Category Archives: Radio

Buy the content, not the channel

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In the future, listeners will buy the content, not the channel. They’ll be more apt to listen to what’s ON your station, not your (radio) station itself. … Talk to the TV networks and they’ll tell you that creating content is a risky, expensive business. But a handful of hits make all the risks worthwhile. The radio industry will have to awaken to new market realities: Investment, trial, failure, success. More programs, less programming. There will be no free lunches and no shortcuts. It will not be possible to operate multi-million dollar franchises like an FCC-licensed CD player.

Once again, Mark Ramsey demonstrates real insight into what’s happening in/to the “radio business”

Altman films “A Prairie Home Companion”

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“It is an imagined last show and so it’s in the context of being taken over by a radio conglomerate, which is happening to a lot of radio shows at home.” Written by Garrison Keillor and starring Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and Lily Tomlin. [Reuters story]

I always liked the Wolfman Jack scenes from American Graffiti. Something about being on the air, alone in a radio station at night. Something we’ll never experience with podcasting. That real-time connection with listeners in the middle of the night. Sigh.

Oprah & Friends on XM

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Oprah Winfrey has signed a three-year, $55 million deal for her own channel on XM Satellite Radio. “Oprah & Friends,” as the channel will be known, is aimed at closing satellite radio’s gender gap. Men account for about two-thirds of the 9.3 million satellite subscriptions nationwide, but XM and its rival, Sirius Satellite Radio of New York, expect to attract more women as they purchase cars equipped with satellite radios.

Somehow, I just think the XM guys understand this satellite radio thing better than the other guys. This sounds like a really good idea to me.

Selling radio spots online

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Broadcast sales execs are still upbeat about the future. Sort of. From an informal Banc of America Securities survey of 46 GSMs and other sales execs at the recent Radio Advertising Bureau meeting:

  • Nearly one-quarter of respondents indicate that they already use online services . . . to sell available airtime,and another 30% plan to use such services in the future.
  • The new worry is the iPod and the Internet radio, not satellite radio. 26% think Internet radio is a bigger threat than satellite radio. That’s up from 10% of respondents a year ago.

From Billboard Radio Monitor [via RAIN]

Cell phone radio

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A Canadian wireless company is offering subscribers more than 1,500 podcasts via their cell phones. The catalogue of podcasts will updated throughout the day as new feeds are received, bringing fresh content to subscribers continually. Unlike terrestrial radio, though, it won’t be free. It’ll cost subscribers $5 per month. But then subscribers can download their choice of podcasts for immediate listening, and save the ones they want to play again later on their phone. [iloveradio.org]

When I started doing affiliate relations back in the early eighties, Don Osborn said something that I have never forgotten: There is no dead air. Every minute is filled with something (music, news, sports, weather, etc). To add some of our network programming, a radio station must take something off the air. My challenge was to persuade the station decision-makers their listeners would be better served by our programming than what they were currently airing.

What does this have to do with cell phone radio? Every minute I spend listening to a podcast on my my cell phone (or nano) is a minute I’m not listening to my local radio station. The listener is now the program director but he/she still has the same 24-hour clock. Do I listen to The Ricky Gervais Show on my cell phone…or the local morning show on KXYZ?

There’s a lot of smart radio guys out there. I have to believe they understand this. The “cell phone radio” story reminded me of an interview I did with Mary Quass last year, in which she saw this coming.

Five hours a week listening to radio

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“Online users spend as much time surfing the web as they do watching TV, and they spend far more time at it than they spend with other media, says a new study from Jupiter Research. The report was based on a survey of just under 3,000 regular online users, defined as people who go online at least once a month from home, work or school. It found that on average online users are now spending about 14 hours a week surfing the internet, which is equal to the amount of time that they spend watching TV. By comparison, on average each week they spend one hour reading magazines, two hours perusing newspapers and five hours tuning into the radio. In fact, they spend more time online than they do with all those other media combined.” [Heidi Dawley, Media Life]

Sounds like 30 minutes of radio listening (on average) on the way to and from work each weekday. Compared to a couple of hours online every day.

Music on an iPod

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“When one out of five of everyone you know is listening to music on a portable device packed with hundreds or thousands of songs, commercial-free, what can your station bring them that they can’t self-program better?”

— Mark Ramsey quoting a national study by American Media Services

End of music research?

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Mark Ramsey asks: What’s the point of music research when every listener personalizes his or her music to his or her own tastes? And where’s your NON-music content, Mr. Broadcaster?

He also wants to drop the term “streaming” in favor of “Internet radio.” My only problem with that is where that leaves us verb-wise. Now I typically write/say: We’ll stream the governor’s speech at 7:00 p.m. If what we’re doing here is “Internet radio,” do I say we’ll “broadcast” the speech? It certainly is not a broadcast.

I’m becoming a fan of Mark’s blog. He seems to really know the radio business and has a firm grasp of new media.

Do you want to buy a new radio?

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Mark Ramsey offers some insight into what’s happening (and is likely to happen) as terrestrial radio rolls out the HD channels (frequencies?).

“It couldn’t be clearer that HD will be a new battlefield where the intent of the broadcaster will be to draw the blood of their competitors. We will try to eat our young. As you evaluate this list as a listener, ask yourself the big question: do you want to buy a new radio?”

Seems like broadcasters have a lot riding on listeners adopting HD. I suppose it’s possible they’ll put some really good formats on the new channels but I’d have to hear it before I’d pop for a new receiver. And I can’t (easily) hear the new stuff …until I buy a new receiver.

Google-izing radio advertising: Day Two

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More on Google’s foray into the world of radio advertising from RAIN’s Kurt Hanson, including quotes and links to The New York Times and the WSJ Online.

“The key to it is that Google is potentiallty bringing 400,000 new advertisers (their AdWords clients) to the radio medium. These new advertisers will (A) fill up unsold inventory and (B) eventually add increased demand for avails. Increased demand, of course, will inevitably drive up prices. That’s how supply-and-demand works.”

I’m still waiting for someone to explain what –if anything– that’s going to mean for barter arrangments with radio stations. Are we looking at a future where every avail can be sold?

Apparantly the dMarc software can automatically send advertisements right into radio station’s traffic ystems, bypassing the largely manual process currently used in the radio industry. Anybody have any first-hand experience with dMarc? Know a station that uses it? I’d love to know more about it.