http://www.robertfeder.com/2015/01/22/d ... ago-radio/





Well, go Q101, I guess, but boy, this is bleak.

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first nail in the coffin for FOTS. He always claimed his client is not the listener but the sponsor.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

With numbers like, it shows that the current revnenue model is dying. Like newspapers, radio is going to have to adjust by better leveraging their programming. As such, it means less high profile personalities and instead things that can be shared on multiple stations and markets. It's like papers cutting editorial staff and using AP stories in their place. Bye bye DJ's and guys that won't get out of bed for less than $300,000.

The Internet is sucking up all advertising dollars. It is much easier to measure the value of Internet advertisitng (ie Google adwords) than radio and newspaper ads.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

That's precisely the kind of bean-counter thinking that has us in this mess. Look at the plummeting Loop. It's all automated, voice-tracked, synergized, whatever. As a result, the product is shit and not worthy of investment. Then you have Clear Channel/iHeart, who have been the kings of consolidating resources and slashing budgets, and now they're deepest in the shit of all the big radio conglomerates because their content is shit and no one wants to listen to what Clear Channel's computer says they should listen to, plus advertisements, when they can listen to Pandora/Spotify.

Live/local origination is the one advantage radio has left. Why has WXRT been one of the highest billers in Chicago for over twenty years? Why did the Score skyrocket in the ratings books with the advent of PPMs? If people are going to make the decision to listen to radio, they want unique content. That means local people talking to them in real time, choosing music for them in real time. The jukebox approach has moved to the internet. Radio needs to use its talent.

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damn, the whole industry must be down 15% in one year. WTF?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

This guy gets it.

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I remember when it was cool to call Clear Channel an evil sack of greedy shit. Now nobody even knows who they are anymore.

I agree that it sucks, but the previous model won't work. It is a vicious circle of decline. I recall looking at newspaper companies when they had 20% operating margins. Then housing, job, and auto ads all moved to sites like Monster and Craigslist. The business model had to change.

Radio is in the same dynamic. People listen to Spotify or XM, which reduces the number of listeners. Advertisers have other outlets that are more productive. You can't sit there on your iPhone and shuffle music all day, and then cry when FM stations move to DJ less formats to save money.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I don't think many people care that radio is becoming more DJ-less. Sure, it's great when someone can truely connect with their audience, but I think people want to hear more variety on these stations. Like instead of The Loop playing "Rock and Roll" by Led Zeppelin every 3 hours, maybe they only play it once a day. You should be able to do better than a 200 song playlist on a classic rock station.

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But running a station on a shoestring budget only makes it decline faster.

Look at i101, that glorious failure. They got some buzz doing a '90s format, then squandered every bit of that buzz because they flipped it to plain old top 40 after The Research said it was too risky to do a format that wasn't well-tested. They didn't get any attention again until they pulled Frankie Hollywood Rodriguez out of the crypt and had him doing big mixtape blocks like the glory days of BMX and B96. That started to get some interest again, because it was something novel, but by then, the damage was irreparable and the stations had been sold to Cumulus, who reinstated Q101, apparently the lone success of commercial Chicago radio.

You have to have interesting content. I feel like in this day and age, it'll be rewarded.

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Agree with both of you guys. I am just saying why it's all dying, and I get that poor programming accelerates the death. I see the same thing with poor reporting in the Daily Herald. The quality of their national and international news is awful with AP stories I can get on the net.

I doubt radio is around at some point in the coming decades. The spectrum is too valuable, and cars will all be internet connected. I listen to The Economist in the car. I know others do podcasts, and many listen to music streamed through the phone. Wscr programming will probably go Internet based for those so inclined to listen to talk radio.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I think the future is already here with internet stream and to a lesser degree satellite. Custom listening to what you want anywhere. Stations like the score have to know this and are hanging around scraping whatever dollars they can until the end. For me score on internet would be more attractive. No fcc either.

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Elections have consequences.

wtf, where is the game on the list? they probably pulled in 10-20k last year

And TB still gets $500K...lol

ZERO talent development.

Leary is the AAAA guy who is sitting on the bench for no reason, you can start with cutting him and trying some new shows at night.

"NEW" is not Herb+Shep+Joe -Jay / Hub +Rosenbloom

Want to give me Grote + "NEW" fine....try it.

So damn simple it kills me.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

i think another big aspect of internet-streaming is that there's simply way less commercials than you get on FM radio. using tunein for internet radio stations i'll get that 30sec tunein-mandated commercial when i start streaming, and then i might get ~1-2mins/hr of commercials. with FM radio you'll get those long breaks that feel like they go as long as 10-15mins, and then after all of that waiting/jumping-to-the-one-station-that-isn't-on-commercial-at-the-same-time-as-all-the-others you're greeted by one of the ~15-20 songs that are in the playlist. the combination of the insanely small/opposite-of-eclectic playlists and the massive amounts of commercials have people going to stations that actually play music for the most part.

of course, as CH touched on these FM stations are run by soulless corporate whores whose market research indicates that the most popular songs of the moment are the most popular songs are the moment and therefore you have to do the safe thing and only play the most popular songs of the moment because people aren't going to listen to less popular songs because they're less popular!,--- it's a whole chicken and the egg situation, where of course the answer to "what came first?" is that somebody in an office way nicer than any one i'll have has already decided what's going to be popular and thus they'll spam the hell out of the songs until they're popular. 100% above my paygrade.

TLDR = yeah, go figure it's "troubling times for radio" when there's a wide assortment of freely available content out there that simply has more/unique content and less commercials, and of course big radio won't see that fundamental dichotomy as the reason for their failure, they'll just think they need to "trim the fat" and give you that winning combo of less/unique content and more commercials in an even cheaper way to make the required profit off of it, and then when the product is cheaper crap they wonder why the ratings still go down. c'est la vie, no?

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I've brought it up over and over here, but the worst case of running scared from research was when WLS-FM decided it was too risky to be an oldies station that played Motown because The Research says white males ages 18-54 are likely to PTFB if they hear a women or a black person (and God forbid the two overlap) doing an old song. That effectively cut the library down to Toto and Eddie Money. Everyone just wants to sound like the Drive. And I do like the Drive, but we don't need four or five of them.

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where does this all-important "market research" come from anyways? focus groups?

i used to get occasional nibbles from a focus group company who'd call me up when i qualified, and i remember getting to watch the pilot episode of an ABC sitcom called I'm With Her which was utterly awful tripe that pandered to every lowest-common-denominator possible and i honestly told them as much.... i remember the demonstrably-edgy (and likely-homosexual) group leader/moderator dude making faces at me and focusing on the average schmoes who had nice banal things to say about the banal-at-best program. it was obvious to me that the guy from ABC/whatever-production-company only wanted to hear the positives from people who liked the show.

still, even after that i got more calls and my last focus group experience was for a show called "love on a conveyor belt" (which was evidently changed to "conveyor belt of love" before it (maybe?) aired and i have to be honest: the show was fucking awesome. it was totally nihilistic and making fun of everybody involved in the process, from the dumbass bro who had to choose from a bunch of hoes that were literally trotted out on a big ol conveyor belt. and these were some str8up vapid gold-digging hoes who were only interested in the most superficial things in life, and the show made sure to shit all over them for being what they were. it was glorious. i freaking loved it and was laughing my ass off and fist in the air and stuff, and i had my little comment card thing filled up with so much praise that i even wrote stuff on the back of the card too cuz i had to let them know all of the different things i loved about it and why it was truly a show for me.

...so of course after the viewing they called a group of us into a room and handed us our $100 checks and sent us home, choosing to stick with a core group of people for the actual focus group part of the focus group.... and i was actually excited for the focus group part to start because i wanted to tell them why i loved this show, mind you. there needed to be more stuff like this on television!

so while i can't exactly bitch that i basically got paid $100 to only watch a 1hr show that i absolutely loved, it seems like demonstrably loving the show they were showing me had exposed me as a "bad apple" as i've never gotten another nibble from the focus group company since then. in other words, i have no idea what the fuck they want from these things.... but clearly people go into these "market research" things wanting to validate their pre-existing opinions one way or another, and people who disagree with the narrative are ushered out the door so they can focus on getting only the opinions they want to get.

TLDR = "market research" is a bunch of bullshit which is used to prop up opinions/decisions made by the higher-ups, as i've been there in the trenches of focus groups and seen firsthand that the people running these things go out of their way to only get the feedback from people whose opinions are the ones desired by the people setting up the focus group. and be warned, if you actually like something to the point of demonstrating clearly visible bliss (as they watch you through one-way-mirrors) they might ask you to go home and never come back because...... uhhh i guess they maybe thought i was doing a bit? but the show was awesome and of course that's why i think they never produced another one other than the pilot episode which i think was eventually aired as a "special" --- it was too good for contemporary television.

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