Pay for Broadcast Net Radio? (April 11, 2002)

Chris Carmichael asks on his website: "Would you pay to listen to local radio via the 'net?" I answer: only if it's something worth listening to such as comedy and novelty music, folk, electronica, alternative or edgy country, AAA rock, and upbeat pop. But there is no way in hell that I would pay Clear Channel San Diego or Elsewhere (in fact, Clear Channel San Diego should be paying me) to listen to their poorly-programmed cookie-cutter period-piece music formats such as those found on 91X, My Mux 94.1, KOOL, KGB, or KPOP unless they offer spontaneity and intellegence (read fire Bryan Schock) to their currently limited music playlists that are put together with Radio Disney grade level intelligence. I know. I used to be that ignorant in music when I was that age. I'm surprised that I learned so much in the five years I've been listening to Internet radio, but the IQ levels of the radio programmers are still living in the 1980s.

Clear Channel keeps bitching and moaning how much they have to make cuts in salaries, staffs, and corners to make ends meet. What Clear Channel is doing wrong is not programming the music formats competetive with the intelligence level of the average Napster/Kazaa MP3 music pirate who is now more familiar with songs they downloaded than what's been playing on KIIS and 91X for the past 2-3 years. The King can name most every hit from the under played and mostly unknown, but can't even name more than one hit from the most hyped pop band of recent past, N Sync. Hell, it's no wonder Tony Goldmark wants to kill the Backstreet Boys in a song.

If Clear Channel intends to launch a pay web streaming service, they have to listen to The King first. Here's what the penny-pitching peasants at "Cheap" Channel must do. First, they must reprogram their music stations (except for KIOZ Rock 105.3 since that's the only mainstream rock station that isn't programmed like a kid) with a better choice of compatable new music on every format (including Magic 92.5, KOOL, KGB, and KPOP).

If Clear Channel wants their pay downloading music service to make them money, they can't just keep playing the same old songs all the time. People including The King want to download and pay for the new music they are hearing on the pirate file-sharing servers. Who wants to download and pay for oldies music we already have better quality versions of on our CD collections? Most people already have what they could at least stand to hear over and over again on their CDs. Give the listeners exposure to new music, let them judge what they like, let them pay Clear Channel for 50 tracks downloadable in high quality (no shit quality) MP3s, or MP4s if they're invented yet.

Clear Channel needs to rethink and rebrand their music stations so that every radio station feaatures at least 40 percent new music. Radio is the most influential medium for new music, so why is Clear Channel wasting their resources by rerunning the same old music all the time when the music they're not playing is what brings in the listeners to ensure a higher rating and to put the radio stations into the first class category? Clear Channel could easily use the 40-plus percent of their new music mixes to sell the pay download services they're offering all by themselves like no ad ever does (and the ads don't work if people don't hear what they want to pay for). Clear Channel could easily be raking in all the dough in the radio business with high subscription retention, ad rates, and listeners, if they simply did the following to their radio stations in San Diego:

91X - 70 percent new music (and not repeated sooner than every six hours!)
92.5 - 40 percent old R&B, soul, and dance music, 60 percent current music, with adult dance flavor.
93.3 - Top 100 Hits of the Week, no oldies.
94.1 - adult aimed contemporary since the 70's, currents being in the 40-50 percent range, plus extra genres
       not commonly heard.
95.7 - 60 percent oldies, 40 percent compatable new music, wider range of music genres, aimed at the
       very lucrative 35 and older demographic
101.5 - 60 percent new adult rock and roll, no more than 40 percent oldies from 1964 through six months ago.
105.3 - 40 percent hard rock classics, 60 percent new music.
1360 - 60 percent classic nostalgia and easy pop standards, 40 percent compatable new music.