Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Are You A Strong Enough Personality To Bring Howard's Audience Back To FM?


An LA Times report says 'millions of terrestial radio listeners have just disappeared.'

RAIN's Kurt Hanson is pessimistic. He thinks you can't do it.

"As this audience experiments with other stations, analysts expect ratings to vacillate among the morning shows for months, even years, before the new listening patterns become habit. And even though most believe that the bulk of hard-core fans who couldn't live without their Stern have already signed up for Sirius, it's possible more may pony up Sirius subscription fees if terrestrial has nothing to offer them."

I'm not, IF we step up to the plate with compelling content.

It's a matter of longterm life and death. The opportunity is in front of anyone who talks on the radio. It's not enough to just be 'real.' You can be real boring, for example. Let's be real fun. Real entertaining. Real stimulating. Now. I know you can do it, but we have no time to waste.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Radio is losing a lot of folks like me, however, and I don’t think the iPod is the biggest reason. I don’t want my classic rock station to sound like a classical station, and my intent here is not to simply present yet another ivory-tower, academic rant against populism. The between-the-records on classic and active rock stations, however, just doesn’t move the needle for me in an increasingly introspective life—and if you are honest with yourself, I bet it doesn’t do much for you either, as much as you might tell yourself your audience loves it. My father still wakes up every morning at 5:30 and drives over to the local Dunkin’ Donuts, where he “hides” with his closest male friends for an hour or so to chat about local high school basketball, the decline of the local paper mill, and what old antique hot rod he is restoring this week. Where do I hide? I don’t know. I do, however, spend a lot of my solitary time with some kind of audio companion. Increasingly, my rock station sounds like the guy you run into every five years at your high school reunion who never really grew up, but still lives for weekends, beer-league softball and can’t keep a good job. Fun to visit, but I cannot live there any more. The music used to matter—the music still matters. I want the rest to matter, too.