Element9 said:
It certainly gives the programmer, manager and sales person pause to think... and worry.
Now two questions for Paul and the board at large: Can niche programming evolve and enlarge its base (in which case, it wouldn't be niche programming) and will radio stations "smarten up," evolve and provide a product that attracts more listeners regardless of format? Or will radio devolve to become niche narrowcasters with increasingly narrow and decreasing listenership and eventually fade away?
Programmers, managers and sales people need only worry if they consider themselves trapped in the traditional radio model. The opportunities already out there on the web are incredible. My daily listenership is more than the 12+ AQH of the top-ranked station in the Buffalo ARB, and much better defined. I have about 5 minutes of avails, plus billboards, per day in my podcasts. That, times 20,000 well-targeted listeners, gives me at least as much daily earning power as a single stopset on a big-time radio station, with near-zero overhead. Could you live on that?
I grew up listening to KB, and never wanted to do anything else. I've hoped for years that I could find my way back into the business I loved, maybe even in Buffalo. I now realize what I'm doing instead is both more profitable and more secure. (I know, I know, nothing new - George Hamberger figured the same thing out in real estate 25 years ago.)
As for niche programming on broadcast radio, you can't increase the commercial value of a niche audience by making your content broader. That might get you more cume, but TSL and loyalty get killed, the audience less defined, and there's less of the exclusivity you need to support good rates. What you need to do is define the niche even more narrowly, serve it even more exclusively, and push it out past the geographical limitations of a single radio transmitter to increase audience size without watering down what you do. A radio network could provide the necessary scaling, but individual affiliates won't clear your content, because they can only sell ads in the portion that airs on their individual signals, and the audience in an individual city will be tiny.
The appropriate venue for niches is podcasting.
There are currently something like 59,000 audio podcasts in regular production. If 99% of them are unlistenably amateurish, in a language you don't speak, or don't show up reliably, that still leaves a whole new "band" with 590 channels of audio content that's created by people passionate about their topics. If the podcast industry ever teaches people en masse how to use it, radio stations which create commodities and call them "brands" are in deep doo-doo.
OK - The premise of this thread was Buffalo, in two years. I think you'll see the beginning of a wave of small AM operators turning in their licenses, especially as the march of technology makes the band even noisier. Station values on both bands will drop sharply as the big guys have to liquidate some of their properties to pay debts, or wind up with their entire portfolios on the courthouse steps. The stations which have truly developed both distinct brands and decent cumes (WBEN, WYRK, WJYE, WGRF, WBLK, maybe WTSS) will dig in and do OK for a while, if their owners survive. The rest will be running off desktop computers, with Google as their sales departments, just waiting to die.
And radio in general needs them to! If 75% of current stations went dark, the rest were consolidated to one end of the FM dial, and the AM band and half of FM was spectrally repurposed through FCC auctions, we radio geeks might gasp, but it would be better for both the survivors and the listening public.
If the Bills leave town, so will a ton of radio's local ad revenue market share. If Congress stops radio's exemption from performance royalties, voicetracking and ten-in-a-row will no longer look so attractive, and more talk will wind up on FM, compounding AM's problems.
And at least a couple of displaced Buffalo radio veterans will figure out that they can create daily podcasts that people will buy for $3.99/month, produce them out of their home studios, build an audience of 1500 people, and make more than a typical Buffalo midday salary for working an hour or two a day. Perhaps they'll even attract enough listeners that they can sell entire quarter-hours to ElectraGas and Schmitt's Garage!
