The Biggest Threat

The iPod is a threat to terrestrial radio.
iTunes is a threat.
Downloadable music is a threat.
Satellite radio is a threat.
Internet radio is a threat.

But none of these compares to the biggest threat terrestrial radio faces today:

ITSELF.

Terrestrial radio has more listeners than all iTunes users, iPod owners, internet downloaders. music streamers and Satellite Radio Subscribers combined.

COMBINED.

That means terrestrial radio has the most to lose. And damn is terrestrial radio doing a fine job of that. We're seeing our best and brightest leaving the medium entirely - or worse - leaving it for a competitor.

Hell, the fact that we're now referring to it as "terrestrial radio" is proof of the challenges ahead.

We are Band Aids.
We are Kleenex.
We are IBM. Do you remember when PCs were called IBMs, and Clones? I bought an IMB clone in 1990 at a store called "The Clone Store." Even people who buy IMBs don't call them IBMs anymore. They're just PCs. But a Mac is still a Mac.

We are Coke.
We are the Walkman.
We are Xerox. Remember the days when you'd go Xerox something?

We are Radio. For now anyway.

But I am not a doom-sayer. I am the ultimate optimist. I am the guy who believes that reinvigorating our medium is easy. It's knowing people as more than P1s and P2s. It's understanding what motivates them, and using that knowledge to capture their attention and speak to their passions so they'll keep them coming back time and time again.

The only thing holding radio back is radio. There are too many old-days and old-ways types who like radio the way it was because that's all they understand. These are the radio bureaucrats. They're the ones who program by format rather than programming for people. These broadcasters have completely lost touch with real people living real lives. Y'know... "Listeners."

The biggest threat to radio is radio.

Many broadcasters believe the iPod is radio's biggest threat. This only reinforces my opinion that radio people don't understand people at all.

Do you know what the two most popular features of the iPod are?

...Autofill and the shuffle button.

Autofill picks songs at random from the thousands in a typical user's library to load onto the iPod, and shuffle picks songs at random to play.

So much for the argument that people are using their iPods to program their own music.

Sadly, one feature that the masses aren't looking for on their iPods is RADIO. If there were enough demand for it, Apple would build radio into the iPod - but the demand isn't there.

The biggest threat to radio is radio.