On a recent trip to Dallas, TX a longtime friend and colleague asked “What happened to Radio, and who’s to blame for the mess?” As a society, we seem to have a “need” to blame someone or something for failures that impact us whether directly or indirectly. One only need look as far as your nightly news to see this.
Paul and I exchanged emails and conversation that touched on everything from Programming failures, greed, absentee owners, consolidation, on-air automation systems, scientific music scheduling, too much research, not enough research, Wall Street, and more. We put forth many theory’s that by and large centered on philosophy intermingled with observations of isolated cause and effect.
Ask 100 radio “insiders” what happened and you’re likely to get 100 different answers all colored by the individual’s personal experience in the business.
In the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that playing the blame game really accomplishes nothing. The simple unvarnished truth is this; the radio industry finds itself lost in a perfect storm that, as a collective entity it largely created for itself. There is no “ONE THING” that got the industry where it is but rather an accumulation of mistakes, errors in judgment, failure to re-invest in people and product and failure to be responsive to audience and business community alike.
That said, someone is responsible for this mess, but who? At the end of the day, I would suggest to you that it is OWNERS themselves. It is the licensee who must bear responsibility for success or failure in radio broadcasting. Ultimately large owners made (and continue to make) the decisions that got us here.
For years small Mom and Pop owners struggled to make it (even in good times), yet small owners still found a way to give something meaningful back to their community. Most of them were in it for love of the business, God knows it wasn’t to get filthy rich. Today, many major broadcast companies, the so-called “Industry Leaders” find themselves in Bankruptcy while others frantically try to find a way to avoid it. These “industry leaders” lined their own as well as investors pockets but failed to invest in the product or the community. These “industry leaders” paid enormous bonuses to a select few while “un-budgeting” the rank and file “boots on the ground” necessary to provide a compelling and entertaining product advertisers could not buy around. These “industry leaders” borrowed insane amounts of money to acquire more properties in spite of their utter incompetence to operate the stations they already had. Unfortunately, too many smaller owners gleefully followed the pied piper to their ultimate undoing and are now wondering “what the hell happened?”
In the last email I received from Paul, he said: “…I’ve spent most of my life in this industry, and while I see that she’s in serious trouble, I can’t give up on her quite yet.”
Paul my friend, I understand your desire to not give up on radio, and yet the only chance I see she has for survival and a miraculous recovery is for real broadcasters, real men and women of integrity and character to take back control of the industry and stand and channel the spirit of President Harry S. Truman… to declare “The Buck Stops Here”.
Real broadcasters didn’t screw this up, and real broadcasters alone won’t be able to fix it without adopting a new set of core values. It’s going to take a new breed of owner, one with the stomach to invest in the product and a willingness to take smaller margins. It’s going to take owners who actually want to participate in the business, understand it and invest long term. The new breed of owner will embrace technology as a tool driven by people to gain market share, not as a means to replace people and eliminate payroll. The new breed of owner will be laser focused on creating 2 or 3 GREAT radio stations in a market rather than owning 7 or 8 mediocre but cheap to run signals.
Many years ago over a discussion involving sales vs. programming, a friend said to me, “you don’t need a delicious can of beans to make money; you just need a can of beans”. And such is the current state of radio broadcasting. Everybody has a can of beans to sell, especially the “conglomerated” radio stations in your market. Rare are the stations offering a truly DELICIOUS and unique can of beans. Until that changes, don’t expect anything different than the current mess.
Time will reveal when and where this new breed of owner will emerge, but I suspect it will come from the most unlikely of places. Stay tuned!
Subscribe