January 17, 2002

 

THE YEAR IN SALES

THE YEAR IN FORMATS, CALLS AND PEOPLE

IN MEMORIAM

The Year-End Rant: The Pragmatists and the Romantics

by SCOTT FYBUSH

This is not an easy year to write a rant. There's certainly no way to argue that consolidation, voicetracking or satellite radio are world-changing matters in the wake of a year in which the world really did change. So if you're wondering why it took a few extra weeks for this year's Rant to reach you, that's one reason.

Another, just by chance, was the news from Nashville. It's been somehow gratifying to see the national media attention being given to the talk about a format change at WSM. There was little surprise here at NERW Central when Gaylord announced it wouldn't be changing the format on AM 650; for one thing, the whole matter had the feeling of a publicity stunt (even, as it turned out, a somewhat accidental one); for another, it's not as though WSM has the eight-decade legacy of country music that some of the protesters seemed to think it does.

The message board traffic and the mailing list chatter about WSM provided a perfect illustration, though, for the point I was planning to make anyway as I began writing this year's Rant: there's a growing gap between the romantics and the pragmatics when it comes to radio at the beginning of the 21st century.

And while that's understandable, it's not necessarily a good thing for the future of the industry we all love. I'll address that disconnect in the context of two of the biggest questions to face radio as we enter 2002; first, the consolidation of ownership under media giants such as Clear Channel, and second, the arrival of satellite radio as a broadcast reality.

Clear Channel: the mere mention of these two words can inspire a remarkable level of venom when brought up in the right company.

In some circles, bashing the 1300-station behemoth is almost the party line; even a fairly innocuous positive mention of the company in the wrap-up to the Big Trip retrospective on the Tower Site of the Week feature here on fybush.com produced e-mail from one former Clear Channel employee accusing me, not entirely in jest, of having "drunken the Kool-Aid."

But I meant what I said at the end of this summer's 5000-mile journey around the country, and I'll amplify it in this Rant: To the extent that there's something wrong with radio in 2002, Clear Channel is at best a symptom, not the cause, of the problem.

The problem, if your name isn't Randy or Mel, is that Congress apparently never envisioned, when it lifted the national ownership cap in 1996, that any one company would actually attempt to do what it had just made possible and buy up fully a tenth of the nation's broadcast signals, with a particular (and very deliberate) emphasis on strong full-time AM signals and solid FMs. The resulting rush on stations had the positive effect of allowing many old-line owners to cash out of their investments for far more than they ever could have dreamed of getting for their stations. But it also made it all but certain that no other generation would ever get the chance to experience individual ownership of any major broadcast signal.

We've bemoaned that change in this space before, and the genie is too far out of the bottle now to expect any regulatory change that would take us from a 1300-station group back to mom and pop. So with individual ownership more or less out of the question (and a tip of the hat to folks like Bob Bittner, Dennis Jackson and Ernie Anastos who are desperately trying to prove me wrong on this one) and a few years of the mega-groups under our collective belt, what have we all learned?

The romantics on the message boards will tell you that the product being heard on the radio since the advent of the mega-groups is worse than it used to be for two reasons: first, it's less diverse; second, it's less local.

M Street lists 399 distinct radio markets in the U.S., from New York City all the way down to the 32,800 souls in the Scottsbluff, Nebraska market. Over the last decade, I've had the chance to listen intently to radio in about 142 of those markets - and by "listen," I mean aircheck and study every station on the air in those markets. Several thousand Shania Twain songs later, here's what I now believe about U.S. radio in the 21st century: there's nothing much local about it, anyway - and there's nothing terribly wrong with that.

Don't get me wrong; there are still places where "local" is a vital part of radio programming. The "Big Trip" this summer took me to places like Yankton, South Dakota, where WNAX maintains an eight-decade tradition as a critical link between far-flung farming communities and the markets the farmers depend upon.

As I write this, I'm listening to some tapes recorded during a long drive from Yankton south to Omaha, through some of the least exciting parts of Nebraska I've ever seen (and that's saying something). The FM signals that emanate from little towns like Norfolk and Columbus and Central City and West Point were doing something important that Friday afternoon as I passed through, offering up the kind of hyper-local news, birthday greetings and farm reports that are the traditional province of the local weekly paper. No satellite services to be heard here, either; it seems that the presence of one or two stations with live, local jocks all day serves as a prod for the other stations to do the same. Stations like KLIR, KWPN and KZEN aren't likely to be on any mega-group's acquisition list any time soon; even if owned in volume, it's hard to believe they could ever produce enough profit to be more than a rounding error on even a medium-sized group's balance sheet.

And as they fly under the radar, I suspect they'll survive the next decade much better than some of their bigger cousins. For while these stations still provide something to their communities that can be had nowhere else, those bigger cousins could be headed for a face-to-face brush with irrelevance. I'm speaking, of course, of satellite radio - and more specifically of a point that I think most terrestrial broadcasters haven't quite grasped yet: with a few crucial exceptions, radio in the U.S. has become a national medium.

This, too, is nothing new: that's what radio was in its Golden Age, and it's what programmers like Bill Drake tried to do during the "second Golden Age" of the sixties and early seventies. It's what the satellite providers tried to do in the eighties, come to think of it. What was missing was the technology to implement truly national local radio. The best Drake could do was to dictate playlists and jock styles, and the best the satellite folks could do was a crude "20 past the hour" after the local ID, if the cart machine didn't jam.

Take one listen to your local "Kiss" CHR - and the odds are awfully good that you have one - and it should be clear that times have changed. Here in Rochester, our Kiss has a morning jock who's doing his shift the night before in Los Angeles, an afternoon jock who's here in Rochester and a bunch of other personalities who could be anywhere...and it doesn't matter. I'd bet a significant sum of money that none of the station's target listeners know that the jocks on Kiss aren't in town - and even if they did, that they can't tell the difference between the jock patter and the music there and the programming on Infinity's crosstown CHR competitor, whose jocks and programmers are all local.

Now stir the dozens of other CHRs I've heard over the past few years into the mix, and the distinctions grow even blurrier. Point to the "major-market" talent on a KIIS or a WHTZ as a distinction, and I'll point out that voice-tracking technology allows smaller markets like Rochester to get that sort of talent on the "local" airwaves in a way it never could before.

The AM dial is no different. Tell me you have a news-talk station in your market, and that it's owned by Clear Channel, and I'll bet that it has a local morning show, followed by either Laura Schlessinger or Glenn Beck, then Rush Limbaugh, perhaps a local afternoon show, and eventually Art Bell overnight. Does it have a sister AM doing sports? It's probably running Fox Sports or ESPN, with some local play-by-play and perhaps a local afternoon show. And again, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. (Still don't believe me? Then why is the news-talk station in question - again, the top 20 or so markets exempted - probably the number one AM in the market?)

Bottom line, and this is nothing new, at least to the pragmatists among you: give the listener programming he or she wants to hear, and it makes not one bit of difference whether it's being heard on just a single transmitter in Providence or a thousand stations nationwide.

And that, in turn, brings us back around to the question of satellite radio. For if the idea is to be national, whether it's with Mike Siegel or Carson Daly, why do it over all those local transmitters when you can do it over one big one in the sky? Better yet, why spend several years and accumulate millions in debt to pull together three or four not-quite-national networks (and, in effect, that's what Clear Channel has done) when you can turn on 100 channels to everyone with a single flip of the switch?

If you didn't pick up on it last fall, this is precisely what has the NAB so worried about satellite radio. I believe the satellite companies - for now, anyway - when they say they have no intention of adding local content to their national broadcasts.

But the NAB is right to be afraid on this one, because it would be hard for the satellite guys to do a worse job creating a local/national mix than some of the "local" broadcasters are already doing. For every station that gets the mix right - and that can mean anything from a relentlessly local focus like WNAX (or, closer to home, WMCR or WMVY or WLNG) to a well-executed voicetracked Kiss or Mix format (and while the romantics may complain, they're often much better sounding to the average listener than the local formats they've replaced) - there are plenty more that are just plain failing.

Here's where the pragmatists get their due: the AM stations that were allowed to power up during the deregulatory eighties and now create a noise floor that's all but ruined the band, yet without offering anything redeeming in terms of programming; the forgotten stations (often the same AM outlets) that run all week off the hard drive without anyone noticing whether the spots, the IDs or even the programs themselves are running properly; the FM allocations that were dropped in in the nineties even though they never stand a chance of turning a profit, especially if they try to serve their nominal communities of license (but then, who does that anymore?)

Even the better operators, driven by the debt service that inevitably accompanied the big radio land rush of the last few years, can't seem to pull free of the temptation of the 20-minute stopset, despite the fairly clear evidence that it's driving listeners away and they're not coming back.

But will they go to satellite radio? Not at $300 for a radio, they won't, 30,000 early adopters notwithstanding. Receiver prices will drop, though, and when they do, here's how things just might play out.

Satellite gets the automatic win for a few types of listener for whom traditional radio has simply dropped the ball. If you're a classical-music aficionado just about anywhere, commercial radio has given up on you; doubly so for jazz and, lately, for standards. Make the radios inexpensive enough, and $10 a month doesn't look so bad if it means access to a format that terrestrial radio isn't offering.

Satellite should also solve the "small-market" issues that keep me in Rochester from enjoying the same diversity of formats that my friends in Boston take for granted. No AAA station where you live? Nobody doing Spanish tropical? You live in Manhattan and like country? No problem.

Those are all niche markets, though. Can XM or Sirius compete with Kiss or Mix? Can their news and talk channels compete against the WHYNs and WSYRs and WHPs of the world? Here's where I don my official pundit cap and declare: "I dunno." It will be a few years, if ever, before satellite radio can market a "must-hear" talk personality on the level of a Limbaugh or a Harvey, instead of simply retreading existing second-echelon talkers from terrestrial networks. To the extent they continue their already-diminished committment to local news staffing, the terrestrial broadcasters will always have that advantage over the purely national satellite.

In the long run, though, it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which the terrestrial broadcasters, and in particular Clear Channel, fight back by becoming more like satellite. Take TV as a model here: nobody cringes at hearing their "local" station call itself, say, "NBC3" (well, as long as they don't live in San Francisco), and nobody is bothered by the fact that the most popular programming on most TV stations comes from New York and Los Angeles, not from Worcester or Altoona.

That model already exists in radio, at least at the fringes: think about "ESPN 1260" or "Radio Disney 1490." It will come as no surprise, at least to this column, if they're someday accompanied by a fully-networked "Clear Channel Talk 570" or a purely national "Mix" feed. It works in most of the world, after all...and has for decades.

The romantics may not like it (and there are some valid points to be made on their behalf, particularly the nagging question of where the next generation of radio talent will get its training), but it's the pragmatists speaking this year. That's my rant, and now it's your turn. E-mail me with your responses (rant@fybush.com) and I'll begin publishing them here. If you want to be anonymous, say so and I won't post your name. Have at it!

NorthEast Radio Watch is made possible by the generous contributions of our regular readers. If you enjoy NERW, please click here to learn how you can help make continued publication possible. NERW is copyright 2002 by Scott Fybush.