When someone in the future writes a historical account of radio over the past decade, ample space will be given to radio’s long list of new competitors. The growth of the internet, satellite radio, iPods and so on will be recounted as the weapons that inflicted great harm on our beloved medium. We hope, however, that equal space will be given to radio’s response. We hope that this future author will lay the blame for radio’s dark days squarely where it belongs, not with these new media, but radio’s failure to rise to new media’s challenge.
For decades, radio had a virtual lock on listeners. Sure, people could by records and later CDs, but if someone wanted free musical entertainment or wanted to hear new music, they had just one option radio. Radio operated as a cartel, and behaved as a cartel.
Our lock on listeners began to deteriorate well before the internet and these other new alternatives to radio. Looking back, MTV was perhaps the first serious threat to the cartel. It showed listeners that there was an alternative to radio--that radio didn’t have a lock on music. Once listeners realized this, the door was open for all the new media that followed.
It is not unusual for a dominant business to lose its monopoly on its customers. AT&T lost its telephone monopoly, IBM lost its near monopoly on computers. When a company loses its strangle-hold, it needs to adapt to survive. Radio did not.
Not only did radio fail to adapt to new competition, it started to destroy the very reasons that listeners tuned to radio in the first place. Playlists were nationalized and homogenized. Live personalities were replaced with voice tracking. Promotional budgets were gutted. What listeners wanted became secondary to what Wall Street wanted.
At the very moment radio needed to be better than ever to thwart new media’s challenge, radio got worse, a lot worse. What were we thinking?
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