Tremendous Response

My pre-NAB posting has elicited a tremendous response and a whole inbox of really positive feedback. It has also been picked up by the radio trades here, here, here, and here. There are a few questions I've received a number of times so I thought I'd do a follow up post to clarify a few things.

36 months. -- I'm not saying radio will be gone in 36 months. I'm saying there is a window in which to leverage the current radio audience onto a new platform which better fits their changing consumption habits. It will take far longer for that for radio to go away. 36 months is the window for the tipping point.

Radio has survived everything, it will never lose popularity. -- Right, because people still watch newsreels.

FM radios in cell phones. -- Everyone who you're trying to reach by putting an FM radio in a cell phone already own multiple radios. They are not listening not because they can't access the programming but because they expect different things from the listening experience than they used to. The NAB would be doing much more for the radio industry by insisting radio manufacturers put 8.0211 chips, RJ-45 jacks and a TCP-IP stack in radios than cell phone manufacturers put FM radios in phones.

Michael Harrison of Talkers Magazine put it very well today; The real problem is the NAB is not a trade organization for the radio industry, the NAB is a trade organization for the owners of FCC licenses. The true value in the radio industry is people who make programming, not corporations that overpaid for spectrum.

Pandering to the status quo will in the long run be counterproductive.

NAB: Will Radio Send an SOS?

The radio industry will gather in Austin, Texas this week for the annual NAB radio conference. The radio business is in deep weeds right now. Listenership is down. Revenues are off. The audience is trending older and young people aren't listening. The future's looking grim.

What's broken? It's not that people don't like audio programming anymore. It's that the audience has changed in ways that radio does not understand. People don't consume media the way they did 5 years ago. Want to see the future of media consumption? Look at your TiVo. Look at YouTube. People want a user-controllable experience. They want media to be on-demand, in discrete single microchunks, sharable and re-usable as they wish. They need fresh content. They find out about new programming from their friends. They're quick to try something new, but quick to drop it if it doesn't fit their needs.

What's radio's answer to this? Mostly denial. David Rehr, head of the NAB, will inevitably give another one of his "it's not so bad" speeches in Austin this week. Enormous sums of money have been spent on the awkwardly-named "HD Radio" initiative (HD stands for "Hybrid Digital," not High Definition). HD Radio is a way of cramming more stations into the existing radio spectrum. More stations don't address the problem of the changing consumption habits of the audience. NAB is trying to get cell phone manufacturers to put FM radios into cell phones. As if the problem is a lack of radios.

So is radio going the way of the dinosaurs? Not yet. The industry need to realize that they're in the content business, not the broadcasting business. They need to understand that their primary competitive asset is the people who use their voices and minds to influence, entertain, and educate -- not the transmitters, towers and FCC licenses for which they paid so dearly. They need to embrace their local footprint and knowledge as a competitive advantage over internet radio and other sources of audience fragmentation.

Fundamentally, the distribution channel must change from a centrally-controlled broadcast model to a narrowcast model, where the consumer has more control. Radio can embrace new technologies. They need to understand how listeners consume the media.

Programming will change. Talk, news, and sports will become more dominant. Music radio can't just be music; iPods do that just fine. Music radio will need personality. They're in the audio content business -- it should not matter how that audio is distributed.

Revenue models will change. Advertisers too have a different set of expectations in the internet age. New technologies like podcasting, internet streaming, and cell-phone narrowcasting must be embraced as equal distribution channels to the broadcast channel.

The radio industry has a brief window of time standing open right now. I estimate it's about 36 months. They will either embrace change and understand what they are, or they will settle into the dustbin of industries that have failed to adapt to the changing needs of the audience. The time is now.

More Radios in Cell Phones

Chip makers are cramming more and more radios into cell phones. But they're not FM radios (sorry David Rehr)

If radio wants to reach the cell phone user then they need to find another channel.

NAB in Vegas

Almost the whole team is off to Las Vegas for NAB this week. We've even raided the farm team for some extra bodies.If you're coming to NAB be sure to drop by our booth (C452) for a demo of our new product (more on that on Monday).

I'm also on a panel on Monday at 10:30 (Mobile, Digital & Syndicated Content) at the RTNDA section of the show. Come on by for that too.

The NAB and the Satellite Guys

This is an interesting article as a follow up to our recent internet radio post.

The NAB has consistently opposed every bit of new technology offering new media options to consumers, going back to satellite television in the 1980s (for which a federal appeals court called the group a "Luddite"). How does it get away with it? Simple. It has a lot of money to throw around. Not to mention influence. One NAB program, for example, lets members of Congress and their families record public service announcements in NAB studios free of charge. The commercials are then broadcast in the members districts on NAB stations, also free of charge. That's broadcast time politicians often have to pay thousands of dollars to reserve.

BTW. So that's what John Ashcroft has been doing since he left office.