Don't know about Verizon, but AT&T gave up Connecticut to Frontier a couple of years back.
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Can be relevant to any rock genre music stations leaving like The Sound
- Thread starter SuperRadioFan
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Don't know about Verizon, but AT&T gave up Connecticut to Frontier a couple of years back.
I feel like as long as OEMs include radio in the car, it will be relevant and valuable to advertisers. When you think about targeting a mass audience in a specific region, radio is still one of the best bets. I see podcasts, Spotify and digital media as a completely different product, usually as a complement to radio.
Mind you, we're all radio nerds here and probably music nerds, by association. Of course, I would love commercial radio to be more adventurous. I would have liked The Sound to remain as a "pure" AAA station. I wish KROQ actually played new, local artists. I WISH INDIE 103.1 WAS STILL AROUND.
But the reality is that since PPM, commercial radio stations are programmed to the "in-between" listeners who want to hear something they feel comfortable with, not core listeners who listen because they're passionate about the format or station. There is a legion of listeners who don't really care if KROQ doesn't play new artists or if The Sound plays The Head and the Heart. They just want something familiar and comfortable. So if it's "Hotel California" every hour on the hour, that's what it will be. All of this is based on data-driven research conducted to optimize TSLs and prevent tune-outs. Calculated risks by program directors.
Reminder, for a lot of listeners, radio is their only option. They might not have a Bluetooth or AUX connection in their car. Or it may be their only option at work.
The only way to have a truly enjoyable radio experience, in the future, will be by changing the business model: finding a way for listeners to pay the station directly. This is something public radio stations have done tremendously well. I am good friends with some underwriting folks at our neighborhood public radio stations and they told me that they are receiving more donations from younger listeners and are seeing stronger revenues than the '90s. Imagine Indie 103.1 had asked listeners to kick in a few dollars a month for a subscription to keep the station alive? It may have been enough for Entravision to look the other way...
Some speculate and say "Well, Millennials and Gen Z will bring Spotify to radio." Not the case. Record labels will push the albums they want to stations, on both streaming and radio. It is one in the same.
Mind you, we're all radio nerds here and probably music nerds, by association. Of course, I would love commercial radio to be more adventurous. I would have liked The Sound to remain as a "pure" AAA station. I wish KROQ actually played new, local artists. I WISH INDIE 103.1 WAS STILL AROUND.
But the reality is that since PPM, commercial radio stations are programmed to the "in-between" listeners who want to hear something they feel comfortable with, not core listeners who listen because they're passionate about the format or station. There is a legion of listeners who don't really care if KROQ doesn't play new artists or if The Sound plays The Head and the Heart. They just want something familiar and comfortable. So if it's "Hotel California" every hour on the hour, that's what it will be. All of this is based on data-driven research conducted to optimize TSLs and prevent tune-outs. Calculated risks by program directors.
Reminder, for a lot of listeners, radio is their only option. They might not have a Bluetooth or AUX connection in their car. Or it may be their only option at work.
The only way to have a truly enjoyable radio experience, in the future, will be by changing the business model: finding a way for listeners to pay the station directly. This is something public radio stations have done tremendously well. I am good friends with some underwriting folks at our neighborhood public radio stations and they told me that they are receiving more donations from younger listeners and are seeing stronger revenues than the '90s. Imagine Indie 103.1 had asked listeners to kick in a few dollars a month for a subscription to keep the station alive? It may have been enough for Entravision to look the other way...
Some speculate and say "Well, Millennials and Gen Z will bring Spotify to radio." Not the case. Record labels will push the albums they want to stations, on both streaming and radio. It is one in the same.
Ask your friends what percentage of listeners actually become members. The national figure is around 7%. That's not good. The only way to ensure people pay for what they hear is to put up a paywall.
I, for one, would not mind at all paying through a paywall in order to hear programming that works for me. I pay extra on my cable bill to have the DVR capability and as a result my wife and I record just about everything we watch so we can zip through the commercials. So last night on Saturday Night Live, they had a spoof of a Levi jeans commercial which probably would have been more amusing to me if I were familiar with the real commercial.
The only catch is that the FCC doesn't allow on-air stations to put their content behind a paywall. That's why public radio hasn't done it. No such rule for online radio.
Big A, most of the listening I do is through the Tune In Radio Pro app which I paid for many years ago. And lately just about all the stations have been OTA with an occasional listen to Radio Paradise and a few others. I also use and pay for Spotify. I will guess I am not typical heh heh
Maybe. I'm told less than 10% of the users pay for Spotify. Not sure on the numbers for TuneIn, but apparently a lot of longtime users are upset about the changes they've instituted. I have a feeling that in the future, the percentages will change, and more people will include paid radio and/or music subscriptions.
How did KAHM get away with it?
All three of your wishes have one thing in common: they are for stations or station features that do or did not succeed.
That is just not true. The difference between the PPM and the diary is that the diary measured cume, TSL and memory, while the PPM measures just cume and TSL.
Diary entries tended to be highly rounded, generally to the hour or half hour. That is not reality, but it does reflect how people remember things. While a diary entry for work listening might have been "9 AM to 5 PM" reality is that listening was not for 8 hours but, maybe, for 3 or 4 after discounting time spent at lunch, on breaks, going to the bathroom, phone calls, meetings, time away from the workstation, etc.
Stations with large cumes and mass appeal lost TSL, but gained secondary listeners. Stations with extreme niche listening did not gain cume, and lost cume and also lost "my favorite station" voting via exaggeration. So those niche stations lost share, because they were purely dependent on partisan-based exaggerated TSL and had no cume depth.
The PPM is better at finding cumers than the diary, as occasional or secondary listening is picked up. The fact that niche stations did not benefit from the PPM shows that their fame was vastly overstated in the diary survey due to memory and rounding up of diary entries.
While the PPM is more granular as a ratings device, stations have used systems like callout and music tests since the 80's (AMT's) and 70's (callout) to find the songs that have mass appeal and which are destructive for the majority of listeners. The change to the PPM did not change that.
The commodity nature of most formats is such that folks who pay will buy packages, not individual stations. Aggregators may succeed, but most people outside of certain formats, will pay for a specific station unless a technology arrives which allows for metered listening with payment in proportion to usage, like your utility bills.
The station had such low cume towards the end that, given the tiny percentage who give even to NPR stations, the business model would not have worked
As I said, online stations don't have such a rule. So KAHM charged $20 for their stream. Several other small market standards stations have done the same thing. They use it to cover their music royalty fees.
I thought they were an actual FM station with an online stream. When you say "the FCC doesn't allow on-air stations to put their content behind a paywall.", is that not referring to an internet streaming simulcast of the FM or AM feed?
No. The FCC doesn't allow a broadcast station to encode their on-air signal so it can only be heard if the listener pays. Online streams are different.
This. This is why I am not a fan of services like Spotify and while I listen to a few podcasts I don't do it very often.
I have about a 30 minute commute. If I listen to something on my phone, I pretty much have to commit to listening to it for the entire trip, and I have to decide what I'm going to listen to before I pull out of the driveway. On the plus side, if I'm streaming a station on that trip, I won't punch out for spots because it's not worth the $200 ticket.
Or I can just listen to the radio and punch around until I'm happy.
Car infotainment systems still haven't quite caught up. If someone gets voice control right, that could be a game changer. Most of the voice control systems now are still half-baked.
I remember Pay-TV (with the decoder boxes) but I don't think it was ever allowed on AM/FM....
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