The Delorean's All Warmed Up. Time To Go

Have you been following all the news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week? You couldn't help but hear about all the latest radios -- every TV report and newspaper column and tech blog was chock full of drooling over the newest and best HD Radios on display in....

No, no, of course they weren't drooling over HD Radio at CES. It's all about cell phones and 3-D TVs, tablets and e-book readers, laptops and apps. It's not like radio's not there, it's that nobody's buzzing about it. (Kinda like the April NAB Show. But that's another column) There WAS news, including a bunch of car manufacturers agreeing to put HD receivers in some 2011 models, but it's not BIG news. That status goes to, um, most everything else at the show.

And then there was the Pandora thing. Ford's Sync communications system, which already lets you control your iPod by voice commands, is adding the ability to listen to and control Pandora and Stitcher. You put, say, a Pandora app on your phone, and it'll stream into your car stereo; you'll be able to control it without taking your hands off the steering wheel. That's Pandora as in customizable music stream Pandora. This surely won't be the last deal of its kind. And it means that, for music, traditional radio's online competition is aiming to go everywhere radio goes. Sure, AM and FM and HD are there, and so is satellite, but the floodgates are opening.

So while broadcasters bet on something that's basically their existing, linear, non-customized model in a new digital form, the competition is getting increasingly aggressive. That's not to say that music radio isn't viable at present -- the ratings say otherwise -- or that it can't hold its own or win against more technologically advanced competition, but it portends a far more crowded field and further audience fragmentation. That, obviously, is not good for advertising sales.

Now, we've already discussed the common sense reaction to competition for the music listener: talk. Personality. The content a logarithm can't provide, that a robot can't "program." Live talk, national or local. Makes sense. The obvious solution. Perfect.

Or not. In the last few months, we've seen a wave of firings/"mutual agreements"/"retirements" of high-profile radio personalities, including acts with decades of success. A lot of them were morning shows on music stations, and there's always vague talk about how "the meters" brought trouble and showed disappointing numbers. In some cases, those disappointing numbers indicated real problems, shows resting on their laurels or perhaps not nearly as popular as the diaries would have you believe. But, on the other hand, we're still in the infancy of the PPM, and when we're paring it down to a narrow demographic in a narrow time frame, the sample size in some markets might be a little, you know, light. It's hard to make an accurate call on a show's performance when the numbers fluctuate wildly, independent of any changes in the actual programming, yet some managers can't resist.

On the other hand, there's another set of numbers that's not in dispute: salaries. If your show has a lot of people working on it, and the personnel costs are high, the meters don't matter as much as the savings the company will realize once your contract's off the books. I suspect that some of the "more music in the morning" movement is justified by the meters, but some of it is management's way of feeling better about firing people who have given their all for the station for a long time. Hey, July, August, September, and October were fine, but November... well, we're going to have to let you go. Nothing personal. Just business.

That, sadly, is the present. I'm hoping that whoever's in charge as the industry moves forward can take a longer view than this quarter or this month's debt service and think about the long-term implications of jettisoning "personality radio" because, in the short term, you can stick a lower-paid liner-card reader in morning drive and maintain enough of the numbers to sell while paying out a lot less in salaries. If all you're doing is playing music with commercials and time checks, you're open to competition from someone, or something, that plays better music with fewer (or no) commercials, and lets the listener define what kind of music they'll get. And then, you've got low expenses and low ratings and low revenue, and that's when you'll look for talent and they'll all be out of the business, because radio didn't have any room for them, let alone patience so they could grow.

Patience is key. The meters have a lot of managers thinking that if a show doesn't perform immediately, it's a flop, but good shows are often slower builds, especially if, as in today's market, there's no money to market the thing. That's what I'd like to see in 2010: Hire talent and give them time to develop without freaking over every month's meter numbers. In a few years, when people will have an infinite number of entertainment options in their cars, "more music in the morning" isn't going to be a competitive advantage. Personality -- talk -- will be that advantage... if it's still around.

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So, that rambling monologue means we're back for another year of All Access News-Talk-Sports (it'll be 11 years in September), and, yes, after a holiday hiatus, Talk Topics is (are?) back as well, pumping out an endless stream of material you can use on your talk show or morning show or chatting with the clerk at the QuikTrip. Among the items you'll find this week are stories about the "Our Little Genius" scandal, an underdressed jogger near the White House, a college which is dropping Yiddish classes (meshuggah!), very bad things happening in a fire pit and in the Grand Canyon, a violent dispute over a chess game, American's preference of dogs over cats, the Kings of Leon clothing line, how cell phones may be good for your brain, the Apple Store crime wave, this year's "America's Greatest Thinker" competition question, why it sucks to be freelance writer these days (tell me about it!), some very young bank robbers, some women who went ballistic over fast food, why you can't trust the label on your frozen dinner, and the pending end of the world (and not the 2012 Mayan calendar end of the world, either), plus much about the economy, health care, the crotch-bomber, and gun-slingin' Gilbert Arenas. If you can't find stuff to talk about in Talk Topics, you, um, actually, I haven't thought this slogan through just yet. Let me work on it.

And while I do, go read "10 Questions With..." WINS/New York and Metro Networks sportscaster and St. John's U. professor Marc Ernay (find the hidden link there and be rewarded with a very special Rheingold beer commercial!) and peruse the rest of All Access with the industry's best, fastest, and most complete news coverage, ratings, job listings, and forums, where you can go and post complaints about this column, because I know you want to. And it's all free, the best price for anything these days.

So... Welcome back. Let's make this a great year. We could use one of those.

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