Swinging For The Fences

An industry notices that its audience is getting smaller and older, and publicly agonizes over ways to stem the tide, trying to face the fact that their product doesn't have the same appeal to people under a certain age.

Sound familiar? Yeah, but radio isn't the only industry dealing with that situation. Take baseball, which happens to be entering All-Star week and is struggling to find answers for why there are plenty of empty seats even for good teams. Now, we can point out that baseball has not always packed 'em in for regular season games -- go back to the 1950s and 1960s and check attendance figures, and you'll find crowds a lot smaller than today's (unless you're looking at today's Miami and Tampa Bay numbers, but that's another story). But compared to attendance in recent decades, it's not a pretty picture. Nor are TV ratings, and while in most markets baseball provides a bump for radio flagships, that's not always a given anymore, either.

Why? Commissioner Rob Manfred is focusing on the pace of game play, which is a step in the right direction but misses a larger point. The proposals being considered all have to do with shortening the length of a game, trying to eliminate those interminable marathons by limiting managers' mound visits, considering a pitch clock, restricting batters from stepping out of the box and adjusting the Velcro on their batting gloves over and over... which is all fine and dandy, except for this: The game will never, ever be fast enough for someone raised on video games. Ever. Someone under the age of, let's be conservative and call it 21 years old, is more apt to watch someone play Call of Duty on Twitch, or play Fortnite into the wee hours, or become an Overwatch League fan, and if you don't know what any of that is, you don't get what the next generation of your audience is into. Even football -- furious action separated by 40 seconds of standing around -- isn't fast enough, and while basketball has lots of action, it's less of a time suck to just watch the highlights on YouTube, where you can cut right to the posterizing and insanely long 3s without the mid-range jumpers. Baseball is a game celebrated for NOT running on a clock, for being in its own untimed world, something that made it appealing in a simpler time and anathema to people used to a faster-paced world.

That's not an argument that baseball is dead. Baseball isn't dead, it's a big business and as long as there are sponsors and sizable radio and TV audiences, it's going to continue and do well enough, even if it's currently mired in an era of batters either hitting homers (launch angle!) or striking out with nothing in between. A compelling storyline -- another Cubs-style renaissance for a long-time also-ran (Hello, Cleveland! Are you ready to rock, Milwaukee?), the emergence of a charismatic superstar -- wouldn't hurt, either. It just isn't what it was a few years ago, and you can't really change baseball enough to appeal to someone who wants constant motion and sound and energy without alienating the present fan base.

But there's value in knowing what you are and what you aren't, which brings us back to radio. Radio isn't social media, although it can use social media to enhance its product. It isn't customizable, on-demand streaming of music, although it could set up separate, branded products to do that or branded, curated playlists for other services. It isn't the new, bright shiny object and it is not going to be that. It isn't podcasting, though it can produce content as podcasts, and I'll be talking about more of that in the next couple of weeks. It is, however, an easy-to-use, practically ubiquitous medium, and because of that, it has opportunities baseball doesn't and can't have. Baseball can't totally reinvent itself, because it has too much to lose, but it can't appeal to a growing segment of its intended audience unless it does reinvent itself. Radio isn't burdened by that conundrum; while it can't blow off its present revenue streams, there's plenty of opportunity to develop content that new audiences WILL find and listen to and enjoy, whether it's taking the worst performer in a cluster and rolling the dice on a totally new format or trying out talent on podcasts or underutilized HD2 channels or just taking a big swing at something truly different. I have ideas I'd try that are unlike anything on radio, but that's not my job and nobody's paying me for them. If I can come up with different and unique ideas for radio, the people who ARE being paid to come up with them surely can, right?

They need to do that, but at least they can. Unlike baseball, there's no reason that radio can't change.

=============================

Whatever you do, you need content, and you can count on Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, to provide just that, with plenty of stuff to talk about and make your own. Find it by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts, too.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

My podcast is "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," a quick (two minutes or less) daily thing, and you can get it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Spotify, too. Google Podcasts? Click here. You can also use the RSS feed and the website where you can listen in your browser, or my own website where they're all embedded, too. And if you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, just say "Alexa, play the Evening Bulletin podcast."

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

=============================

I'll see you at The Conclave next week, I hope, and in Philadelphia the following week, and that means some schedule changes. Talk Topics should be pretty normal at least through July 26th, though the timing of posts might be thrown off due to travel. I have no idea if I'll have time to do columns, though; we'll see. The podcast will be on regular schedule. And between July 27th and 31st, I'll be away, so plan accordingly, whatever that means.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
www.facebook.com/pmsimon
Twitter @pmsimon
Instagram @pmsimon