If you’ve noticed more talk about podcasts and non-“radio” things more in the blog, it’s not your imagination. This mirrors my own personal change in interests.
This web site started as an extension of my interest in seeing radio get onto the internet, partly motivated by the way program directors were dropping “controversial” shows like Michael Savage believing their listeners had no say in the matter since the station owns a government issued license to “serve” their local community – if you live in a community, the government indirectly defines which programs you’re allowed to hear, the people the radio station is allowed to hire, which advertisers are allowed to advertise, which words the hosts are not allowed to say, which guests cannot appear on the station…
Most “real” radio stations are now streaming on the Internet and most people on the Internet are aware that they can listen to what they want regardless of where they live and when they want (with archives and podcasts). Radio management has been pushed into the water – it’s up to them now if they learn to swim or drown or die from lack of water.
Much of “Conventional Radio” hasn’t gotten the message of 2009 that their business model has changed for good. Radio still thinks it is the advertisers who are their “customer” – not the people who choose to listen to their programming (or not). I’ve reached my threshold of 26 minutes per hour of ads and noise that fills the radio waves. Life is too short to waste it listening to government created PSAs trying to scare people, herbal cure ads and CNN newscasts.
Cable TV, Sirius/XM and people paying $80 a month for an iPhone are all pointing that the advertisement based radio/TV business model has run its course. Radio sales people needed to focus on “What ads would my listeners want to hear?” instead of “Which advertiser will pay me the highest CPM to forcefeed their ads to our listeners and how many ads can I cram in a row before people turn the channel”. Those of us who grew up with radio have been slower to admit “the time is up”. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
The web site is not going away – but more of the focus will be on building information about digital media that is not “over the air” radio. This does NOT mean that I want to be sent emails of every guy in his basement that started doing a shoutcast stream last Tuesday.
How you’ll see that first is I’ll be more aggressive at shrinking the amount of things to be regularly tested – cutting down the poorly performing streams, stations that insist on running prestream ads, or taking over your entire screen for the player, stations that run frequent sports preemptions, and dropping local shows with a negligible streaming audience. Preference will be shown to stations that support non-proprietary streams that work on Cell Phones and wireless radios.
The focus will be on the content and where it is available, not builidng a list of every radio station carrying every programs (that was never the goal to begin with).
Given the importance to the world of the election in November, don’t look for any really drastic changes before then, but we live in interesting times. It’s hard to know what next week will bring, let alone next year. Stuff happens.
Art, it’s good to adapt to change, especially when dealing with new media and the web. Notice how on Amazon’s web site there’s always some new widget? Amazon takes the view that you should constantly innovate and put new features forward–if the audience doesn’t like it, you can take it off the web almost in real time. So, thanks for all your hard work. The SRG site is a gold mine for us info junkies, and the blog always has something fresh and interesting to read about.