RADIO, THEN AND NOW
- PANDORA: AN IDEA FOR RADIO PEOPLE TO STEAL…BACK
At one time, disc jockeys were hired for their talent as entertainers, and their love of, and feel for, music. Pandora.com has taken the music idea and run with it. Pandora is the offspring of the Music Genome Project, where musicologists have developed a method of classifying recordings by their musical and performance characteristics. An example explains it best: you can go to the site and create your own personal music channel(s) by typing in an artist, composer, or style, and the program delivers a continuous stream of music that matches your choice. Then you fine-tune the channel by rejecting or approving tunes, or adding more artist names or descriptors. Pandora is uncannily accurate at supplying music in the vein you identify. It’s probably the best marriage of geekiness and content on the Web. On radio-industry music stations–broadcast, satellite or Web–music selection is mandated by random-sample market survey techniques and stress-emphasis-frequency formulae. On all but the most obscure campus or non-commercial music-freak stations, the human element has been diminished to virtually nil. Now–as U.S. music radio is beginning to know what a Greenland glacier feels like–now would be a great time to steal back the idea of human-programmed music radio. It’s time to free up the suppressed radio guys–and women–stalking the back halls of stations all over the country. Or hire fascinating, talented people from your community–every town is loaded with them, and the radio business is conspicuously not. When people, not formats, reach out to listeners as only they can, sharing their lives and musical knowledge with their neighbors…then, AM and FM radio will recover its vitality and grow again.
- DIGITAL NIGHT SOUNDS — A NEW BUG FOR AM RADIO.
We’re in the midst of a digital revolution in all media, and radio is no exception. You’re hearing about “HD Radio.” But not hearing much of it yet, because U.S radio is just now switching over to digital broadcasting, and the price of a digital radio receiver is still ridiculous. But these are not the only problems. AM radio stations (540 to 1600 kHz) have just begun to convert to this new method of pumping out electrons, and they’re interfering with each other, and themselves, at night. Nighttime has always been a problem and a blessing for AM — the original radio transmission platform. When the sun goes down, a station’s signal rushes skyward — it’s called the station’s “skywave”–and bounces off the ionosphere, then off the earth again, and skips over great distances. One of the geek joys of radio has always been “DX-ing” — distance listening. “Hey Maude, c’mere! I’ve got Del Rio, Texas!” Now, the big-nighttime-signal stations — those on what we used to call “clear channels”–are having fuzz problems because of their own and others’ new digital signals. It’s the system the U.S. adopted, called IBOC, (In-Band-On-Channel), which makes it possible to transmit the new digital radio information on the same frequency with the old analog signal. What it seems to be doing is killing the possibility of skywave broadcasting — picking up San Francisco stations in Houston, and so on. A lot of people in U.S. radio are unhappy about this, though radio has long been considered a local-only medium. You can read more about this in the radio trades (see my right column for links), but here’s a telling little article by a broadcast engineer, writing in Radio World this week. This guy, in his dispassionate (sorta) way, delivers his analysis of the problem. It’ll give you a taste of radio guy talk. Just plow on through the technical terms and jargon. Will the radio guys have to fix this bug, or will the clear channel station owners just have to get over it? Stay tuned.
- WORDS FOR RADIO PEOPLE, NO. 1
We define our world by the names we give things. Change the names–the words–and you change the way you think. Here’s today’s Word for Radio People:Â Stop calling the town you work in a “market.” Start calling it a “city.” Or call it your “home town.” Say “here.” Better yet, call it by its given name. For me, that’s Yakima, Washington. I live here. My point: it’s hard to be a full citizen of a place if you only think of it as a “market.” There’s a whole radio business mindset that goes with being a person living in a city and working for a radio station that will melt away if you start thinking of your city as your home, rather than the market you’re currently working in. Want to be a better person? Stop thinking of yourself as a resident of Planet Radio. Start thinking of yourself as a citizen of Hometown, U.S.A. The bonus: you’ll do better radio.
- RADIO RATINGS GO DIGITAL. UH OH.
Now, instead of filling out diaries about your radio listening, Arbitron asks selected people to carry a gadget that listens to your radios and reports back automatically to the master computer. This is supposed to be better for radio and its advertisers, because it cuts out the middle-memory–your suspect recollection of what station you listened to when, and for how long. Never mind that the old flawed statistical sampling system dictates billions of dollars in advertising every year, split among most of the 10,000 or so commercial radio stations in the U.S. As you might expect, the new “People Meter” system gets somewhat different results from the old diary method. Arbitron has started it up in Houston, Philadelphia, and, now, New York City. It’s just one more disruption to the established radio order (Author’s Note: Understatement). The New York Times reports today on one of these minor shifts in the environment–Arbitron’s People Meter reduces listening to minority-programmed stations by 30 to 40 percent from what the diaries reported. This will reduce those stations’ income; ad agencies buy on a cost-per-thousand basis. Arbitron, which communicates kinda like our current government administration, is saying they’re working on the system, but their data is basically correct, and besides, this is kind of a preview report–the software business call them “beta”s. Ratings and market research are radio’s and the ad biz’s scientific sacraments, so there is no alternative to the concept of infallibility. Once again we witness the genius of the marketplace.
- PAY FOR PLAYS; RADIO TRIES TO FIGHT IT OFF.
As long as radio stations have played records, they’ve been paying royalties to songwriters, through ASCAP and BMI, the music publishing collection agencies. Thanks to the storm stirred up by Internet song-trading, the artists and the recorded music industry want to be paid by on-air radio too. Radio, of course, is trying to fight it off–claiming, somewhat incredibly, that they’ll just go out of business if they have to add one more expense. And, emotionally, how can the music biz be so ungrateful for all the free exposure radio’s been giving artists and record companies all these years. Well, maybe. But radio has unilaterally strangled that romance by limiting the trickle of new music to the air since the Seventies. Most music buyers are motivated by TV show appearances and the Internet these days. Once again, by acting defensive and succumbing to its raging case of denial, radio skids backward into oblivion. You’ll hear more about this fight when Lyle Lovett speaks to Congress on the subject — see this in the Washington Post.
- KNDO-TV LISTENS, GETS AN EARFUL; A CAUTIONARY TALE.
I went to a community listening session put on by one of our Yakima (Washington) TV stations today–KNDO-TV–at a senior center, but others attended. I’d guess the attendee count at about twelve, almost matched by nine station employees–an impressive turnout by the station: the manager, news director, three sales managers, a sales assistant (She wrote things down on a conference pad), a news anchor, a reporter, and a camera guy. I was suspicious it might just be eyewash for license renewal, but I looked it up; renewal happened last year. No, this was apparently a real, sincere effort to talk with the community. It comes at an interesting time, when all the major Yakima network TV stations have recently consolidated their local newscasts with their co-owned Tri-Cities, Washington, stations, about eighty miles away. I went to the meeting to agitate about this–”local” newscasts now contain stories from both places. Less time for Yakima stories on the Yakima station. Set aside for the moment the fact that the “local” news is mostly fires, murders and other calamities, with a trickle of community event coverage and almost no government affairs. The sincere folk from KNDO explained that they had to consolidate local production operations in the bigger town because they could only afford to buy new digital broadcasting gear for one location–it’s government mandated because our national digital conversion of TV must come in the next year (Does HDTV sound familiar?). Tri-Cities wins because it’s the bigger town. And Yakima (72,000 or so souls) has always been sold to advertisers as part of the Tri-Cities regional market. Thus, marketing-advertising determines whether a community actually gets what its TV licensees were required to deliver. The KNDO staffers’ serious but uncomfortable reaction to my question showed they understand that Yakima people could make their lives more “interesting” if we get it–that we’re being shortchanged. I give KNDO credit for getting out here to engage the activists who’d show up for such events. But I worry about the widening gap between broadcasters in the consolidated media business and the communities their licenses require them to focus on. Traditional radio and TV are under enormous pressure from new media–serious economic pressure. KNDO, KAPP, and KIMA– in fact, all significant Yakima radio and TV stations–are owned by non-resident companies. The daily newspaper is, too, owned by the Seattle Times Company. As these corporations focus on downsizing–KNDO has chosen to keep its local news staff, but squeeze their resources and consolidate operations–the stations are risking their hometown relationships. With these moves, the stations have increased their risk at a time when the cost of entering the media business has fallen radically–the Web has made it possible to mount a print-radio-TV “station” without FCC regulation, with minimal technical investment, with, potentially, total local and international distribution. It isn’t as simple as that sounds, but it can be done. Sooner or later local broadcasters must realize that they’re consolidating themselves out of business. As an economic center, Yakima is in trouble. But that’s an opportunity. Innovation is called for. But right now traditional broadcasters are in no condition to take advantage of opportunities.
- FIRE HEROES.
The radio trade press was full of praise for the San Diego radio stations as the awful Southern California wildfires ebbed. As always — well, as most of the time — local radio managers rose to the challenge and turned their stations from music/talk money machines into real-time information helpers for their city. Clear Channel, the Big Dog of corporate radio operators, simulcast its news station on all its five or so other radio stations. Another station, an FM alternative music station, even turned off its own programming and its transmitter over to public station KPBS, which had lost its own transmitter to the fires, for the duration. Smart move, though it was an open admission that it was incapable of anything but jukeboxing. Nevertheless, the station got raves from the radio biz for its selflessness in the face of imminent apocalypse. There were probably other stations that performed well under fire, and probably others that stood there with their hands in their pockets. But it would be ungenerous in the extreme not to join the applause for those who did what they were supposed to do. Good job, people.
- LOCAL? YOKELS?
The heat is on the steel-tower radio business to get more local. Wha? All radio stations are “local”, aren’t they? From the microphone in the studio in that old house in the middle of that former cornfield out on River Road to the tip of the tower, right? Actually, there may not be one body in that studio — with the music and voices pumping out of a hard drive or buzzing down from a satellite from Denver or New York or some other fleshpot. And, well, even if there is a live person talking into a microphone right now, what’s he/she talking about? Be the seventeenth caller? The weather? Hey now, that’s local. But anyway, the FCC had a big hearing in D.C. (where all localism resides) the other day. [See the Radio Trades links in the right column if you want to follow up.] And some of the commissioners have been out in the provinces listening to the pressure groups, er, citizens who care about radio. Radio earned this pressure honestly — by focusing on ratings and research, the quick way to avoid talking to real people, and following internal industry trends, instead of living in their communities and listening to their neighbors and their guts. And, the entire Wall Street feeding frenzy on admittedly fabulously profitable radio stations reinforced the entire bean-counting procedure. Well, this regulatory hassle is only going to pay off for the lawyers, not the listeners. It all just cements the dug-in heels and blinds radio license-holders to the opportunity to change today’s boring radio game. There’s gotta be a better word for it than “local.” “It” being the honest, hard work of opening your eyes and ears to the landscape and sentient life around that little building with the dishes on top, listening for what makes your town sit up and take notice. Creating that unique sound track for your town that makes your station an indispensable companion to the lives we lead. Bond with us. Build the enduring success as a hometown business that no set of consultant tricks or ratings percentiles could ever produce.
