Invasion!

Pandora's pushing into cars and building a sales staff. The Mini will have a dashboard display and USB interface so you can stream Net audio from your cell phone through the car's stereo system. On and on and on it goes, more ways for more programming to compete with you where you never had competition before.

Oh, wait, you DID have competition in the car before. Or have we forgotten CD changers, cassette players, and 8-track players? Cell phone conversations and conversations with the person in the next seat? Billboards, the speaker at the Jack in the Box drive-thru, and the moron who just cut you off? You've never been without competition. Now, you just have more.

A lot more, that is. Should you be worried? If you're the CEO of a broadcasting company and you paid a lot of money for broadcast licenses, yeah, you're looking at continued valuation problems there. Pandora doesn't need a tower on Mount Wilson and a transmitter and STL and all that. They pay for bandwidth and servers. In time, as these in-car solutions proliferate and everyone's cell phone does streaming, Internet radio will be as ubiquitous as broadcast radio, maybe more so, since the signal won't cut out as you leave the market (unless, that is, your carrier has lousy 3G service; everyone thinks his or her carrier's the worst, and they're all correct). There's life in those broadcast licenses, but every shift of a listener to streaming content makes that $75 million purchase look more and more insane.

And music radio, which is presently in the thrall of programmers and advisors who, consulting the PPMs for Tuesday, March 2nd at 7:17 am, will tell you to shut up and play the music, because that's what the PPM results say. Never mind the small sample size or the impossibility of determining why a particular panel member turned the station off at that moment -- perhaps she arrived at her destination and turned the car off, perhaps she stepped into the shower, perhaps she really does hate the host. No, the Conventional Wisdom is Just Play Music. And if that's what broadcast radio does, and I can choose a Pandora Silversun Pickups channel (okay, I'm an indie-rock snob) or a Last.fm John Hiatt channel (okay, I'm old) or a Pandora Big Star channel (okay, I'm an indie-rock snob and I'm old), why would I listen to my local rock stations?

For personality. For local content. For a human voice. For the occasional news, weather, time, and traffic checks. And I'll punch around that same radio dial for entertaining talk, for something that doesn't sound like my iPod. And I don't care whether I'm getting it over the Internet or from an antenna on the mountain. Before radio completely denudes itself of every vestige of compelling (and local) content, management should step away from this week's numbers and consider a future where everyone's car radio gets every Internet stream and iPod audio. You have to differentiate yourself in the new media world. "Shut up and play the music" isn't different.

Which leads back to what I've said in this column so many times I'm tired of reading it myself: You either do something different and compelling or you're looking at a limited future. There is no escaping the fact that there will be an infinite number of audio entertainment options everywhere radio goes. And you can beat the customized jukeboxes and the hordes of people talking about anything and everything. That's something for which radio companies can actually be helpful: They have existing marketing clout, and they can help a show or talent or stream get noticed. I'm not sure, however, that they're thinking about their future quite in that fashion. There's too much invested in the broadcast model, but things are changing.

What? How are we all going to make money when there's an infinite number of choices on the car radio dial dividing advertising revenues up into tiny little slivers? Yeah, well, that's something we gotta work on. In the meantime, just create the best and most unusual content you can, and let the business geniuses figure out the math.

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Part of creating compelling and unique radio is finding the best material, and sometimes you need a little help with that. Here's where to go for that: Talk Topics, the show prep extravaganza at All Access News-Talk-Sports. Once there, you'll find a long list of topic ideas with links, possible angles, and painfully stupid jokes you'd be ill-advised to borrow. Among this week's fresh material are things like kiddie condoms, Megan Fox's intimate resume, women's coleslaw wrestling, plenty of political scandals, the Worst Traffic in America (yes, it's probably where you think it is, and where I KNOW it is), a LOT of airplane and airport-related stories, the slow demise of the school photographer, the effect of winning the Oscar on your career (hint: not what you'd assume), the disappering Big Blue Mailbox, babies in bars, why to be careful where you do your ablutions, and why trendy people are keeping goats as pets and killing rabbits, plus all the "real news" of the week and more. For "10 Questions With..." this week, there's a conversation with Dan Gutierrez, the host of "The Directors Cut," a show about movies and the kind of stuff young guys talk about that's on terrestrial radio and podcasting. Check that out, then visit the rest of All Access for the latest news and columns and job listings and forums and all the resources you need, all free.

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Okay, I'm forgetting something, Let's think... well, Spring training's underway and Roy Halliday threw a couple of shutout innings... um... no, that wasn't it... hmm... Ah, yes, the Revlon Run/Walk for Women 2010, May 8th in Los Angeles. Once again, Fran and I are walking around the USC campus and into the Coliseum to raise money to fight cancer, and every donation will be greatly appreciated. If you're in a position to give this year, here's the link: https://www.revlonrunwalk.com/la/secure/MyWebPage.cfm?pID=533458. Thank you!

And thank you!

Perry Michael Simon
Editor
All Access News-Talk-Sports
psimon@allaccess.com
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