I was reading through my Facebook page, much too early, on Saturday morning when I saw a Facebook post from a radio personality that I have had several conversations with over the years about the Cumulus CEO asking for employees to reach out to family members for help selling ads on their radio stations.
Which isn’t a bad idea.
Its just more that it is funny in the context of all of the things that have befallen the radio industry.
And, one of the commenters made a point of saying, it is easy to shoot arrows but tougher to come up with solutions.
Which got me to thinking, what would I do if my stock was cratering and my business was failing.
Here are some of my ideas for fixing the business of radio.
First, the challenges. Then, the opportunities.
Challenges:
First, radio on the whole has become saddled with too much debt.
As investors have bought radio stations, combining them into conglomerates, they have taken on unsustainable amounts of debt.
This has had the impact of meaning that radio has had to become more of a factory medium.
Which isn’t good.
This factory making of radio has caused a product where the same songs, same shows, and same POVs are played on almost every station in every market.
Why?
Because they feel safe?
One look at listenership and stock prices would tell you that that isn’t correct.
Second, consumer tastes have changed.
With the rise of mobile technologies, consumers aren’t attached to only what is playing in their car or in their CD player (remember those?).
This change has been slow to be embraced radio because as we have stated above, radio has become a factory initiative.
Which really means that the structure of these large companies has become so big that they can’t adapt to the changes and demands of the consumers.
Couple that with the fact that many of the young adults and younger weren’t raised on radio, so they have no love or connection to the media.
Third, when you combine all of this together, it creates a very toxic environment…which has begun to look a little like this:
Due to changing consumer habits and the high amounts of debt, this has created a toxic environment in the radio industry that makes some of these things an everyday fact of life for anyone that wants to work or listen to radio.
- Ad prices are too high for too little value.
- There is no new talent pipeline. It is a bunch of conservative talkers and paid programming, for the most part.
- The variety of music doesn’t exist. Gone are the days of DJs having personalities and breaking new songs.
- The culture in many of the organizations is toxic with a Dilbert comic not being too far from the truth. Or, if you are familiar with the cartoon below, that’s the truth of radio business. Meaning that if you have other options, you don’t go there.
On the whole, I wouldn’t call radio a healthy medium. And, I wouldn’t call this a comprehensive list, but just a high level overview of the challenges that radio is dealing with.
Let’s look at where the opportunities would live, if you were so inclined to take a chance on them.
Opportunities:
Embrace the weird:
Above I wrote about the new talent challenge. And, while Rush Limbaugh is still considered a king of talk radio, podcast and streaming audio has provided listeners with a world of opportunity to experience new voices and new talent.
If you were to thumb through my podcasts and listening habits, you’d be amazed at the diversity of people and ideas that I might touch in a single week.
Here’s a short list of the regular stuff:
Fitness Confidential with Vinnie Tortorich
The Tao of Sports with Troy Kirby
HBR podcast from Harvard Business Review
The Big Podcast With Shaq
What do you see there?
A wide variety and something that likely is unique in a great many ways.
In other words, its a weird list.
I’m not stuck on the Limbaugh/Hannity train.
I’m not on the train of only listening to political talk.
No morning zoo.
No all day sports talk.
Just a bunch of different, interesting voices that have unique voices and tell great stories.
What radio needs to do is embrace talent again. Howard Stern famously went to satellite radio so that he wouldn’t be restrained by his bosses on terrestrial radio. And, since he left, the flood of talent looking for other places to ply their trade has only quickened.
Tom Leykis has gone to open up ocean front property by taking his show to the web, where you can stream it 24/7 and hear him live daily.
Podcasts are the same deal. Adam Carolla has built a podcast empire with what seems like 50 different shows.
What all of these examples have in common is that they have specific POVs, they have audiences that don’t fit into one simple silo, and now that they have used the web they have audiences that are global.
But most important, they are talent and talent development would need to be at the forefront of any resurgence of radio.
Rethink the distribution model:
For so long, radio has been built on one model.
The host has a spot on the dial for a set time, each day or each week. The host goes live and tells stories that will drive callers to call.
Callers talk to the host and that’s it.
But let’s think about this, the number of call-in show hosts that are really, really phenomenal at that is small. Very, very small.
I’d put Tom Leykis in the category of experts at using callers to drive shows.
Adam Carolla uses calls on his podcast to set him up from time to time.
Sure, some of the right wing talkers are good at using their callers to initiate their rants, but the bulk of talkers aren’t necessarily the greatest at engaging callers.
They may be great storytellers.
They may be great interviewers.
Embrace those attributes.
Because if you free your talent up from doing call-in shows just because that’s how it has always been done, you can get better content.
Imagine how many hoops you have to jump through to get people into your studio or onto your shows at the right time.
What if you just taped more things? Distributed them in a different manner?
Maybe part of the interview goes on the radio?
Maybe part of the interview is behind a paywall?
Maybe part of the interview is available to email subscribers?
Maybe you can stream stuff live through your website, unedited?
The thing is that today’s consumers aren’t fixated on where the content comes from, they are just consumed by the content.
And, the thing is, you have to really give it to them in the places that they are willing to hear it or where it is best for them.
Not where it is best for you.
Because if you only do what is best for you, the consumer is going to go somewhere else.
Maximize the use of live & immediate:
Let’s be clear, there are still moments and times where radio and audio surpasses everything.
Think about how vivid a picture Vin Scully would paint of a Dodgers’ game.
Maybe you are a bigger runner or cycler and a big baseball or news fan, these things are prime points of contact.
There are just some things that need to be live to be best.
Major news events are prime points.
Major sporting events, again…prime points.
Maybe build up a once in a lifetime live interview like Howard Stern did with Madonna. (And, I get it, that’s really once in a lifetime, but you get the point.)
The thing about it is, use live and immediate to your advantage.
As consumers have shown, they don’t care about everything being live if it is awesome!
They do care about things that are awesome!
So don’t be wed to always needing to be live, unless live and immediate is the unique selling advantage that will get you in front of your audience…then do it.
To recap, here are 3 big areas that radio should look at if they want to have a chance:
- Embrace the weird: Mass is over and you need to give consumers a variety of talent. Podcasts prove that people love talk content, they just don’t love radios.
- Rethink your distribution: You can’t get by just pumping sounds out over the air. You have to use all of the distribution channels at your disposal to hook listeners. In truth, this could be a selling point to gain you listeners and dollars.
- Use live and immediate to your advantage, not just as a fall back. Listeners don’t care about live and immediate any more. They just want great! Sometimes great comes due to being live and immediate.
If you do this, you are going to have a better opportunity to make money.
See, the era of mass market marketing and consuming is over. Which means that just pumping out lowest common denominator content, ads, and personalities isn’t a sustainable model.
Until radio gets back into the business of producing must listen content on many distribution channels, they money is going to continue to dry up and it is going to happen faster and faster.
So the only hope for radio is actually just to start focusing on doing things that are great again…that means authentic and personal content with real personalities that can’t and won’t appeal to everyone.
Other than that, good luck because you are going to be fighting the winds of change sweeping many industries.