The Downfall Of Radio Is The Downfall Of Man

The downfall of radio is very real, and though pointing fingers and placing blame doesn't solve the problem, it can at least serve as a step towards fully understanding the root of the problem as it exists today. Plus, what the hell. Every now and then,it's fun to vent, so here goes.

The downfall of radio can be blamed on:

#1. Freaking Flanking.

Remember the LMA? The Local Marketing Agreement was never about marketing. It was about turning frequencies into pawns, and it was the beginning of the end.

Imagine if car companies started running other car companies as shells to produce cars NOT for consumers but instead to HURT other car companies.

That's what the LMA was all about. Station A more or less owned Station B and used it NOT to entertain, but instead, the primary goal was to take audience away from Station C. If they couldn't beat 'em, they got a flanker to hurt 'em.

In the days of the LMA, I lived in a small market where the local rock station LMA'ed another frequency and flipped it Hot AC to take audience away from the adult-leaning CHR that owned the market. They used the flanker to take out the market leader, but not by better programming. The Hot AC never had to be any good. It just had to hurt the CHR as much as possible on as little budget as possible.

It all sounds like harmless strategy until you consider that it meant a lowering of the standard of quality for radio stations, which was bad for radio as a whole.

When Mix couldn't play certain songs because they'd take audience away from B107, the real loser was the Mix listener who couldn't hear her favorite song on her favorite station.

Sounds trivial, eh? Well, it might have been trivial if it had been the exception to the rule of radio. Instead, it become the norm thanks to deregulation. Deregulation was really the LMA times a thousand. It's hard to win in a market when you first have to fight within your own building. Then again, winning isn't even about listeners anymore, is it? It's about stock.

The downfall of radio can also be blamed on:

#2. The FCC.

When did the FCC become a government version of a take out window? "You want how many stations? That'll be XXX dollars. Please pull up to the next window to receive your order."

Far too many stations were added to the dial, not to mention how many were shuffled from city to city - which, by the way, completely contradicted the reason those licenses were granted in the first place!

And then there's the sheer comedy that is FCC fines.

Opie And Anthony held an on-air contest where people had to fuck in St. Patrick's Cathedral to win a prize. When that stunt didn't cost WNEW its license it became pretty obvious that the FCC was a joke without a punchline. Oh, sure, people were fired, blah blah, but owner didn't lose the license. In fact, they were fined less than half a million dollars, which is what to a company the size of CBS?

...please...

The FCC is a joke.

And speaking of initials we can blame for the downfall of radio...

#3. The NAB.

Broadcasters have no advocate in the legal or regulatory process. If the FCC is a joke, the NAB is a face-painted clown. The NAB is the National Association Of Broadcasters - yes, BROADCASTERS - yet their organization does little but harm broadcasters and harm broadcasting. Instead, their ambition is to benefit owners at the expense of broadcasting.

"Hang on" you say. "Aren't owners also broadcasters?"

No.

Most of today's broadcasting owners are no more broadcasters than plantation owners were farmers. Let's talk about the man busting his back in the fields during the early 1800s. He deserves the recognition because he was a farmer, and probably a damn good one. He knew the land. He knew the crop. He tilled the soil. The guy sitting in his mansion drinking wine was just a farm owner.

There is a difference.

Even in the days of 7 AMs and 7 FMs in 7 markets, many of the station owners weren't really broadcasters. Not really. But they were so closely connected to the point where sales and programming met that they understood the symbiotic relationship required for each to prosper. Also, there were so many owners back then that you at least had the opportunity to use your talents to find a better station with better ownership. It's true that there were plenty of bad owners back then, but there were exceptional owners too. Don't like Wilkes? OK, that's fair. How about a gig with Nationwide? Or Secret. Or Susquehanna, or Chancellor... or the noise you can't ignore, if it suited your personality. Grin.

Today's Clear Channel and Cumulus are about as different as Republicans and Democrats. The differences may seem vast on paper, but politics is still politics.

And that brings me to the fourth thing the downfall of radio can be blamed on.

Grade School Math.

Let me see if I've got this right... some genius thought it was a good idea to buy radio stations at ten or twenty times what each frequency was worth while also dropping the price of ads being run on said frequencies so he could undercut the competition... and then a whole bunch of other geniuses - seeing the brilliance of such a strategy - decided to do the same.

They increased cumulative debt while decreasing individual revenue.
"BRILLIANT!!!"

...no. Not so brilliant, as it turns out.

"OK THEN! Let's cut costs."
You mean fire people?
"Yeah. That."

...but those people create the product that IS your radio station. They give your listeners a reason to listen.

"Well they're not doing a good job, are they? Ratings are down!"

...that's because you took away their tools in your last few rounds of cost cutting. Remember the research they used? You slashed that part of the budget already. Oh, and remember the songs you wouldn't let them play because you were trying to protect your other stations? And remember the guests you wouldn't let the morning show book for the same reason? Oh, and remember the air talent you already fired during the last round of cost cutting... when you replaced live shows with voicetracking? Oh yeah... and remember when you...

Which brings me to the fifth thing the downfall of radio can be blamed on.

Your Local Planetarium.

Let's talk about time and space.

First, there were carvings in stone. Eventually there was ink and paper. And then the telegraph. And then AM radio. Then TV. Then FM radio. And Satellite. Etc.

I think of it all as being similar to the Big Bang. An initial explosion of information came with the birth of human language, and that explosion has been expanding in all directions with the growth of technology - but part of the big bang theory suggests that everything will eventually contract. I believe the same will be true of media. Media has been expanding into more and more forms - but then came this thing called the internet, which may very well be the point where all media collapses into itself - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's just change.

Been to Amazon.com lately? They're selling digital books. Kindle, they call it. Hell, the very website we're on now is really just an evolution of magazines like R&R, FMQB and Gavin, not to mention those daily fax reports.

It's change - and it's an example of various forms of expanded media eventually collapsing into a singular form.

Radio has two options.

Radio will either be wiped out by the internet, or it will eventually merge into it. The determining factor will be the strength of each individual radio station at the time when AM and FM radio listenership truly collapses.

That bit is important.

Radio today is swirling in a sea of cost cutting chaos. If our stations are stripped to the bone, to the point where they aren't the most entertaining option when listeners seek something to listen to, radio is doomed as of the moment something equally convenient comes along. Will some other form of entertainment become the thing to listen to while driving to work once the internet reaches the car? Already we are seeing other forms of media taking over so much of the listening radio had in the home.

I would think corporations that have invested so much money into radio ownership would protect their investments by making sure the product that *IS* their radio stations is compelling enough to survive these hard times. But I would be wrong because greed trumps common sense.

I've always thought of radio not as a medium, but instead as individual brands. We're in a time of great change, and many of our individual brands - our stations - won't survive when the internet surpasses the airwaves.

"Oh, who are you kidding... that's so far into the future."

Hardly.

If you thought FM changed the face of AM, wait until a simplified interface is created to bring the internet into your car. And remember this: it's already been done once.

Did you surf the internet in 1985? I doubt it, but I bet you were starting to by 1995.

The change in your habits was born out of a change in the internet's interface. It's too hard to remember a number like 64.236.29.120 so a system of domain names was created to simplify the process of taking us somewhere like cnn.com.

In other words:
http://64.236.29.120 = http://www.cnn.com

Similarly, a system will eventually be created to take us from some crazy set of numbers to an online stream of what we now know as 95.7 FM in Houston.

Again, the question is, how many of our AM and FM signals will be worth a damn when that time comes? It's not as far off as you may think, and there's only so much budgetary stripping to the bone that can be done before the entertainment bone is broken entirely.

I'm not a doom and gloom guy. I've always believed that one person can change a radio station and one station can change a market, and one market can change the medium. It's happened before. We all know who the legends are in terms of stations and talent. But will there be future legends for radio when the medium becomes too constrictive for talent to develop?

With each passing year, my doubts grow.

The downfall of radio is the downfall of man: It's greed.