terrestrial radio Archive

Recently, I’ve found Pandora and it has me in its spell. Its like Napster all over again. I’m exploring new artists and new genres, and like the Napster days, I’m buying music because I like niche artists and narrow genres that I’d have little or no exposure to. Once again, the music industry has been presented with another goose laying golden eggs and is trying to find a way to kill it.

But then again, I’m trying to find a way to frustrate it. I’m pretty eclectic in my audio taste, and in 50-something years I’ve picked up a lot of strange knowledge, and I can’t resist trying to tweek Pandora with it. Its a little like entering Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park or Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at “What do the lyrics mean” websites.

So far, Pandora’s responded admirably. At Pandora, one can create stations based on an artist, or a song, or both. This information drives a big inference engine that suggests a whole range of songs. My first attempt was Spike Jones. Voila! Spike Jones radio, which proceeded to play Spike Jones selections I’ve not yet heard, and offer up other off-center performances. Ray Stevens, Sheb Wooley, Ben Colder (who looks remarkably like Mr. Wooley), and a host of great novelty one-hit wonders.

Tom Leherer? Absolutely. Which gravitated to Dr. Demento and all his craziness. Pico & Sepulveda still streams in my head. OK. how about dead genres. Let’s try Milton Brown. “And his Musical Brownies?” queries the Pandorabot. Curses. Foiled again.

Along the way, I learned and appreciated, and about that time my musical juggernaut was interrupted by a bulletin from Don Barrett at LAradio.com that Bill Drake had gone to that great music library in the sky, and my mind went to the Nickodell, now a parking lot on the Paramount Lot, where the Boss Jocks of KHJ drank away many happy hours. Background music?

So I started creating a station using the tools I’d discovered playing with the box (should that be a jar) that is Pandora, and soon, I had Last Round at Ciro’s. What might have been heard at the Nickodell in its heyday. Elegant music of the 50s and 60s with a twist of nostalgia. I was doing in minutes what used to take days even months; tweaking a radio format without even the need of a record library. Did Drake ever know this existed?

Before the Internet, there were specialized and scarce jobs that required multidisciplinary understanding, like the music director or program director of radio stations that were unapproachable by the masses. Today anybody with a little knowledge and a lot of passion can do them thanks to specialized websites like Pandora and last.fm.

And by the way, I finally beat Pandora at its own game. The Pasadena Roof Orchestra

“We’re always looking for great music to include, so we’ll check it out” said the Pandora-bot, its eyes downward. “Is there something else you’d like to listen to?”

[And thanks to Pete Handleman for the light. Bartender, another one for Mr. Morgan, Mr. Steele and Mr. Drake, on me.]

They’re scared. The newspaper crossownership restrictions that the FCC loosened in late 2007 may be an early target of the Obama administration’s desire to help return some diversity to legacy media, and the arguments are already beginning.

Broadcasting and Cable posted their “Open Hopes” yesterday in a pleading editorial that would have made George Orwell proud:

“Diversity can mean helping preserve TV and radio stations by allowing those in smaller markets to combine resources and ensuring that the government does not try to silence its critics.”

That’s got to go down with “less is more” and “obedience is freedom,” as a truly great oxymoron, so let me make this real simple for the obviously confused guardians of our public airwaves. Diversity is more people owning fewer media outlets. That means the local newspaper does not get to buy the local television station.

In some cases, that is going to result in newspapers going out of business, sometimes the very same newspapers that tried to run radio stations out of business in the 1930s, until United Press threw in the towel and started putting wire services in radio stations.

The Broadcasting and Cable “Open Hopes” editorial tries to finesse its point by talking about “stations in midsized markets” and then changing the subject as quickly as possible to Bush’s embedded reporters and wholesale classification of embarrassing government reports. That’s not the point, in fact its counter-intuitive. If we had more diversity, somebody might actually have called Bush out on those issues at the time!

Broadcasters: you have two choices. Either start providing a range of opinions on your properties so that you can point to diversity on your own outlets, or get ready to be forced to divest them or to face that dreaded “fairness doctrine.” If you had been doing your jobs, there’d be no reason for any of this.

And stop trying to play this off as being somehow driven by troubles at midsized stations in small markets. It was the Chicago Tribune sale that caused FCC Chief Kevin Martin to ram this through, followed by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones.

And if you’re looking for “synergy” (meaning you get to buy the local television station), think again. The public airwaves are not there to pay for your red ink. If you need a new delivery medium, look to the Internet.

I was ready to pitch Disney on a sequel. “Honey, I shrunk the phone book.” If I had any doubt that the old media was dying a slow agonizing death, it was put to rest when I picked up a plastic bag in my driveway today. I thought whatever was in that little bag couldn’t possibly be good, and AT&T probably is thinking the same thing.

Eons ago, the Yellow Pages was the place to find every restaurant, every auto body shop, and every ambulance chasing attorney with 80 square inches of colored ink touting their praises. In Vegas “escort services” was a whole chapter. Selling ads was almost easy; identify a potential client’s competitors, drop a few hints about how big the competitor’s ad would be, and produce the contract.

Newspapers are scurrying for cover and firing their oldest employees first to get the greatest cost savings. Magazines are shuttering daily,  radio is past tense, outdoor feels the pinch of increased air travel and, at least until recently, gas prices that make road trips impossible.

And letting our fingers do the walking? Could that be yet another reason we’re a nation of the obese?

Synergy. Whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s when things are good.

Too big to fail. National resource. That’s when things are bad.

Suddenly, we’re no longer bowing to the god of “size matters.” Today’s bailout of Citibank suggests that, and the coming crash in legacy broadcasting and satellite will be more proof.

Just today, in the [City Near You] Business Journal, Lew Dickey, Jr, CEO of Cumulus Media opines that in the next 36 months, half of the companies in the radio business will be gone.

Mike Elgan at Datamation is getting mass redistribution with his article that sticks a fork in XM/Sirius, and at Daily Kos, Jerome a Paris (who could spend a year just writing “I told you so” diaries) tells us what we should have been doing with banks which is extensible to broadcasters. There was a reason for ownership caps. Ronald Reagan forgot them somehow, but then as we discovered when he left office, Reagan forgot a lot.

Back when radio was a medium of some importance, there was a great gotcha line. When the transmitter failed, you could usually get a false start out of a fledgling announcer by saying, “Quick, go announce that we’re off the air.”

Hoisted myself on my own petard this morning when I found twitter down and had the overwhelming desire to share that fact by tweeting it.

Want to press Hannity’s hotbutton? Want to send Limbaugh into orbit? Mention the possible return of the Fairness Doctrine and sit back and watch the fireworks. The concept that a radio station has an obligation to offer a buffet of differing viewpoints would have stopped the rise of conservative radio and kept millions of dollars out of the hands of the right wing blowhards and billions out of the hands of their owners and handlers.

The fat lady, though, is about to sing. Radio stocks like Citadel have taken a nosedive and one of the biggest players in the right-wing hostage taking, Clear Channel, went private just before the bust (they literally regotiated in a panic as the grim reaper was approaching).

While it would be an oversimplification to single out deregulation as sole cause (radio is old media and will die soon of natural causes anyway,)  radio traded away its credibility for the quick buck, and now that the GOP is tanking, it will be taking its kept medium with it.

When the voices in the ether on the far right found, in 2008, that they couldn’t sway the Republican Party from its choice of McCain, it showed the first signs of its new impotence. If it couldn’t do that by howling 24/7 its not much good selling products in 30 second pitches. Maybe if it hadn’t been so anxious to trade on its newly-acquired unfairness, it might have more value today.

[Don Barrett on his subscription site LAradio.com debates a column by Paul Bond in the Hollywood Reporter (another subscription site) and asks if radio is to blame for its ills, or if its just the economy. I've got a slightly different view.]

A few months ago, deep in the comments section of a diary about Air America on DailyKos (that lefty blog the right loves to hate) a poster mentioned that she’d received an ARB diary. She was going to make sure that all the liberal talk shows she listens to got the full credit they deserve. Problem was: she didn’t listen to any of them on the radio.

She listened to them as podcasts. As the discussion proceeded, she listed all the reasons that podcasts were so much better than listening on the radio. It was probably beyond her why she wasn’t really helping Air America by filling out the diary as if she listened. When even the folks who like audio-only programming move on from radio to other distribution media, its the death knell.

I don’t know for sure why Clear Channel went private, but my guess is that they’re pretty smart cookies even though they’re widely reviled, and they know or should know that advertsing-supported radio is dead, and to not tell the stockholders might be actionable.

Radio stayed alive the way the telegram and the landline analog telephone stayed alive for so long; bandwidth was expensive. Today we send emoticons back and forth on chat channels that take more bandwidth than a telegram took just 50 years ago.

Radio always existed because there wasn’t a more information-rich medium to fill its shoes, from the days it repurposed vaudeville, through the days it played niche music, to the days the public’s ears became sophisticated enough to tell AM was inferior, and it was relegated to the bellicose screeching of the right wing blowhards, religion, and foreign language.

Who left talk radio first? The progressives. Who is leaving music radio? The kids. Sure, some of it is that they didn’t grow up with it. But the rest is that what they grew up understanding (mp3 players and texting cell phones) are far more interesting because they’re interactive.

One hundred years ago, instantaneous communication was so stunning that a transmitter and receiver in a room together “with no connection between them save the ether” could cause an audience to gasp. Today, there’s a cellphone in everybody’s pocket.

I know many of us love radio, usually because we were in it or it was a big part of our lives when our world was young, but the medium was lucky enough to have two golden ages. We’re in the throes of a media technological revolution that is as dramatic as the early demonstrations of radio was to the horse-drawn generation. The telegraph is dead, newspapers and radio aren’t far behind.

So, I’d say radio isn’t at fault for its ills, nor is it the economy. Its the public that, just as they finally grasped that FM was better–over RCA’s powerful objections–has finally grasped that radio isn’t the best place to go for anything anymore.

Could radio have kept itself alive longer? Probably. But its like any dying industry. Do you stop pouring the money into it, and take the profits until they dry up, or do you try and prop it up by massive infusions of cash even when you know there’s a fundamental flaw in the technology. I think radio lived a long and rich life, and we ought to prepare ourselves to give it the final tribute it deserves.