Am I supposed to feel bad about that?
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Sirius XM loses over a quarter-million subscribers in Q1 of 2024
- Thread starter DavidEduardo
- Start date
No, just a better understanding of priorities.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
There is a difference in terms of what media can still use these types of retention offers.
DirecTV, Dish, your cable company (if you subscribe to video): There are ongoing expenses, not the least of which are the subscriber fees for the cable networks and the retransmission fees for broadcast stations. That creates a limit on how much of a discount thay can offer. (If you only have cable for broadband access, as I do, they have little in expenses beyond the construction and maintenance of their network and the already-amortized cost of your free installation initially, so there's a lot more room to negotiate with the customer.)
SXM is in the latter category (so, for that matter, is wireless phone service). Their ongoing costs are relatively low so they can cut deals like the $7.77 a month mentioned earlier.
And yes, there is a strong possibility that the customer may not even notice when the price goes back up after a year. Or (as was the case with my cable provider one year) they may offer faster speed or capacity for one year at the new rate for your old service ... then the new tier of service gets billed at a new rate 12 months later along with everyone else on that tier.
Retention offers have been around for decades, and they have been proven to prevent a significant enough amount of "churn". If they didn't, do you really think they'd keep using them?
I still don't understand your point. Can you elaborate?
Over the years that 80% of music radio listeners surveyed prefer no yakking air talent, just music. That leaves 20% who do.
Where is that survey(s) published?
There have been surveys paid for by stations and radio groups since the 80's that consistently say the same thing.
You realize you're setting yourself up for accusations that the "greedy" stations and radio groups are rigging those survey results to produce the result that will save them the most money by giving them an excuse to fire on-air talent, don't you?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
It's not Kelly's fault that people outside the business are unaware of the surveys and studies that have been done about this.
The average listener wants to believe that their perception is the only correct one, and any deviation from that is suspect. Another example is the "you won't play my personal favorite song of all time" when testing has identified it as one that most listeners don't want to hear ... which leads to the erroneous "but I'm your customer" argument, which we all know is not true. Except that to people outside the business, we appear to be dismissing their "truth" without any basis.
Actually, the whole question of "more music, less talk" has been kicking around for decades. Most of my programming successes were either free of air talent, or (if we did have jocks) had restrictions on talk length. With all due respect to the OP, the vast majority of listeners tune in to music radio for music ... not to hear jocks run off at the mouth. (I call the latter "being able to talk for a full minute or two into a stopset and manage to say absolutely nothing".)
In any event, whether or not any of those surveys and studies are available for the skeptics to read -- and remember, if (for example) iHeart does such a study they have every right to not post it online -- there have been, as Kelly says, plenty of them and they all come to the same conclusion.
And we're not going to program to the 20% minority. It's called "broadcasting" because we try to please (or at least not irritate) the broadest cross-section of the population as is possible.
Those who would take the cynical view that we are only trying to justify our actions by "rigging" the data obviously are not taking the goal of RD to heart, which is in part to educate those outside of radio how the business works.
Why are there announcers? 80% of people don't want to hear "yacking air talent".
I like a voice for the most part. 60s Gold has a stable of jocks like Pat St. John and Shotgun Tom Kelly
It depends on what you call "announcers". Some are just VO or promo creators. Some are personalities like Stern, Elliott in the Morning, or shows that don't feature much if any music. What focus groups and surveys have consistently shown, is 80% (78.8%) of music listeners don't want interruptions by DJ's, talking over intros, stopping-down music to talk, time checks, or typical needless interruption of the music flow.
Why does SXM still feature yakky jocks on some of their music channels? I can't answer that, other than SXM was formed by a bunch of old style radio guys in an effort to move terrestrial radio listeners to satellite back in the day, they figured it better sound like radio. If you've listened to XM or Sirius, which became SXM, music channels are featuring much less traditional yakky jocks than even two years ago. Are they phasing the yakky jocks especially on their streaming channels out, I suspect in an effort to move in the direction that modern listeners appreciate, and that they can get via streaming; music without useless chatter? Likely so.
Proprietary studies done by all the significant radio groups show this. But none will reveal the specifics, such as the demographics of the "give me just the music" folks vs. the "I like the announcers" ones.
If you paid tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to research a station's format so you could beat the competition, would you reveal the results?
Since the listeners of those eras of music find that style familiar, its made to sound familiar. Other than of course; the old jocks voice-tracking sounding old and tired. (my opinion)
At least when it comes to music stations, universally the respondents/participants didn't care for any spots or promos unless it was something they were personally interested in. In the last batch of research, I saw about five years ago, there didn't seem to be a consensus of one or two giant sets of breaks verses spread out over the hour. The consensus was more music and fewer interruptions, which isn't anything new or groundbreaking for several decades.
Most rated terrestrial radio stations still follow the age-old 'quarter-hour rule' to build TSL, by trying to keep listeners through at least two or more consecutive quarter hours within an hour. Research has proven that spreading out breaks into quarter hours causes premature tune-out, preventing some listeners from sticking around through at least two consecutive fifteen-minute periods. Since the top of the hour is generally considered a reset of the hour, it makes sense to stack the largest break nearing the top because you need to run spots to stay in business, and a certain amount of tune-out during a break is inevitable anyway.
Again, I'm not talking about SXM because they don't participate in ratings so the quarter-hour rule doesn't apply.
Top 40 from the 60's is different from AOR style presentation. "Boss Jocks" talked(shouted) over song intros until the vocal. I never cared for that style. I preferred a low key natural vocal delivery.
I have found that many listeners enjoy compelling content. If the announcer has something worthwhile to share about the artist and song, then the jock is a compliment to the music. If they just blather on about themselves, that is a huge tune out...
The problem is that the DJs that listeners who grew up with "personality" radio prefer are on channels that play music from the years they remember so fondly. There's little any DJ can say about some Elton John or Temptations song -- or about Elton or the Temps themselves -- that hasn't been said before. Without local content -- traffic, weather, sports scores, coming events -- satellite radio DJs have nothing of much value to say, so they might as well not exist in 2024.
That's not true. A lot of new music and deeper Album Tracks are played on Satellite Radio. There is worthwhile information about touring schedules, artist info, etc...that can be shared. Just because the channels are Music Intensive doesn't mean the announcer is totally obsolete. For people who only want music, they have unlimited options. Interviews with artists are excellent when the host is actually informed and cares about the topic/music...
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And by subscribing, you pay directly for that sound or level of detail without commercials. Some expecting terrestrial radio to do the same are missing the differences.