After watching the YouTube clip of Gene Kelly dancing and singing in “Singing in the Rain”, I went to refresh my memory of what the movie was about – I probably saw it in the 1960s, but most of us probably only saw the musical numbers in the MGM movie “That’s Entertainment” in 1974
Singing in the Rain is a close parallel to what is happening today in radio. Gene Kelly’s character was an actor in the Movie business during the silent movie era – then this new technology came along that added sound to a movie.
Suddenly the movie business was faced with a challenge that had the potential to destroy their business model. At first, the studios pointed to the problems with the new technology – the early “talking” movies relied on using phonograph records that had to be manually synchronized with the film. If the film broke and had to be spliced, there was no way to keep things working. Records of that era wore out quickly. The sound was low quality, speaker systems were not loud enough. Some said this was just a fad, and would never last. People will keep coming to the silent movies if they’re good.
Actors who didn’t have a nice sounding voice suddenly had a problem – another dimension had been added to what it meant to be talented. The same issue would come again when TV came along and was a challenge to radio and introduced new requirements in what it took to succeed.
The woman that the studio had paired with Kelly’s character was a singer who wasn’t able to sing. Kelly falls in love with a chorus girl who can sing. The studio decides that the solution to the problems caused by the technology is to have the chorus girl sing for the soundtrack, which requires that she sing off stage while the actress pretends to sing at public appearances. Kelly’s character eventually gets fed up and exposes the facade, forcing the movie studio to own up to their problem and find a way to adapt to the new technology or perish.
That’s where we’re at – with podcasting, mp3 players and handheld devices that can stream audio from anywhere in the world, consumers now choose their entertainment, not limited by whether that are standing inside an imaginary circle drawn by a government agency to protect the economic interestes of existing license holders. Now it is not just enough to show up – radio hosts have to actually learn what it takes to attract an audience that isn’t surrounded by a fence.
