Into The Great Wide Open

If you do one job for a couple of decades, you're going to find certain things repeating themselves. Write a column that long and you end up revisiting some themes, and by "revisiting" I mean "repeating yourself ad nauseam," which leads me to my time-honored "blank slate" theory of content creation and how it came to mind again this week.

It was near the end of three days of the IAB Podcast Upfront, during Audacy's presentation, to be precise, and it was nothing I hadn't reported on before. The company was touting -- this was three days of companies touting themselves -- its C13Features podcasts, which had been announced last year, and it reminded me that they were taking a chance on what amounts to movies, but for audio: single-episode, one story told from beginning to end like a movie, not divided up into multiple episodes. Scripted fiction podcasts have been episodic affairs up to now; Audacy and Cadence13 are gambling that a slickly produced 90-minute piece of audio storytelling will find an audience, and at the same time entice movie studios to turn it into an actual movie. It's an interesting roll of the dice.

Will it work? Will people devote a solid hour-and-a-half to a podcast the way they'll sit through a movie? Dunno, and it doesn't matter to me. What matters is that they're doing something different. If it pays off, you'll see more. If not, okay, we'll move on. But someone looked at the medium of podcasting and instead of thinking "let's do what works for other people," thought, "hey, what if...?" They looked at a medium, thought of it as a blank slate, had an idea, and now they're trying it.

That's what I've advised radio to do several times over the years in this column. Like practically every other industry, radio has become a bit fossilized in its thinking. There are ways to do things, and everybody does them that way. Propose something different and you're going to get a cold reception. You stick to certain formats. You play music here, you put stop sets there. You talk a certain way about certain topics from a certain viewpoint, lest your core listeners panic over hearing something un-Rush-ian. Your imaging sounds like this and has these slogans. Do anything else and it's a risk we can't afford to take, not with our investors looking over our shoulders. Save the experimenting for podcasting and streaming, and even there, don't do anything out of the ordinary. After all, podcasts are just time-shifted talk radio and streaming is radio over IP, right?

They are, but they're not only that, and the stab at making "audio movies" is one example of how those media don't have to just be radio on a different device. Radio programming doesn't have to be radio programming, either, not as we know it, which brings me back to the blank slate, the blank page, the wide open field. The radio industry -- and, let's be honest, the podcasting industry -- doesn't have a lot of revolutionaries. Most radio people think of their medium as what it's been since the late '50s, music with jocks and jingles and lots of commercials, or angry men arguing politics with lots of commercials, or somnolent introduction of news stories with no commercials. A lot fewer see radio as an opportunity to do wildly different things, or even just to turn the traditional formats and formatics on their ears -- seeing radio as a blank slate to be re-created from the ground up, only better.

We need more revolutionaries. We need them in radio, in podcasting, in streaming. We get them if we cultivate an openness to experimentation, to handing a station or an HD2 channel or a struggling AM someplace or a stream on a station website over to someone who isn't steeped in "this is how Z100 does it so that's how we'll do it" or "there's only one way to do talk radio." And this is where I usually note that I am fully aware that this won't happen and companies won't endanger any revenue stream even if they're so deeply in debt that it won't matter in the long run, but I will also note that even the big companies have stations that are fairly lost causes and while they could just throw voicetracked formats on them and let them run as zombies on a computer in the former prize closet with low expenses, they could also use them to try something radical and, hey, if it works, it works, and if not, the zombie option's always available. Besides, maybe the revolutionary ideas won't cost much to do, either, and the payoff could be much, much better than using the station as a flanker, or value-added for the cluster, or a dump for otherwise-un-clearable syndication. There might not be much to lose.

(I'll add here that podcasting is not immune to rigid thinking. When I go to podcasting conferences, the vast majority of attendees just want to do the kind of shows everyone else does; they're more concerned about monetization than whether what they're doing is unique or better or creative. That's not to say that there aren't people trying different things, but there are an awful lot of podcasts that use the same basic structure and concept and execution, and a lot fewer that you can listen to and think, wow, that's something I haven't heard before.)

Doing that for radio might also help fix that nagging image problem. You know what I'm talking about. Last week, the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team tweeted out a poll to pass the time between periods, asking, "You have to use one of the following for all music listening for an entire year. Which one are you going with?" The choices: Walkman, 8-Track, iPod Shuffle, and FM radio. FM didn't even win. When you're being lumped in with obsolete technology and you're not (yet) obsolete, you have an image problem. If radio isn't perceived as cool, it's not cool. Wanna be cool? Do cool things. Start with doing the unexpected, because the expected isn't even as popular as an iPod Shuffle. It's hard to compete for the attention of new generations with streamers and podcasts unless you're doing something they want to hear and won't get elsewhere.

Do that. Start by looking at radio as a wide open medium, offering live delivery to a massive installed base of devices, with no other preconceptions. And if nobody will let you do it, take it to podcasting, where there's nobody stopping you. The sky's the limit either way.

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By the way, the other thing I noticed about the IAB Podcast Upfront is that the adjective "immersive" has become the latest overused buzz word. Immersive experience, immersive audio, immersive everything. You see it used in describing games, movies, TV shows, podcasts, live events. There are even, apparently, competing Van Gogh exhibits touring the U.S., all of which are described as "immersive." I don't like the term, because it sounds like you're being submerged in hot water. But everyone will likely move on to a different buzz word soon enough, so I'll be patient. Maybe they'll all start using "moist" instead.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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