Within the radio business (of which I’m not), the people owning and running radio have interesting perspectives. One phrase I read from time to time is when talking about radio syndication the station owners grumble about them “taking away my minutes” – which means in real people language, that in order to get the syndicated programming for free (or at all), the local radio station has to allow the syndicator time to run their commercials during the show to pay for creating the show – 5 minutes per hour is pretty typical.
This notion that the syndicators are “stealing time” from the radio owner has the situation completely backward. In an environment where there are so many other ways to get music and information, a radio station consuming 25 or more minutes an hour on ads and promotional material is stealing the listener’s time. Now that we have options, conventional radio no longer has the leverage to steal our time.
I don’t think anyone believes that radio should have no commercials, although there are models for government funded radio, contribution based radio (NPR) and paid subscription (Sirius/XM) – but the obscene amount of my time wasted every day listening to vapid PSAs and semi-fraudulent health products would be driving me away from radio if it wasn’t for this project.
When Radio shifts its idea from the “minutes” are “My Minutes” to “My Listener’s minutes”, maybe they’ll start to bring back listenership. Back in World War two, a message beat into people was “Is the trip really necesssary”, to get people to think about not wasting resources during a period of war time shortages. Imagine a world in which program directors asked themselves “was this really a good use of my listener’s time?”, instead of ‘how can I squeeze in more ads without creating tuneout”…