Most people under age 20 have never experienced good radio. So when baby boomers and Gen X’ers start waxing rhapsodically about their old-time favorites, wanting them to come back, it’s the equivalent of wishing that musicvideos would come back to MTV.
Insiders believe that there’s no revolution in terrestrial radio because the owners know it’s headed into the dumper. They’re just milking it for all they can before it falls off a cliff....
June 23, 2013
"Radio Digs Its Own Grave as Cultural Currents Shift."
"Stolid biz loses a generation; Wi-Fi in cars could deliver a crushing blow."
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48 comments:
Radio people tend to have split personalities. They portray boundless enthusiasm on the air, but inside, they're always afraid for the jobs and their industry.
It was the music.
In many, though not all, cases, the DJs were interchangeable.
It was the vibrators in the power supply that made the music.
Nowadays with transistors they don't put them in.
The few times I've tried to listen to broadcast radio, other than news radio, I've found it utterly un-listenable. Long strings of commercials punctuated by DJ chatter and occasional bits of music. If the industry dies I'll metaphorically dance on its metaphorical grave.
Peter
I listened to Imus through the 90s on whatever AM affiliate I could hear, often a thousand miles away, using an 8 element active phased array spread out over an acre and a serious receiver.
That would have been ruined by IBOC, so called HD radio, that wipes out adjacent stations around every station using it, except a local station picked Imus up; and then Imus got fired.
On his return it was all internet streaming.
I listen to Rush on the actual radio, avoiding the idiot local affiliate with the preemptions for rain and OSU press conferences, from Wheeling WV.
Everything else is podcasts and streams.
I suspect that Car Talk might be in reruns, only, but it's hard to tell.
Here's a nice way to null out two local stations to hear a third distant station under them.
1. Turn on two elements, and phase them to null away the first local station.
2. Turn on a different two elements, and use them to null away the same local station.
3. Combine these pairs, using phasing to null away the second local station.
4. Since the first station is absent from both inputs in (3) and since you just phased away the second station, what you wind up with is the third distant station.
This is actually more interesting that Imus was.
You could do the same with only three elements total, but I don't know of a search procedure that would converge on the right phases.
The local AM station is useful when there is severe weather in the vicinity. Other than that, and occasionally listening to NPR for irritainment, I don't listen to radio at all.
Wait... MTV doesn't show music videos at all? Kind of a misnomer, isn't it?
I can handle some of the ads.
I like the music.
I HATE the 'banter' and the talking heads. Their approach is 'We are so silly and stupid that we're entertaining!!!'
When I get up in the morning grouchy and tired I don't want to listen to a bunch of fake cheer or unfunny ass hats.
I will buy a round for the house when the industry dies...
Radio people tend to have split personalities. They portray boundless enthusiasm on the air, but inside, they're always afraid for the jobs and their industry.
If every last one of them gets re-engineered I'll be happy.
Peter
Once Cars Began to Have Tape Decks Instead of Only Radio the Long Slow Decline Began.
WXRT in Chicago in college in the 70's.
Listened to Roxy Music, The (early) Police etc.
WXRT in Chicago in college in the 70's.
Listened to Roxy Music, The (early) Police etc.
Love the "these kids today" tag.
Just the right amount of old fogey without any descent into geezerism.
We chose the DJ for my daughter's wedding recently because his website listed options under "Interaction" including "Will play your music choices and will only speak if necessary."
Hired.
Big tip because he wasn't lying.
The size of Limbaugh's audience is 15 million. Which leftists of course dispute. Suffice it to say it is huge. Hannity too, though a lesser talent, has an audience in the millions. I don't think radio is panicking just yet.
Is there a production car already built without a radio?
That would be confirmation of radio's death.
I'm working through the old 007 movies, having seen only Goldfinger in the original.
The early high tech is unintentionally funny and the luxury cars have tail fins.
A couple have great one-liners, but not all, so they didn't work at it as I expected.
Some good chases.
One has a continuity problem, where Bond winds up in bed with a girl but without the usual 30 second explanatory clip.
Dark scenes don't come out well. They're plot gaps. Maybe you can see what's going on in a theater.
It's better than radio, though.
I'll see more as more come down to bargain prices.
I spotted a couple Get Smart citations of Bond from them, which Smart meant to be understood as such but I didn't spot them at the time.
My father insisted on new cars without radios, thinking it a waste of money.
Tail fins on luxury cars were funny? Most beautiful car bodies ever were the mid-50's Caddies.
Re: "Tail fins on luxury cars were funny?"
Tail Fins on Tropky Wives would be Funny.
Wow, rhhardin, I 'd never thought about playing with phrasing arrays at those wavelengths, only vhf or uhf. Cool!
Wow, rhhardin, I 'd never thought about playing with phrasing arrays at those wavelengths, only vhf or uhf. Cool!
Just put the antennas as far apart as you can get them.
You can use a loop against a whip that is co-located. The pattern sweeps a null pair from one endfire to broadside to the other endfire.
The swirly "stainless steel" stuff was a vinyl, adhesive-backed sheet you could buy retail at Edmund Scientific, apparently still in business.
The Dymo Label Maker could be purchased in any store that sold office supplies.
Maybe the Brits thought such things to be exotic.
I recall a joke in the Beatles movie Help! where some mad scientist needed to get his electronics from the U.S. if he wanted them to work.
Perhaps a jab at Jaguar or M.G. or something like that.
The author has it a little bit wrong. Radio stations as content providers are not going to go away entirely. The big ones will just stop delivering their content through terrestrial technology.
I stopped subscribing to Sirius/XM radio when I bought a car that had a Bluetooth link in it. I use an Android app called Tunein Radio to stream BBC Radio 2 to the car audio system. I listen to it constantly. Sometimes I'll tune in AM WABC 770 when I want to listen to Rush or Levin rant; but even then, I have the choice of streaming KSVP in Artesia New Mexico to get those programs.
This is all apiece of the podification/cellularization of community that's happening in America. Up until the 1990s, most people shared the same streams for information -- the same half-dozen network news streams through the same regional broadcast outlets; the same newspapers. You experienced anything they delivered.
Now, the internet and mobile broadband access enables anyone to create a virtual world in which they never have to see or hear anything that they don't want to.
With the internet, you can create you own personal ghetto.
As soon as I discovered recorded books I abandoned radio. And I'm mid-boomer. So not just the utes.
My kids only listen to the music from their phones that are plugged into the car stereo system. I can't imagine tuning into a radio station.
When Wi-Fi hits the car, or whatever type of cheap Internet access deploys in automobiles, Sirius XM will be challenged too.
That's the trick. The phone companies don't have enough spectrum, and outdoor wifi is expensive to deploy.
The phone companies have plenty of spectrum. I'm on the 4gb Share Everything plan with Verizon Wireless. I use it constantly and I still haven't maxed it out.
Lets be fair. Radio hasn't gotten worse. The alternatives to radio have gotten better.
Scott said:
"I stopped subscribing to Sirius/XM radio when I bought a car that had a Bluetooth link in it."
I wish I could buy a car without Bluetooth.
Those odd looking diamonds you have on top of traffic lights?
Bluetooth trackers.
Those odd looking posts along the road with solar panels on top?
Bluetooth trackers.
All for your own good, naturally.
Here is how it works:
http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/bluetooth/transtar_bluetooth.html
They SAY it is anonymized and only used for traffic control.
They might even be telling the truth, for now.
Anyone want to bet the NSA can't access the data and deanonymize it?
John Henry
I have not listened to radio in a car except by accident in 15 or more years.
Recorded books (Books on Tape), later an MP3 player (not an I-Pod) listening to music
Now an MP3 player and podcasts and audio books from Librivox.org
If you like listening to books, Librivox is great. Sort of the Gutenberg.org of recorded books. All public domain, all free.
Reader quality ranges from better than professional to one Russian(?) reader who is almost unlistenable. Most are pretty good.
I've been working my way through all of Trollope's novels. Recently finished Dr Thorne, currently on Framly Parsonage.
And don't forget the twice weekly No Agenda podcast with Crackpot and Buzzkill(Dvorak and Currey) www.seanhannity.com (Has nothing at all to do with Hannity.)
John Henry
I recall a joke in the Beatles movie Help! where some mad scientist needed to get his electronics from the U.S. if he wanted them to work.
Perhaps a jab at Jaguar or M.G. or something like that.
Yeah, Lucas the Prince of Darkness.
Kept a lot of garages in full time business.
John Henry
Radio my husband and I listen to in the car:
(1) NPR
(2) local AM talk when we need to find out about traffic conditions, road closures (some things tend to flood around here occasionally), and the like; and
(3) classical music stations ... in Europe. George can route any station that streams audio through the car speakers. All American classical stations suck, without exception, but the ones on the West Coast are especially lame. Now NRK Klassisk (Norway) or Radio Stephansdom (Vienna) or any of half a dozen stations in Germany ... that's classical music radio done right. Low on annoying would-be-educational chit-chat; whole works, rather than the "nothing longer than four minutes" principle that assumes an audience weaned exclusively on pop songs; no phobia about vocal music, or anything written after 1900.
What you get, in short, is roughly what you'd get if you grabbed fifty CDs at random from my own shelves and played one work from each of them in random order. (Not a bad thing; I've even considered setting up a streaming audio station myself, because I sure have the library to run one. Licensure would be a bitch, though.)
Streaming through iPhone via Bluetooth to the car stereo doesn't work well without strong cell reception, though, so whenever George has to drive long distances through places of spotty reception, I do grab a bunch of CDs at random and toss them in a bag. (Well, not quite at random; I try to mix old favorites with discs I'm positive he hasn't heard yet. He dignifies my picks as "curated.") He's doubtless listening to something from the bag right now, as he's on the way to a music festival in Colorado, and is presently somewhere in the wilds of Idaho :-)
I listen to a couple local AM stations for new stalk or sports talk. I often get the impression there is no one actually running it. Dead air, awkward commercial breaks, etc.
On national sports talk like Fox Sports and ESPN, they have commercial promotions continuously inserted into the programming. There will be a 15 second Geico promo, followed up by "now on our Progressive Insurance Celebrity Hotline..."
Skyler,
Lets be fair. Radio hasn't gotten worse. The alternatives to radio have gotten better.
Can't they both be true? I can't speak to non-classical music stations, because I don't listen to them, but I do remember American classical music stations that didn't suck. Maybe thirty years ago.
As long as we're on the subject, may I put in a plug for KALW? It's a small San Francisco NPR affiliate that does streaming audio, so that we listen to it still up here in Oregon. It hosts some local talk content of its own, but its real distinction is that it has managed to run non-irritating pledge drives.
If you listen to other NPR affiliates during "pledge time," you will know how rare that is. What KALW does is to take the spaces that NPR Morning Edition reserves for local station content, and use them for a polite invitation to contribute. No loss of content; no twenty minutes' worth of people detailing how with this donation level you get an NPR tote bag, and with this one, a solar-powered flashlight; no call-center background noise of constantly ringing phones designed to guilt-trip you into contributing, if only to make the noise stop.
Who cares? People are already listening to Pandora/Spotify/Rdio through their smartphone LTE antennas. Technology has already rendered terrestrial radio obsolete.
Why listen to a bunch of commercials and DJ chatter when there's recorded music, books, podcasts, etc?
NPR sucks. The same old standard issue establishment liberalism. Plus a lot of goofy "human interest" stuff aimed at SWPL females. Its the New York Times on audio.
We use recorded books on long trips. Donwload them from the library and transfer them to CDs.
When we rent a car we get Sirius XM. It is what radio was like in the olden days, without the commercials or the inane headlines every hour on the hour. Cannot bring myself to paying a hefty monthly fee for it since our usual trips at home are an hour tops. I think Sirius XM still has a future if they can work out some way to charge only for the time you actually listen to it. Radio in the old days had DJs some of whom actually knew and loved the music they were playing, and that is what you get on Sirius XM.
Public radio in these parts has a split personality nowadays. NPR has cut its classical hole, the part I always liked, to 2 hours a day, usually when I'm not in the car. The NPR news programs, Morning Edition and ATC, used to be a solid 2 hours AM and PM, of which a half hour had to be avoided because it was an "in depth" documentary from a third-world backwater complete with natives speaking a foreign language while chickens cackled in the background, but the rest was solid news and analysis. Now they have expanded their news hole to practially all day except for the pittance of time they allow for classical music and boring old chestnuts like Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me (all of the above could be in reruns, how would anyone know?) but broken it into little stupid pieces like "Marketplace" or "The World" or my personal hate, the "BBC". Really, why are my tax dollars paying for some haughty Brit telling me about the latest cabinet shuffle in Lower Slobovia?
Our other public radio station is more interesting. As far as I know they don't get any money from liberal bureaucrats in DC. Every penny they get, and they don't need much, comes from old hippies who went back to the land here in Maine. Their volunteer DJs know and love the music they are playing, often from their personal collections. Outside of the music they have unlistenable public affairs programs dominated by leftist conspiracy mongers or organic farmers all of whom think that the kinds of people appearing on the Diane Rehm show are fascists.
When I'm in the car in the afternoon I listen to Rush. If my wife found out she'd kill me. (By the way, Rush has a lot of local sponsors, prominent among them are local gun dealers and people who claim they can get you out of trouble with the IRS. Once, just once, I would love to hear a "journalist" from NPR or its ilk ask someone like Biden or Bloomberg why states like Maine or NH which have few restrictions on guns have very low crime rates while states like MA, CT, NJ and NY where it is practically impossible to posess a gun legally have such high crime rates. Ask that just once please.) Most of the time I disagree with him, but he is interesting and says what he says with conviction. Compare him to NPR's Diane Rehm. She had an interesting biography and I respect that, but her programs with a couple of journalists or "experts" peddling the liberal consensus from DC are exactly what Rush is referring to when he rants about "State-controlled media."
Commercial radio outside of Rush, what can one say? In our neck of the woods we have about 5 stations that play Rock's greatest pre-1980 hits over and over and over and over again; and about 5 country music stations playing music I detest because there are so many obviously talented people working trite formulas without a hint of creativity. It could be worse, if Maine were not 97% white we would have some stations playing rap "music", but certainly not jazz or blues which you can only get on Sirius XM.
I often get the impression that 95%of the population never travels outside a city. Good luck getting Wi-Fi in the boonies.
I've got about a thousand tunes and counting on my iPod. Just about all the music I want to listen to happened in the past. I see no need to stay current on the music scene. Perhaps Kanye West is genuinely talented or Justin Bieber will go on to become the Frank Sinatra of his generation. Well, good for them, but I see no need to learn Farsi or become acquainted with whatever noise the young people of today define as music. I just don't understand why anyone would want to listen to music on the radio.
SteveR said "I often get the impression there is no one actually running it."
It's called Broadcast automation. It's been around for decades, and it's far more widespread than you might think. Tune into 101 FM almost anywhere for an example.
Problem is that there is little reason to listen to local radio any more, except in my case, to hear talk shows, like Rush, that are not on Sirius/XM. Music? A lot of cars are now coming equipped with USB, and on a recent trip, would turn my iPad and iPhone into iPods whenever I would try to charge them from the front USB. Go online to iTunes, pay a buck or so for the tune, or borrow the DVD, and load it onto a digital device. Thereafter, you can play it any time you want. And, yes, Sirius/XM has music too.
Sirius/XM has most of the talk radio I want, and I am about 20 miles from the nearest radio station, which plays local news and bad country western music. And, the problem with something like Tunein Radio is that I do drive distances in the west, where cell coverage is spotty to non-existent. XM is more reliable, though I do still run into blind spots, including, interestingly about 1/3 of the parking places at the local park. Mostly though, deeper canyons and north of mountains.
The problem with either the Tunein app that Scott mentioned, or Sirius/XM is that what you get is less selection with higher quality. Those who make it, have an international audience, but many fewer stations can afford to do their own stuff. The result is that it is harder to get into the field, most make less money, but those at the top make way more money. A lot like a lot of other markets, like music, acting, etc.
Insiders believe that there’s no revolution in terrestrial radio because the owners know it’s headed into the dumper. They’re just milking it for all they can before it falls off a cliff....
I spent ten years jocking rock and alt-rock stations and I agree wholeheartedly with the above. I saw the writing on the wall with the Napster and like blowups in 2001/2002 and decided to get out of the game in 2003. Of all the jocks and PD's I knew in my decade of work, only a couple are still in the industry and they hate it.
I loved being in radio. Loved doing it and loved listening to others do it. But, frankly, there's just not enough "there" there anymore.
I listen to a combination of Rhapsody and Audible for my commutes. Anything shorter, I go to Sirius/XM. The only time I listen to local terrestrial radio is if there's a possible tornado in the area.
Mitchel the Bat and John Henry:
Why do the English drink warm beer? Because they keep it in Lucas refrigerators.
rhhardin said...
I'm working through the old 007 movies
I am too ,are you watching the Blu-Rays? I am also going thru the Hitchcock Blu-ray set.
I am too ,are you watching the Blu-Rays? I am also going thru the Hitchcock Blu-ray set.
No, just such DVDs that appear for under $5.00.
I saw the blu-ray set on sale but don't have and don't want a player.
I'm not sure I could stand 50 of them, or however many there are.
They're not uniformly good.
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