Radio Shoots Own Foot For Listener Ignorance (August 1, 2005)

Those factors have seriously affected the amount of time spent listening to broadcast radio. Put them all together and you have a big problem for radio to overcome in this day and age of multimedia Internet connectivity.

A lot of ground has been lost in radio's stranglehold of the listening base in the nearly ten years since President Clinton signed a bill that among things allowed radio station operators to own up to eight stations in a market with no cap on the number of stations allowed to own.

Radio owners were allowed to buy struggling stations operating in the red and turn them into profit makers. What did they do that was bad?

Consolidating staffs of several stations eliminated redundant employees in engineering, marketing, programming, and other specialized departments within a radio station. Was that a bad thing? Hardly.

Eschewing the needs of the listeners in terms of introducing new genres in favor of tried and true MOR genres for years on end? Very likely. Many new genres since 1995 have been getting on newly-created mediums so that their songs can get exposure to their fans who embrace the new styles such as electronica, comedy music, and reggaeton, just two popular genres that commercial radio never embraced.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Obviously, the necessity was to create a new medium to expose music that radio stations won't play. In 1995, someone created a way to stream music off of a radio statio, WMVP AM 1000 in Chicago, so that fans could listen to the Chicago Bulls basketball games anywhere in the world. Today, ten years later, you can listen to thousands of broadcasting radio stations from all over the world, listening to music originating from countries and playing the nation's hits for anyone whose a fan of the given genres. Even music from familiar artists can be heard in stations from Great Britian, Canada, Australia, and South America before any station in the USA is allowed to play them. This gives the fans of such artists a heads up on knowing what some of the latest songs are being played long before anyone in the USA bothers to inquire about them.

An idea occurred. What if someone could create an Internet-only radio station now powered by a local broadcaster? Someone way back in 1996 created an all Grateful Dead channel, but I'm not sure if that's still on since the DMCA rules that seriously affected what could be streamed on the Internet took effect in 1998. Today, tens of thousands of untold Internet-only stations stream just about anything they want to play, which was the inspiration of Jack-FM in 2004 on a radio station in Canada, playing whatever it wants.

Satellite radio, since 2001, has been broadcasting a hundred music channels to listeners coast to coast, but unlike Internet radio, you don't use an Internet connection, except for XM's extra Internet-only stations not available on satellite. Also, satellite radio in your car provides mega competetion for the local broadcasters, taking away most of the lucrative upper-income listening base and leaving a mostly poorer listening base for advertisers to try to sell products to.

Podcasting is the latest thing in Internet, but think of it as downloads time delayed so you can listen to it anytime. Though talk radio is the perfect format, programming music is tricky at best since it is a copyright tribunal issue as making them available for download presents a legal challenge with the RIAA.

Point to Point file sharing was intended to share files between computers, but since someone in 1999 figured out a way to compress music into mp3 formats, it has become a defacto medium for music, with many people illegally sharing copyrighted music, and now movies, for anyone to download without paying for them as well as not paying the copyright holders for distributing their works. Also in hot water are the peer-to-peer software themselves, selling advertising on Kazaa and others, while making a profit with the advertisers as people illegally share music. This became not only formiddable competetion for radio, but it also created an exodus of CD buyers, forcing several record stores to go out of business in many locations, but it's also the major CD label companies that are to blame for pricing their CDs too high to justfify the lack of quality of the music contained in their CDs priced at some $20 for just two hits on it.

Meanwhile, while all of this has been going on, what has commercial radio been doing to keep their listeners? Playing nothing that the younger listeners are interested in hearing. They're into weird rap mix blocks, video game techno, and whatever else they like to hear that radio just won't play.

What else? Cookie cutter formats and brands. How many Mix, Star, KISS, Channel, My, NewsRadio and World Class brands have Clear Channel planted across radio stations in America? Unique branding, imaging, and selection has gone the way in favor of a more homogenous MOR sound with almost on variance in off-format genres within the formats. Listeners are not interested in hearing songs that are popular in another market but have no meaning in theirs. Listeners also have prefrences to how a format leans, such as towards urban, dance, smooth jazz, or even country, but where do you hear an adult music format that has a certain genre lean as a variant to their formats today?

What else? The long held rumor of payola in the form of having indies act as middlemen have come to light since one of the evil big five (now four) record labels, Sony BMG, have admitted to using bribes to get radio prgrammers to play Sony artists, which can easily explain why lousy songs by Jennifer Lopez, Evanesessence, Linkin Park, Celine Dion, Alicia Keys, and others that wouldn't have otherwise gotten exposed over the airwaves got endless airplay to the churgin of more sophisticated fans of popular music.

Earlier last week, Sony BMG agreed to pay a $10-million settlement and halt such "wrong and improper" practices. Another part of Sony's settlement is changing the way they do business practices such as announcing that a song is paid for beofre and after the song has aired on the radio (so Billboard won't use the spin as an occurrence in determining the rank on their charts.)

It's no wonder many radio stations sound so monotonous and homogenous. Payola has led to less risk taking and more reliance on nationwide million dollar giveaway contests on Thursday afternoons where listeners a hundred markets competeted to be the 25th nationwide caller on a toll-free number to claim the money. That kind of contesting has turned off a lot of people, thinking that they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning anything, so why bother to waste a day listening through the payola dreck until that chance comes to call?

Also to blame is the employment of music directors who are not even fans of the music they are programing, leading to a stale monotonous sound that's driving listeners away to the new medium competetors. People without a vision in music are not going to be creative in getting listeners away from the competetors. Such people are better off running a cookie-cutter Domino's Pizza franchise than to run a radio station.

Since the dead-tree medium publised numerous articles confirming the use of indie-influenced payola, the image of commercial radio is more damaged than ever, with fans of music losing faith in a once-influential medium, many of which will never depend on radio to learn about new music ever again, and chances of getting the younger teen demos to get into the habit of listening to the radio are slim at best today.

Also to blame? Over-reliance on researched lists of music in determining what to play on a radio station. Many fans are frustrated in suggesting songs for a station to play, only to never hear them. Radio just won't bother testing new music for the most part, except during low-rated dayparts such as Sunday nights when most people are watching television.

According to newsday.com, people are spending less time listening to traditional radio: about 19 hours and 30 seconds per week, down from 22 hours per week in 1993. Back in 1993, someone who wanted to tune in a station to hear music was limited to whatever lineup of radio stations broadcasting over the airwaves in their areas. There was no Internet streaming, no downloads, no mp3s, no podcasts, and no satellites back in the days when frustrated music fans couldn't get their fill of the kinds of music they enjoy hearing. Today, they made the music that radio won't play part of their cultural lifestyle. In a given place in America, people in the United States have at least 250 channels from XM and Sirius pay satellite radio, plus whatever dozen or two local stations in a given market, for them to tune into. At home, you almost don't listen to local radio unless it's a broadcast of your local sports team or a popular talk show.

Radio payola has existed as a legal way for record labels to influence what radio stations play until 1960 when radio disc jockey Alan Freed was busted by the feds for taking bribes to play songs such as Chuck Berry's "Maybellene". It has been illegal since then, but even though a label outsourced an indie to take their place of paying a radio station to play a label's songs, it's still payola.

Payola fools the Billboard pop chart by boosting its rank on the singles chart through increased radio airplay, translated into a higher, but artificial, number of listens. This would be a nightmare for Billboard to investigate each song it ranked for the amount of paid spins that were accounted for and revising every weekly chart that was affected by such payola-influenced songs on the chart.

Payola also has hurt the record store industry as many now former record store managers stocked more copies of albums by payola-influenced artists than there was a market for, resulting in hundreds of unsold copies to be cleared out at a loss if they can't return the unsold copies to their distributors. Aside of losing money on over-purchasing of payola artists, the record stores lost money due to reduced sales of their albums because of illegal music file sharing, which was why you don't see as many Wherehouses or Tower Records in as many places as you used to ten years ago. Nowadays, you could find used CD clearance retailers trying to unload thousands of unsold Britney Spears CDs at one dollar apiece.

Also hurting the radio station: labels paying "listeners" that they hire to specifically call the radio stations on their request lines to play their songs to increase the number of weekly spins, which raises the ranks on the Billboard pop charts. This is voodoo popularity at best. Since there's no way to determine immediately whether a listener is actually interested in the song or not, most uneducated radio programmers decide to spin the songs more often, like once every two hours at best for the most heavily-requested songs. How can you tell whether the requests are from true fans or a label-paid caller posing as a requester?

In the end, payola has hurt the radio stations, the record stores, and the music listeners as I have witnessed over the past ten years. A radio station that plays dud songs that are paid for by their labels (or by indies outsourced by their labels) will lose listeners, which is why ratings go down. With payola dogs hogging all the airtime, songs people want to hear don't get on the air, so the listeners leave and listen to a competetor, or on a station from another medium.

A new group of independent record labels, The American Association of Independent Music, hopes to break the time hogging of the four big record labels on the radio airwaves. They're represting underrepresented artists who hope to make it big by getting their songs exposed on commercial radio while time spent playing a song from the big four labels will decrease.

"Once you level the playing field, we'll benefit," says the association's acting president, Don Rose. "If the programming decisions become purer -- and by that I mean if they're made by individuals with good taste and solid knowledge of their audience," he says, "then radio could get better."

Radio needs to hire educated music directors who can discern the difference between a quality song people will enjoy and those that are so poorly produced that they shouldn't have ever gotten on the playlist in the first place. Radio can still do research by subscribing to Billboard and Radio and Records magazines to see how the songs rank in their markets, as well as monitoring what Big Champagne has reported on what songs were illegally shared on peer-to-peer networks, but radio needs to have a brain and actually listen for themselves what people are listening to or are interested in listening. Some radio stations are outsourcing the listener research projects to independent organizations who will do the testing of the songs for them, and return the results to the radio stations.

But one kind of radio station isn't doing any researching of any kind. Jack-FM (tm), with its slogan "playing what we want", meaning, that the station doesn't take any requests, and instead of a rigidly formatted concept, it seems to go all over the genres that made the pop charts, playing anything except the soft adult contemporary love songs.

Today, there are many millions of people regularily listening to music on a medium other than broadcast radio. Four million are on satellite radio. Eleven million are using an MP3 player (podcast, ipod, CD-R, etc). Twenty million are listening to Internet radio. Many of the millions do overlap, so you're looking anywhere form 20 to 35 million people who are regular listeners of the other mediums.

So we come down to today. What can radio do to revive listenership. It's relative easy. Here's what commercial radio needs to do and now:

1. Fire anyone involved in payola.

2. Hire knowledgeable and interested fans of music as music directors. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

3. Retool your radio station websites so that listeners can download podcasts and mp3s, and even add Internet-only stations (automated and sponsored, naturally) for listeners to have more options for them to stay with your station.

4. Get feedback on the songs being played at the moment. Dump songs that suck. Play songs they hear on the Internet-only stations on the broadcast station. Radio progammers in touch with their audience, such as FM 94.9, is what most radio stations did until the late 1990s when corporate suits bought the stations and gutted the staff with fewer employees in touch with their audiences.

5. Get rid of the phony cold voice tracked deejays and either replace them with live deejays or use sweepers between stop sets and blocks of music.

6. And finally, give up 25 percent of the daypart time between 6am and 10pm to blocks of airtime run by the listenrs who pay to spin whatever they want and sponsored by the radio station with ads. Costs can range up to $20 for an hour's show with the radio station keeping all of the ad and fee revenue.

With so many ways to turn off the radio instead of just turning off the music, the broadcasters need to adjust to the new radio skyline and not only compete with them, but to also play their game and give their listeners the kind of music they want to hear.

Broadcast radio does have one outstanding feature that the alternative mediums cannot do, such as public service, news, sports, weather, traffic, and emergency alerts, none of which you can find on your MP3 download devices.

With payola out in the open, it's time to clean out the radio house. I'd like to get Diana Laird's job at Channel 933 and kick out all of the payola-influenced crud that never should have gotten airplay in this market, as well as other crap nobody cares about. I don't care about the 32-inch plasma TV. I just want to get something on the air that's not designed to kill brain cells.