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.