as they got better. (not to mention return the 50,000+ jobs that were eliminated when the 7-7-7 rules was done away with by the fcc). This rule also would mean that you would have (in a major market) about 30 seperate owners, instead of 3 or 4 like today, thus causing the stations to really have to compete for listeners, and bring the stations power back to programmers and talent instead of sales and gm's where it exists today.
3) do away with all the little low power stations and such..loosen up the frequencies again.

Doing these three things would create tens of thousands of jobs, bring back the old style radio trainings grounds for talent, create a basis for wealth again for talent, and give life to our business that is now almost dead.

Amen!

 

[Surfer]

Anyone can pick on radio. It's easy. Nobody is really going to fix it. Why? Nobody really wants to. It's also expensive. You'll have to pay for stations, fight large corporations, lose your shirt defending your values, and for what? The ability to have live and local dj's? While I agree that radio has the POTENTIAL to do more, the LISTENERS don't care. As long as THEY don't care, radio will not care either. It's about selling advertising. It always has been. If you can still sell advertising with no listeners (and we all know it's being done), why change? This issue isn't ultimately about music, programming, large corporations or what the government should or shouldn't do. If you want to change radio (for the better), control the advertising dollars. Radio will change if advertisers, who want to attract listeners, want it to. Until then, nothing will change.

 

[bturner]

Earlier Big A had a great comment about how radio listeners have been taught not to stay with a station if anything they don't at least like a bunch comes on. I recall listening through songs I didn't care for because I'd really like the next song.

In short we niched ourselves to the point we are dishing out plain vanilla while everyone else is the 31 flavors. Funny think, most everyone likes vanilla but not when there's other flavors to choose from.

I'd love to see live, local fully manned radio but I think radio has gone the route of most retailers. In the retail business you had small outlets selling product with truly educated sales staff. Now the big box stores get most business and many times the staff, if you can find one, are geniunely wanting to help but frequently they know very little about what they sell. I think radio has likely moved past that point of returning to that type of operation.

Radio is in a time of 'growing pains' because I feel radio is not down for the count. We need to reinvent radio and I honestly think that answer will come from someone outside the business. A few pioneers of new ideas will fall as models improve, but if we won't allo radio to die, we might find a way to save it.

 

[bturner]

I'll add another observation. In talking radio, it is frequently pointed out America is over-radioed. They will correctly say there are now about 3 times as many stations. I agree but I started checking a couple of markets I've lived. In checking number of stations on the dial versus population, say over a 30-50 year period and it looks like the number of offerings on the radio versus population have not changed that much.

Granted you have cable TV versus the few TV choices, online listening, ipods, etc. There is much more competition for the ad dollar.

 

[TheBigA]

In short we niched ourselves to the point we are dishing out plain vanilla while everyone else is the 31 flavors. Funny think, most everyone likes vanilla but not when there's other flavors to choose from.

You would think...but at Baskin Robbins, the place that specializes in 31 flavors of ice cream, the most popular still remains vanilla, followed by chocolate. Most people have pretty plain taste when it comes to subjective things like soft drinks (Coke), beer (Bud), and fast food (burgers). That's the game radio is in. Ownership laws prevent companies from owning every station in town. If they could, they'd put cherry cheesecake on one of them. But with only a few signals, you focus on the main winners: News, talk, country, AC, and adult hits.

 

[Tom Wells]

Gosh, vanilla is way too strong flavored. Make mine plain with no flavor. ;D

Expedience is often the path of least resistance. I'm tired of the big box mentality.

Ice cream is an excellent data point for comparison.

My "supervisor" recently went on a vacation to europe...a few days into the trip, he was in Italy, where
ice cream is serious business. He got into an argument with the owner of a shop over the price of an ice cream cone!
Either the police were almost called, or they WERE called, and he was asked to depart and take his bad attitude with him.

If you are unwillilng to pay what it costs to buy hand-made ice dream, do you have any grounds to object to the cost?

A day or two later he cut off the rest of the trip, saying he couldn't stand europe, and came home a week early.

Why would anyone go so far away to tell someone else how to run their business?
Couldn't he just accept the fact he's too cheap to have an ice cream cone?
Why make a stink when there's nothing of low enough quality available to be acceptable?

Moral: When low expectations become the rule, only low quality is permissable.
And when low expectations are impressed upon others, they are justified in fighting back for proper valuations.

A race to be the cheapest and "safest" is always a sad race and never very exciting.

 

[TheBigA]

A race to be the cheapest and "safest" is always a sad race and never very exciting.

Maybe, but they also live the longest.