Human Touch

The NAB Show, for radio people, was all about artificial intelligence, and data, and streaming, and more artificial intelligence, and wondering whether certain companies might be filing Chapter 11 soon, and more artificial intelligence and more data. You know what there wasn't all that much about?

People.

Okay, we got data about listeners, which is enlightening and very good to know, but the human element in creating content was again shortchanged. I suppose that's to be expected when AI is being seriously eyed as the future of content generation, but other than a few good sessions on storytelling and communication, there wasn't a lot of discussion about the content itself. For an industry that hasn't really evolved its content in decades, you'd think there would be more talk about the creative end of things, what radio can do that other services won't, more examples of people doing different things, bucking the trend, breaking the mold. What we got gave attendees a good idea of how people are listening, but not a lot about what content they want. Oh, one exception: One mention of how minute-by-minute data showed a spike for "War of the Roses." I will refrain from comment on that.

Look, it's very cool that technology is now able to track what people are listening to in their cars, where they are, at what volume they're listening, whether their windshield wipers are on and how fast they're wiping... actually, it's a little disturbing from a privacy position (they say it's all anonymized, for what it's worth), but for radio stations, it's informative. You can see on a granular level when people tune out from your present programming. That's a lot of information to digest.

But that data is telling you is how your present programming is doing, not how, or whether, you would do better with something wildly different. You can tell if your top 40 station should be playing that Doja Cat song so much, and you can tell if your sports station dips when you're talking about college basketball, and you can tell if your talk host had a weak segment. What you can't tell is whether you'd attract a much larger audience doing something radically different, and by that I don't mean a "better variety of today's hit music and yesterday's favorites." I mean totally new formats. I mean talk about different topics from standard politics. I mean throwing the clock out and revamping how you do commercials. I mean... well, I mean an infusion of fresh thinking about what exactly you're sending out over the airwaves to be measured by all that fancy new technology.

Because that's what radio needs. Slight adjustment of what you're doing now is not going to attract new listeners. Your competition is radically different, not just in allowing users to program their own music or pick a topic and listen on demand to spoken word content that addresses that desire, but also in TikTok videos and Instagram reels that offer clips -- not entire songs -- with arresting video images. Yes, radio still has much larger reach than any other individual medium, but that number is shrinking, and fast -- doesn't it seem like yesterday that radio's reach was in the mid-90 percent range, and now it's in the low-80s?

What's the answer to that attrition? Can radio grow, or are we looking at just triage to stem the bleeding? Will AI-generated content be "good enough" or drive away the audience you have now, and is letting AI scrape the internet for content just asking for a disaster to occur? Can you do what radio needs to do without a healthy contingent of actual creative humans to produce that content? Those are the questions that came to mind while I sat in the back of the rooms at the NAB Show, and I would hope someone will address it, not with a convention panel but with a roll of the dice on something truly different. Knowing the number, location, and preferences of audio listeners is important, but if they're listening less, maybe it's time to think about what they want that you're not giving them.

Other than that? Nice to see everyone, good show, see you next year.

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You say you want to do things differently? You host a show? Well, then, All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page is where you want to go for different. Click here for that, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Putting my money... okay, not MY money, but someone else's money where my mouth is, I will be highlighting people doing things differently at the All Access Audio Summit -- the guitar-loving pop culture sponge Jon Grayson of KMBZ/Kansas City, America's foremost Cheez-It and people-driving-into-buildings authority Todd Hollst of WHIO/Dayton, and podcast guru Steve Goldstein. It's all streaming, so no travel required, and it's April 26-28, so you should register right away. See the agenda and register here.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Mastodon @pmsimon@c.im