Many years ago, someone told me that country music fans were the most terrestrial radio loyal of all people. He explained that factors like aversion to high-tech, blue collar incomes, need for relatable personalities and local connection were the chief reasons. (As is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it...") And these would ensure country radio's ultimate survival for decades to come.
Of course "many years ago" was 2004.
In 2004, smartphones didn't exist. Neither did the data network coverage we have now. Prices for broadband were much higher and the only way you could hear streaming radio was off your home computer. Unlimited mobile data was non-existent. The radio industry was obsessed with the possibilities of HD Radio and completely dismissed satellite radio and streaming as geek fads that were on the cusp of bankruptcy. Year after year on this board, we read people saying how broke satellite radio was and streaming was never going to amount to anything.
But time, trends and tech changes while we're doing other things. Now Sirius/XM is buying out iHeartMedia and nearly every major market station has an app or is on a streaming portal like iHeart or TuneIn.
Yet even with all that, for some strange reason, the radio industry still acts like everyone is still glued to their transistor pocket radios and ghetto blasters.
So what happened to the KMPS listeners? Did they all suddenly become Adele and Billy Ocean fans? Where's that BIG bump to KKWF everybody was predicting? And KNUC should be up like a rocket by now. What's going on?
When KWJZ flipped to KLCK, I posted a cautionary warning that I got laughed off this board for. That you have to be really careful when making these changes because satellite and streaming were viable options by that time (and even more so today), and you can seriously risk losing terrestrial radio listeners defecting to the new mediums that you may never get back if you coldly flip the format with no warning. Listeners don't like being jerked around. They have the access and if they're paying for it, they're going to use it. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. The market will not stand for it (as the Net Neutrality battle has shown.) And older listeners, though not advertiser friendly, were the most likely to stick to traditional radio because it's what they grew up with. They're more familiar with it and they like it because it's simple: You turn it on, it works. No fussing around with crazy menus, no Bluetooth syncing, no buffering or dropouts. To those who grew up with traditional radio, it's perfection.
Most younger listeners want far more than traditional radio on it's own can give. And even worse, they're also far more fickle. To drive older listeners to streaming and satellite was a bad move in my opinion, even though I can understand the demands of the ad agencies and the first results of PPM didn't look very good for older skewing formats. I still thought it was premature to abandon them altogether. And there was still a lot for PPM to straighten out back then
And as KSWD has proven, the listeners to older leaning formats are there. But back to my starting point; Country radio, which was once seemed invincible to higher tech alternate radio mediums is now finding itself in the same quagmire as the rest of the music formats. The KMPS listeners went somewhere. And if not KKWF or KNUC, then where? Ruling out alien abduction, that leaves only two other possibilities.
One possible solution I thought back then was getting the manufacturers to install PPM in all new radios. That would give a far more accurate view of who's listening to what and where far better than any selected panel. But then we run into another problem. Manufacturers are not interested in traditional radios. At all. They want to make higher tech goodies because that's what everyone wants, not reboot a 100+ year old technology. And secondly, that can already be done with streaming. Nielsen now gathers listener data this way.
The writing is still on the wall as it was in 2010. Only it's now become a full blown mural. And it's getting hard to ignore.
