Radio InSights

Is This Why Classic Hits Does So Well?

A recent analysis of lead singers of the top touring bands may shed some light on why the Classic Hits format does so well.

It turns out that 94% of the top touring artists are over the age of 40. Not only that, 40% are over the age of 60!

Pollstar looked at the top grossing tours of the decade, determined the age of the lead singer, and came up with the proportions shown below, courtesy Digital Music News.

The findings raise some interesting questions for both the music business and radio.

Why are successful tours so old? Is it that only boomers can afford today’s ticket prices, or is there something more fundamental at work?

It takes an investment of something like $1 million to break a new act. Given the poor health of the recording industry, the labels are backing fewer new acts.

Fewer new acts means a smaller chance of finding the next superstars, so the labels continue to work the more reliable established acts–-even as the members grow older.

That’s good news for adult formats, but bad news for young formats.

Formats like CHR and Alternative need a steady stream of new product. And the more product coming out, the pickier music directors can be.

There’s a direct relationship between the quality of product and the success of a format. The stronger the music, the more listeners are drawn to a format.

(This is true for all formats, but adult formats have larger libraries that soften the impact when new hits become scarce.)

Formats that rely on a high proportion of new music have fewer options. When the quality of new music declines, the choice is between playing weaker new product, or playing a higher proportion of older product.

Either solution has a negative impact.Weaker product drives listeners off. Playing older music weakens the station's position.

One frequent criticism of broadcast radio is that it has abandoned young listeners. This isn’t really true.

The absence of young superstars has created a dilemma for potential new music stations. Superstars mold homogenous music tastes, a condition ideal for broadcast radio formats.

Today’s contemporary music is characterized by a tremendous number of niches that each attract small proportions of listeners. There is no homogeneous body of music that large proportions of listeners want to listen to, just the occasional surprise.

This impacts the concert business because there are fewer acts that can fill large venues. This impacts the radio business because it is more difficult to find a cohesive body of music that a station can play.

All this plays into Internet radio’s strengths. Specialized streams make more sense when the hits aren’t really hits. Today an artist can have a top 10 album and sell fewer than 30,000 units.

All these factors add up to a challenge for radio stations targeting younger listeners.

It also raises the specter of Lady Gaga going strong into her 60s. That will be something.

eMusic Radio: Let the Games Begin

There are those who think the battle is over, that Pandora has won. Just look at the company's tremendous lead!

The problem is that radio critics who claim victory think the game is in the bottom of the ninth when in fact it is just the top of the first inning.

The game has just begun.

This was vividly illustrated with the soft roll-out of eMusic Radio, thirty-nine curated channels of new music.

At first glance it might appear that Pandora has nothing to fear from the service, but it does.

Historically, markets evolve as a broad undifferentiated product is attacked by more and more new better-targeted products.

We’ve seen this played out many times in radio.

AM Top 40 began as a broad highly successful format. It was then challenged by Underground FM. Rock itself then split into narrower formats, while Top 40 morphed into multiple variations of stations playing the hits.

Radio has historically fragmented along music format lines, but this time around the fragmentation may be based on something else–-like music discovery.

One of the key benefits Pandora users cite is music discovery. The way users describe the experience is that their personalized channels play mostly songs they know, but now and then the service plays something new and unexpected.

emusic takes the benefit of new music one step further and uses (human!) programmers to create channels designed to highlight new and unfamiliar music. This is how Billboard explains the service:

The stations cover a wide range of genres and styles, from post-punk to alternative country to guilty pleasures (the site has plenty of major label pop stars in its catalog), and will be continuously updated by the eMusic editorial staff.

The more successful Pandora becomes, the more companies will target it with new better differentiated music services. That’s how competition works.

As we pointed out last year:

Pandora may have a tremendous lead over its competition, but it remains to be seen whether the service can sustain its lead. As countless Internet companies have discovered, there is no “first-mover” advantage when it comes to new-media.

As Pandora grows, you can expect many more new competitors, and more choices for users.

Radio: Still Sounding Like It’s 1999.

The seemingly endless hand-wringing about radio’s digital future is all about peripheral issues.

Social media, web sites, mobile apps and streaming might seem important, but in truth they are worthless unless the product is right.

Radio today sounds pretty much as it did in the 1990s.Yet today’s listener isn’t anything like a listener from the 1990s.

A 1990s listener didn’t have many audio entertainment options. She listened to a handful of AM and FM stations, could play a CD, and now and then maybe watch an MTV music video.

Today’s listener has a seemingly infinite number of options from streaming stations to on-demand services, iPods, satellite, Vevo, social networks, and maybe a couple of HD stations in addition to the same dozen or so AM and FM stations.

As a result of the explosion of audio options from iPods to Pandora, today’s listener has much higher expectations than yesterday’s listener.

With more options than ever, today’s listener has much less patience for a radio station that falls short of her expectations.

This is radio's greatest challenge preparing for the future. While today's radio station is little changed, today's listener has changed a lot.

Radio’s failure to adapt the product to today’s listener is a far greater issue than worrying about Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other issues that seem to preoccupy the industry.

Take music.

A 1990s listener grew up with radio organized around music formats. Stations stayed within a format “lane” playing only songs that fit the format.

This rather cloistered arrangement meant that the 1990s listener heard a pretty small body of similarly sounding songs. Because of this, a listener accepted predictability and repetition as inevitable and perhaps even felt comforted by it.

Formats have all but disappeared for today’s listener. The ability to hear millions of songs with the click of a mouse has expanded the musical horizon of today’s listener.

Today’s listener downloads a little country, some pop, maybe hard rock, and maybe even a little international, for no other reason than she liked each song at the time and it cost virtually nothing.

Programming her own music she effortlessly segues between country, pop, and rock songs without giving any thought to whether they “fit.”

This means that when she tunes to a radio station, she isn’t looking for a format. She’s looking for songs she wants to hear.

Surprise and variety now share the stage with familiarity and comfort. She wants to hear something familiar, but at the same time wants to hear something different.

We can no longer refuse to play a popular song because it doesn’t fit the format. Today’s listener expects us to break format.

This even has implications for rotations and how songs move on and off the playlist.

When a listener could only hear a new song on one or two radio stations, we might power a song for weeks. However, today’s multimedia exposure to music means that today’s listener will grow tired of music much faster.

Today, a listener might first hear about a new song from friends on a social website, listen to it on Rhapsody, and then see the video on YouTube, all before radio adds it.

As a result of multimedia exposure, the velocity of a new hit is greater today. Radio is often the last place today’s listener hears about new music.

Music research today is more about measuring the trajectory of a song rather than determining the right moment to add a song.

We can no longer power a top testing song for eight or ten weeks even if it keeps testing. Today’s hits are far more perishable. At the speed of digital, a radio hit can quickly become  yesterday’s news.

What we test has to change too. With today’s listeners exposed to a much wider range of songs, music tests have to test a wider range of music, songs that stretch the boundaries of a format.

Adapting our approach to music is just the start. Every other programming element has to change too. We’ll get to those in future posts.

Pandora for Old People

Pandora for Old People. That’s how Fast Companycharacterized the announcement that AARP, an organization generally associated with retirement and Medicare insurance, was rolling out its own Internet radio service.

A spokesman for AARP speaking to the New York Times described the rationale for the service:

We've always been trying to reach this audience, because we know that boomers are so passionate about music. We also feel that because of changes in format and whatnot, a lot of them have gotten lost in terms of how to find their music.

The AARP may know a lot about retiring boomers, but the quote reveals a woefully simplistic and naive view of radio listening.

With so many radio people out of work, this may represent a great opportunity for a former program director to teach the AARP about “formats and whatnot.”

AARP’s launch of their own streaming service also shows the ease with which Internet radio services can be launched.

The free service offers 18 channels supported by advertisers that want to reach AARP’s 37 million members.

And AARP offers something on their free service that even Pandora doesn’t offer--a skip button!

Will Radio’s Destruction be at Its Own Hands?

Radio people who were in this business before consolidation remember a very different business.

Outside of a few corporate groups in large markets, most stations were part of small groups, maybe in several regional markets.

Many stations were literally mom and pop operations, with pop selling time and mom keeping the books.

Radio was then more of a shoot-from-the-hip business. If you had a new idea, there was a good chance you could find someone to give it a try.

There were 20% fewer stations before deregulation, yet there were far more formats and format variations. Formats would morph as they moved from market to market, so no two stations sounded alike.

Radio was a loose organic confederation, a giant network of people who’s natural urge was to keep changing things, searching for that next share point.

Consolidation, IPOs, and a focus on Quarterly Capitalism changed all that.

Radio began emulating successful public companies outside radio.

Look at successful companies like McDonald’s or Target. Major decisions are made at corporate headquarters.

Large corporations are all about centralized control, centralized decision making. And today’s corporations believe in standardization.

Adapting the approach of successful corporations outside of radio transformed radio stations into little more than McDonald’s franchises. Today formats are standardized just like the size, shape and weight of a McDonald’s beef patty.

We know that centralized decision making works in many other industries, but does it work in radio?

Not well enough to keep radio growing.

Radio has achieved its level of success through continuous, often chaotic, organic evolution and innovation.

Historically, radio programming innovation didn’t come from the cautious major market players. It came from the small market buccaneers who had little to risk, and who were willing to take fliers based on somebody’s crazy sounding idea.

A lot of the crazy sounding ideas turned out to be just crazy, but every once in a while something clicked, and soon others were emulating, and improving on that first person’s idea. The major players were the last to copy a good idea, to do something different.

As long as the buttoned-down suits ran just a handful of major market stations, innovation continued in the hinterlands beyond the reach of those who felt more comfortable doing the same thing over and over.

However, today’s vision of radio stations as McDonald franchises can be found in every market of every size.

Craziness has been systematically bred out of radio’s DNA. Tranformational programming innovation has essentially stopped.

Cisco's CEO John Chambers recently announced that he was reorganizing the company. The company had lost its edge, was losing ground to new competitors.

He concluded that Cisco had too many committees, too much bureaucracy, and as a result, initiative and innovation had suffered:

We have been slow to make decisions, we have had surprises where we should not.

He then laid out his vision of a mobilized Cisco:

• We will take bold steps and we will make meaningful decisions in a timely, targeted way.  
• We will accelerate our leadership. We understand that our competitors are fierce (but) we will not be defined by them. 
• We will simplify the way we work and how we focus our attention and resources.  We will empower our teams, and allow our people to focus on inspiring and important work.

Even Cisco, a $40 billion computer hardware company, can admit to becoming too bureaucratic, too predictable, and unresponsive to new challenges.

Radio, a business built on innovation, unpredictability, and change should do no less.This is the spirit radio needs today.

This is no time for radio to become cautious, afraid of change. We need the crazy buccaneers of the past. We need people willing to try something different, not afraid to fail.

New media is not radio’s greatest challenge. Radio’s greatest challenge is complacency and a growing buttoned-down attitude that stifles creativity.

Against an onslaught of new highly motivated challengers, it will not be new platforms, new delivery systems, or social networking that saves radio.

Radio will survive if those last strands of crazy DNA that still exist in the minds of a few programmers are reactivated and set free to innovate and reinvent radio.

If that happens, those new-media geeks don’t have a chance.

Slacker: The Engine that Thought it Could...but Can’t.

Remember the children’s story of a railroad engine with low self esteem? It managed to get over a tall hill by repeating I think I can, I think I can, I think I can over and over.

The little engine succeeded. It made it over the hill.

This week’s Slacker announcement that it was once again retooling brought to mind the story of the little engine that could. Not because we think it will succeed. We don’t think it will.

No, the story came to mind because we suspect that the venture capitalists who bankroll Slacker must read the story every night to keep their hopes up.

How else can they explain pouring over $65 million into keeping Slacker afloat, with the service no closer to breaking through than when it was just a concept on a beer-stained napkin in 2004.

       Slacker is a wannabe.

First it was an Apple wannabe. It invested millions into creating its own player. With a price tag of $200 for a 2GB player, it was over-priced, under-featured, and hopeless.

Needless to say, up against the iPod the player never caught on. You can still buy one at Amazon for $17.

Slacker blew-out its CEO, and refocused its energy into becoming a Yahoo Launchcast/AOL Radio wannabe. It offered 150 curated  “radio stations” on a desktop player and mobile app.

There is no more crowded segment of mobile audio entertainment than the generic radio station segment, so you can imagine how that worked out.

Seeing how well Pandora was doing, Slacker again refocused, this time to become a Pandora wannabe, adding music discovery tools to its player.

How’s that doing? Pandora is approaching 90 million registered users, Slacker 26 million.

According to Triton Digital ratings, Pandora has over 230 million session starts a week to Slacker’s 16 million. On average, over half a million people are listening to Pandora compared to Slacker’s 40,000.

You can guess Slacker’s response. Yes, time to retool. Slacker just announced that it will become a Spotify wannabe.

Now for a monthly fee you have access to 8 million songs that you can play on your mobile device. Of course we already have Rdio, Rhapsody, Grooveshark, and MOG, just for starters, and maybe soon the European superstar, Spotify.

There have been more rumors about Spotify coming to the US than Elvis sightings, but if it ever really happens (Spotify, not Elvis returning), then Americans will have another option, all around 10 bucks a month, all with larger libraries than Slacker.

We can guess how that will work out for Slacker.

Slacker is what we call a dabbler. Rather than choose a strategy and focus all its energies in one area-–like Pandora had done until recently, Slacker lives up to its name by dabbling in hardware, curated radio, music discovery, and now unlimited play.

Being a little of everything, it becomes nothing.
 
But the real reason we believe Slacker is brain-dead and only alive because of VC life-support is the convoluted thinking of Slacker leaders.

This fuzzy thinking was recently on display in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Declaring that Slacker isn't just going after Pandora, that it is also aiming at traditional radio stations, Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker declared:

If you look at where broadcast radio is going, it looks like they're trying to become what online radio used to be. What we're trying to become is what broadcast radio used to be, which is radio that's expertly programmed and tailored to you.

It used to be that when I came to a new town, I'd find an awesome station with a local DJ that talks about the music in my city, the concerts in my city and play some new music.

Radio done right can be really good. And broadcast radio is really missing out, because they've just turned into generic hit machines.

We suggest you reread Sasse’s comments just in case they made sense to you the first time you read them.

This is the Senior VP of Marketing talking to the Los Angeles Times. If this befuddled gibberish represents the level of strategic thinking within Slacker, the service is hopeless doomed no matter how much money is sunk into it.

First, to belittle a successful industry of over 10,000 radio stations and suggest dismissively that it is vulnerable to a heretofore pathetic me-too service displays a breathtaking level of over-confidence and egotism.

So Sasse thinks Slacker will take on radio with hip DJs that recapture some bygone era in radio?

Did he just rent American Graffiti or something? What’s next? Wolfman Jack posters on the wall?

If this is the best the marketing VP can come up with, what’s the chance Slacker can develop a coherent strategy for becoming something other than an also-ran? Nil.

To win, one has to first identify the competition, learn everything about their strengths and weaknesses, then find means to exploit their weaknesses while leveraging your own strengths in an original and creative way.

Slacker seems to just not get any of this. How else can a company burn through $65 million and still be so hopeless?

Continuous Rebranding

In part one of our series on rebranding, we made the case that rebranding is something that every radio station should embrace.

Think of rebranding not as an event, but rather a process.
 
Here in part two we’ll explain that it should not only be a process. It should be a continuous on-going process.

Rebranding is like shifting tectonic plates.

As long as the shifting is a slow nearly imperceptible continuous movement, everything is fine. It is only when the plates freeze up and pressure builds, that shifting can become violent and destructive.

That’s the way to think about rebranding. You want the changes to be gradual and continuous. If the station goes a long time without an update, it is just like two continental plates getting stuck. Sooner or later, things are going to give, and it won’t be pretty.

So the key is to create a continuous rebranding strategy. Here’s how.

The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the elements that go into creating the station's persona. Think about what makes the station what it is.

You will be surprised. Virtually every department plays a role in giving the station its distinctive personality. And you will want to include every one of them as you inventory what needs to be updated as you rebrand.

In future installments we’ll look at critical components in greater detail, but right now, just start a list and add to it as you go along.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

In programming you’ve got the music--what you play and what you don’t play. Then there are rotations. Rotations, scheduling rules, and flow can have a dramatic impact on how a station sounds even when the library doesn't change.

There’s the airstaff. Regardless of the quality of your staff and how long they have been on the air, this too needs to change from time to time. There's how much they talk, what they talk about, and how they say it. 

If you want to really shake things up, move the staff around. Moving people can often have as dramatic an effect as replacing people.

Newscasts need to change as more listeners get their headlines from the web. List all the elements of news that need to evolve over time. 

Don’t forget special programming, weekend shows, and things like that. Adding an evening feature, a midday gossip show, or some other special program changes the pace of the station, and provides something new to promote and tease.

Every special program should come to an end one day. A show may be doing well, but there's something out there that's even better. Find it and move on. 

Don’t leave engineering out of the list. Changing the over-all texture of the station should be part of the update. Listen critically to the station. Does the station sound contemporary? Think about the processing chain, consider tweeking the EQ, change the mics.

List all the annual promotions (paid and free). Include annual contests, what you give away and how you give it away. Include remotes, both paid and things like concerts. Contests like special programming should have a sunset date.

Inventory the station’s marketing. There’s the station name and logo. List the logo’s elements including things like color, fonts, special effects.

Then there’s the station’s primary positioning statement and liners. Write them all down and list the dates that they were added. Don't forget the station voice. That needs to change periodically.

There’s the web site and the dozens of elements of the site. There’s the station’s social media efforts, email, and on and on.

Once you’ve laid out all the station elements, you’ll find that there are dozens of things you you should be regularly changing.

The next step is to lay out a rebranding clock.

You want to rotate the elements of rebranding as if you’re scheduling an hour of music, except instead of an hour, the wheel might be a year or two.

If the station is a CHR, then you want to use a fairly fast rotation. If you are an AC, Country, or some other adult format, you’ll slow down the rotations.

Each month schedule to change something. It might be in marketing one month, programming the next. Schedule changes with sufficient frequency that everything will have changed by the time a year or two rolls around depending on your format.

Coordinate with your sister stations so no two stations are changing the same element at the same time.

With a group, you might be able to update and recycle ideas across stations.

A comprehensive list of station elements combined with a schedule of when they need to be updated is the road map for continuous rebranding.

It keeps the station fresh, timely, and holds the attention of your audience.

Next installment we’ll address specific marketing elements, and the importance of continually updating them.

In the meantime, start making that list!

Has Pandora Jumped the Shark?

When you think of Pandora, what come to mind?

A personalized music experience?
Stations that play music you'll love--and nothing else?
Discovering new songs?

What about comedy? When you think of Pandora, does helping the world laugh come to mind?

According to Pandora’s Tim Westergren, Pandora users were clamoring for the service to do just that, to do for comedy what it had done for music:

Adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners. There is surely nothing more important than helping the world laugh a little more!

Explaining how Pandora intends to approach comedy, Westergren notes:

We've taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic bits across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance.

As with music, we hope that the Comedy Genome Project will let people enjoy comedy they know as well as discover new talent that they love.

Students of marketing will recognize Pandora’s actions as classic line extension, an attempt to leverage the success of one brand to create a second brand.

Line extension is a controversial practice with a rather spotty history. Here’s what Al Ries and Jack Trout of Positioning fame had to say about it:

When a really new product comes along, it's almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it.

A well-known name got well-known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect's mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder.

The new product, if it's going to be successful, is going to require a new name. New ladder, new name. It's as simple as that.

We recently posted about our two decades of research on humor. Yes, listeners like to hear comedy, and radio has been too slow to capitalize on an obvious new format.

However, we’ve yet to talk to a Pandora user who really missed Bill Cosby on Pandora.

Perhaps Pandora users were demanding humor channels, but we suspect it has more to do with Pandora’s growth trajectory than a groundswell for comedy cuts.

Last August after convincing the world that the secret sauce was the Music Genome Project, Pandora reversed direction and rolled out generic format channels not unlike those found on services like Sirius, Rhapsody, and even traditional radio.

In a post titled, Pandora Now More Perfecter Than Ever, we wrote:

Pandora has been brilliantly marketed and holds a tremendous lead over its competitors. However, regardless of how it is spun, this move to add traditional channels is an admission that Pandora needs more than the genome project buzz to keep growing.

Adding comedy channels, particularly by once again invoking their pet genome project (now branded the Comedy Genome Project) is further evidence that usage of the service is not growing like it once did.

Jumping the Shark is a reference to a Happy Days episode when Fonzie, wearing his leather jacket, water skied over a shark.

While the comedy show ran another seven years, critics point to that moment as a turning point for the series.

Since then, the phrase has evolved into a more general reference to an absurd moment when a brand moves beyond the essential qualities that initially defined its success, beyond relevance or recovery.

Maybe this will prove to be another brilliant move by a company that hopes to redefine radio. Or maybe one day we’ll mark this day as the moment Pandora jumped the shark.

Radio Needs More Fascinators!

Nearly 24 million Americans woke up at 6:00 am on Friday to watch the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton on one of the 11 networks that carried the nuptials.

While there are many aspect of the spectacle people will be talking about, perhaps the most surprising subject will be hats, specifically the so-called fascinators.

If you watched any of the event or the following coverage, you’ve seen the fascinators. Fascinators are the flamboyant colorful hats that many women wore at the ceremony.

Radio needs more fascinators, not the hats we saw at the wedding, but flamboyant attention-getting things that people talk about over and over.

Radio was once a leader in creating fascinators. Often generated on-the-fly by morning personalities, they were the “throw-aways” that unexpectedly gained traction and went viral.

Today radio seems incapable of creating fascinators.

Talk radio still manages to create the occasional ripple, but few music station morning shows create anything memorable or even worth repeating.

Apologists will claim that a local morning show doesn’t have a chance up against Facebook, YouTube, and other Internet sources of viral pop culture.

We believe the opposite is true. These new sources create infinitely more opportunities to create fascinators than during radio’s pre-Internet days.

The unrestrained morning men (yes, most were men) of yesteryear would be having a field day with everything from Rebecca Black to the outfit of Princess Beatrice at the royal wedding.

The real problem is lack of corporate support and the resulting ossification of morning shows. With so many morning people on the beach, the first priority of the still employed morning shows is to stay below corporate radar.

Don’t make waves. Don’t cause problems.

Just keep doing the same one-liner morning show that your boss remembers from the good ol' days, and you might keep your job (even though it might involve a pay-cut).

Without corporate support and rewarding those who try and fail over those who don’t try, radio personality will continue to drift down the pop culture ladder towards irrelevance.

Which group head will step forward and publicly proclaim: More Fascinators!

Comedy Radio: No Laughing Matter.

Heard about Kansas City’s Funny 102.5?

In three weeks it attracted an audience of 235,000. It’s now ranked fourth 25-54 and sixth 18-49, on an HD2 channel and 250 watt translator, no less.

Is it a flash in the pan, or do we have a new format?

It doesn’t matter. One successful format launch can spawn many copy-cats. But before rushing out and buying a bunch of used comedy CDs and launching your own comedy format, read on.

Harker Research worked with Donkey Comedy Network in the development and fine-tuning of the format. Before that we had worked with other radio groups in exploring the potential for a comedy format.

After years of research and testing many approaches we learned that done well, done correctly, comedy has legs. However, creating a successful comedy format is not all laughs.

There are many more ways to do the format poorly than to do it right.

Looking at past failures, we found that earlier efforts were not well thought out. Many basic programming rules were ignored.

Fundamentally, a comedy format has be programmed like a music format. Think of it as spoken-word CHR.

The first stations that tried comedy tended to throw on the air whatever comedy albums they could find. The “playlist” tended to be a little of everything.

You were as likely to hear Jonathan Winters or Bill Cosby as Robin Williams or Eddy Murphy.

It isn’t possible to generalize about the appeal of comedians. We found just like with music artists, there are hit comedians and stiff comedians, not always related to their era. For example, a few comedians from the 1970s are more popular than many contemporary comedians.

But you can’t generalize about any particular era. It’s like syndicated television comedies. Some hold up decade after decade, while others fade quickly. Same with stand-up comedy.

The bottom line is that comedy is just like a music format. You can’t win by guessing about the hits. Comedians have to be tested, and then the cuts have to be tested.

Unfortunately, when it comes to comedy, finding the hits is just the start.

Recorded comedy routines tend to be long, wandering streams-of-consciousness monologues recorded live. Comedians want to recreate the live experience for their devoted fans.

We found that most recorded cuts are too long, hard to follow, and often with a weak kicker or punch line. Today’s listener doesn’t have the time or patience to sit through an eight minute meandering monologue, even a good one.

To keep listeners engaged, each cut has to be ruthlessly edited. The key is to turn every cut into a fast-paced well-focused bit that builds to a funny pay-off.

Once you’ve got a library, there’s the question of how to rotate the cuts.

There are cuts that hold up to repeated listening (the powers). There are also cuts that wear out quickly (the secondaries). Rotations have to be keyed to how well each cut holds up to repeated play.

The sequencing has to be right, too. The format has to flow to hold listeners. Mixing up topics, performers, and tempo all go into creating a format that hangs together.

Hosting is also critical. Early attempts at comedy were little more than comedic jukeboxes that played one cut after another.

A host threads the hour together helping in transitions. The host’s other task is to keep a person listening with teases that give a sense of what hilarity will ensue if she keeps listening.

As digital competitors grow, creating unique content will be critically important in keeping broadcast groups competitive. Comedy along with other spoken-word formats provide the greatest opportunities for creating unique formats.

Comedy: Good for a laugh, but no laughing matter.

Soaring Rhetoric. Sordid Reality.

The reporting coming out of the Las Vegas NAB convention was of a radio renaissance, a mobilized broadcast industry ready to do what it takes to prepare for a digital future.

There was talk of a re-energized industry. There was talk of wondrous wealth for radio stations that embrace digital. And there was talk about the necessary investments to monetize those efforts.

"Video can help you compete in a lot of areas that you couldn't compete in before. Tapping into video-pre-rolls and other online video ad units will be one of the keys to future revenue growth."

"You need a graphic designer in order for the client to see the value you're producing. You may not have the right people in place to succeed. The van driver can't be the person who's in charge of the website."

All very exciting stuff.

But a recent reader’s poll by Inside Radio paints a somewhat different image of radio, that of an industry that is barely prepared for the present, let alone mobilizing for the future.

The recession may be technically over and radio revenue is growing again, but a majority of Inside Radio readers say their station isn't doing any external marketing. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) say they rely exclusively on their own properties for marketing.

The recession is over, revenues are trending up, but fattening the bottom line seems to be the focus of too many groups, not preparing for the future.

As one participant observed, “I doubt ownership will ever restore our budget to pre-recession levels.”

It isn’t just marketing budgets that have been cut at many stations. As anyone in radio knows, the cuts have been across the board.

Radio's new normal is GMs managing markets hundreds of miles apart, program directors over-seeing three or more stations, and voice-tracked robo-radio even in key dayparts.

Does this sound like an industry preparing for a challenging future?

Consider the difference between how radio and television are preparing for the future. We recently noted the investment Viacom is making to strengthen their brands. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman believes the company's commitment to research has helped resuscitate networks such as MTV:

"We've increase our investment in research-market research on our viewers, brand research. In turn, study insight has hopefully led to smarter content investments-focusing the programming around what the research tells us."

Viacom is not alone. The networks realize that creating compelling programming is the key to continued success. They are investing heavily in research and marketing, creating new shows (twenty this year alone) and retooling the old ones.

And it is paying off.

Despite mobile and internet video, television viewing continues to grow, nearly 159 hours a month.

Television spot revenues grew by 24% in 2010 compared to radio’s 7%. This year’s network upfront is expected to surpass $10 billion, with double digit CPM rate hikes.

Television understands that nothing else matters if the content isn’t there.

Compelling content is also the key to radio’s survival in the digital age.

Not video prerolls. Not in-house graphics designers. Not fancy web sites. Not a brilliant social media strategy. Not “the ability to engage audience in all locations where they have a mobile device.”

Content. None of this matters if the content sucks.

But how many groups are investing in content? How many groups are recruiting and grooming the next generation of local air personalities?

Which companies are creating the formats of tomorrow?

Does it make sense for so many broadcast groups to gut their products while expanding the platforms on which people can listen to their gutted products?

As we wrote just the other day, radio remains relevant and strong. However, short-sighted financial decisions can still hobble radio's digital transition. At this critical point, failure to invest in content will have long lasting negative implications.

In the midst of the soaring rhetoric about a fantasy world where radio's investments in the future are limitless, one lone voice at NAB tried to remind radio about content.

John Gehron, perhaps one of the few people in new-media that understands content warned that local radio has to mean more than music.

If it's only for music, that's only going to help you for five years. The challenge is how do you reattach yourself to the community in a way that's good for the community and sets you apart from everybody.

It is a good question, and one that too few radio groups are asking.

Robo-radio delivered on a new platform is still robo-radio. And it sucks.

Rebranding: Don't Wait. Don't Go Half-Way.

The thought of rebranding a radio station strikes terror in the hearts of most general managers, sales managers, and program directors.

That’s because within the industry, rebranding, changing the look, sound, and feel of the station, is too often taken as a sign of failure. Only failed stations rebrand. Successful stations don’t.

Unfortunately, that’s wrong and dangerous. Every radio station should periodically rebrand itself. And the irony is that rebranding should be done when a station is on top, not when it has hit the skids.

Over time radio stations fall into predictable routines, develop bad habits, and stop innovating.

If these bad habits continue for very long, a successful station can lose momentum and find itself on a downwards slide–even while continuing to do what made it successful in the first place.

Compounding the problem is the fact that successful stations generally ignore warning signs too long. A soft book or one where your competitor has an usually strong book are too often dismissed as flukes.

Stations delude themselves into thinking that their misfortunes are only temporary, patiently waiting month after month, book after book.

It’s what we call The Next Book syndrome, over-confidence in the belief that “steady as she goes” is the formula for success.

Too many stations resist change until things have deteriorated so badly that they have no choice but to change. But by this time listeners have already lost confidence in the station and begun drifting away.

In the midst of a free-fall, rebranding too often has an air of desperation. Trying too hard drives listeners away from the station even faster.

So the answer is to periodically rebrand the station even when everything seems to be going OK.

Even if you think the station is perfect, that nothing can be done better than it is currently being done, the station should change from time to time. Think of it as Spring cleaning.

The good news is that while GMs and PDs hate rebranding, listeners see it as a sign of strength.

Making changes shows listeners the station is confident and willing to change. It shows boldness. Listeners like boldness.

It can helps raise a fading station’s top of mind awareness. It creates new curiosity about it.

Don’t Go Half-Way.

Getting over the reluctance to make changes to a healthy station is the first huddle in successfully rebranding a station. The second huddle is going far enough for people to notice.

The temptation is to rebrand by making modest incremental changes in the hope that it will minimize any risks. This is the wrong attitude in rebranding.

Moving too cautiously creates more problems than it solves. If the changes are more talk than action, listeners will perceive the moves as a sign of weakness.

Like jumping half-way over a ditch, a cautious effort can leave you in a deeper hole.

Timid rebranding just confirms what listeners were beginning to sense–that the station is struggling. Bold moves are a sign of strength and confidence.

If it is bold enough to make you nervous, you are probably on the right track, but boldness alone isn’t the solution. You have to make sure the moves create a positive impact.

Rebranding should be bold, and yet still evolutionary. It should be a natural “next step” so that listeners feel that the moves are not to catch up, but rather keep up with the listener’s evolving expectations.

That means the rebranding strategy has to be based on a well-grounded understanding of the station, your audience, and changes in the marketplace (today not just terrestrial radio, but alternatives to radio too).

Research is critical to a successful rebranding effort because off-target rebranding can accelerate an already deteriorating situation.

It’s another reason to think of rebranding as a continuous process instead of something distasteful only done out of desperation.

In future posts we’ll look at the steps in rebranding a station. The key to a successful effort is to make changes across a broad range of elements. We’ll discuss what those should be.

Why “Crusty Old Buzzard” Media Keep Winning

There’s nothing more frustrating to broadcast radio critics than radio’s continued success. The critics tell us that radio along with the other traditional media will soon be toast, just a distant memory of past glories.

Soon listeners will abandon radio for Internet alternatives. Media buyers will follow them pouring more and more money into new media, ultimately starving radio to a financial death, the critics tell us.

Yet listeners keep listening, media buyers keep buying. The latest projections have broadcast radio spot revenue continuing to grow for the foreseeable future even without digital.

How can that be? How can radio critics be so righteously confident they’re right, and yet so wrong-headedly wrong?

A recent MediaPost column by Bill Rose, Seiter & Miller VP/Director of Account Services, notes that:

Big, old media brands with their passive audiences, one-way communication and clunky buyer/seller interactions (face-to-face selling, really?) are just not ready to leave the party. Many of these crusty old buzzards are having banner years in this, the second decade of the 21st century.

Rose believes these crusty old buzzards aren’t toast for a very good reason: They deliver value to the advertiser. He attributes traditional media’s continued strength to its ability to:

Drive fundamental awareness and positive perceptions for a product or brand. It is the gateway to deeper brand relationships; (it) is the battleground for the biggest marketing bucks.

He believes that “Digital media (online, mobile and social) have not inspired confidence that they can be the lead spears in putting a brand quickly on the map of consumer's consciousness.”

Advertisers may like to dabble in new delivery systems, but ultimately they put the lion’s share of their budgets into media that deliver value. Radio’s reach is unsurpassed. Radio’s ability to efficiently target an audience beats even television.

New media is not radio’s greatest threat. It is radio’s self-doubt and a fire-sale mentality that diminishes the product and willingly drives CPPs down.

Be sure to read his entire commentary.

Radio Asleep at the Wheel...Again.

Yesterday we brought you the story of Rebecca Black, a 13 year-old who’s parents helped her produce a music video.

Ridiculed with comments like hilariously dreadful and mind-meltingly horrific, she just may be having the last laugh. Her video is approaching 38 million views.

 The phenomenon has generated nearly 500 web stories so far, an appearance on the Tonight Show, and kind words from Lady Gaga herself.

The perfect grist for radio morning shows, right?

Out of the roughly 1,600 CHR and AC radio stations that ought to be all over this, by our count 27 have played the song. Fewer than 2% of stations in the two formats have bothered to exploit the story.

About one-third of the spins were on Clear Channel stations alone. CBS, Citadel, and Cumulus, in contrast, had each managed to play the song once when we checked.

The monitors may have missed a few spins, but even if we're off by a factor of 10, it says a lot about radio's loss of focus. Friday went viral, and radio didn't even seem to notice.

Is there any stronger evidence that radio is out of touch?

Is This the Worst Song Ever?

Can a song with over 33 million YouTube hits be the worst song ever? What if the song is also ranks 45th on iTunes?

The song is Friday, sung by 13 year-old Rebecca Black and produced by Ark Music Factory.

 

According to Physorg.com:

As the tune began to attract attention on YouTube, a Yahoo! music blog called it a "mind-meltingly horrific song" and asked readers "Is YouTube Sensation Rebecca Black's 'Friday' The Worst Song Ever?"

Time magazine described "Friday" as a "train wreck" and the video as "hilariously dreadful."

The poor reviews only fueled more interest in the video and it has become a viral hit, racking up millions of YouTube views, spawning a slew of parodies on the video-sharing site and making Black an Internet sensation.

A 13 year-old unknown can generate over 33 million YouTube views, but most radio station videos generate views in the hundreds. What does it say about the state of radio and radio morning shows?

Why can't a multi-billion dollar industry that prides itself on its marketing skills create a viral sensation? After all, even a kid can do it.

 

Radio Needs Some Tiger Blood

Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, The Situation, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears. At one time each has captured the attention of Americans with their outrageous behavior.

There was a day when radio morning shows too could capture a listener's attention with outrageous, off-the-wall behavior. The radio industry once had hometown Charlie Sheens throughout America.

They created controversy. They created GM headaches, but they created water-cooler talk. And they produced box-car morning ratings.

Today, most morning shows are like television morning shows without pictures. A little chat, a little news, and the occasional funny story off the web.

Is that any way to fire up an audience? Is that the sort of content that will keep people in their cars after they’ve gotten to work to see how things turn out?

No. Absolutely not.

Local radio morning shows simply cannot successfully compete directly against television morning shows. National TV shows have the big hosts. They have the big interviews. They have the fancy graphics, cut-aways, and on-location reports. And local TV morning shows just ride their coat-tails.

Local radio morning shows can only successfully compete against TV morning shows by doing what TV cannot. That means being more controversial, more unpredictable, and a little more crazy.

Radio needs some tiger blood.

Radio was once the medium that tested the limits of good taste. Radio was once the machine behind many TV newscast kickers. But no more.

Now it is Charlie Sheen, YouTube videos, the Daily Show, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, and Skins that people talk about and discuss on social networks.

Seems like the rest of the world sped past radio on it’s way to ever-greater attention grabbing crass tastelessness, leaving radio morning shows in the dust.

Today, the average prime-time basic cable television viewer sees more off-the-wall craziness in a single evening than today’s staid radio morning show produces in a year. Radio has become cautious, even prudish, at a time when the country is headed in the other direction.

Morning shows seem frozen in place reflecting the community standards of Happy Days while radio listeners are busy downloading fart apps.

Whatever you think of today’s moral climate, of America’s 21st century sense of humor and entertainment, radio has to be the medium that reflects where America is today, not when The Osbournes were cutting edge.

Want to get some double digit morning numbers? Stop sounding like Fox and Friends.

No Bunker Mentality for Viacom

While the looming threat of new media has demoralized radio and created a bunker mentality among many of its leaders, television has refused to accept that new media is anything but a great opportunity.

You can see the difference in how the two media are preparing for the future.

While radio trims, consolidates, and focuses on the expense side of the ledger, television invests in the future.

According to MediaPost:

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman reiterated Monday how the company’s commitment to research has helped resuscitate networks such as MTV:

"We’ve increase our investment in research–market research on our viewers, brand research. In turn, study insight has hopefully led to smarter content investments–focusing the programming around what the research tells us."

Media moguls don’t often credit research for turning their products around. They more often attribute success to their own brilliant "out of the box" thinking.

So it is heartwarming to a research company like Harker Research to hear a CEO credit research for doing the heavy lifting.

The greater the threat, the greater the importance that programmers and marketers understand their markets and understand their brand.

Greater understanding comes through the right research, something that Viacom under Mr. Dauman clearly appreciates.

Radio’s financial funk will not be reversed by trimming expenses, creating more nationalized robo-radio, and cloning the same tired formats.

There’s a reason that post-recession television revenues are growing faster than radio’s. Television still believes in itself and acts like it by investing in the future.

Too many radio leaders are locked in their bunkers.

Want to Build Your Own Pandora?

Want to build your own music discovery platform? Work at Columbia University may soon help. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A new collaboration between Columbia University researchers and The Echo Nest, a company that tracks online music and delivers listening suggestions to users, hopes to take the human element out of Internet radio. One goal is to deliver better recommendations and more songs through improved artificial intelligence.

To get started, download the app Discovr. Here’s what Discovr does:

Discovr lets you see how the music you love is connected, and makes it easy to find great new bands and artists that are similar to what you like.

Music and Program directors take note: For $2.99, your listeners can learn more about your music than you know. That should be a sobering thought.

 

Continuing developments in music discovery only reinforces the point we’ve been making. Pandora may have been the first to market artist linkage as a means to discover new music, but they are not alone, and in some respects they are already behind the state of the art.

Bob Pittman's Rational Digital Strategy

Bob Pittman has done a better job shining a light on broadcast’s continued strength and relevance than the NAB, RAB, pundits, and leaders of all the large groups combined.

We noted his quick start last month asking Does Radio Finally Have a Leader? The answer appears to be yes.

After scoring interviews with the Wall Street Journal, Variety, Bloomberg, and others he quickly made his first digital acquisition, Thumbplay. The acquisition again put broadcast radio in coast to coast headlines from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times.

Ad Age, a magazine that has had some pretty unkind words to say regarding radio the last few years, interviewed Pittman last week on the Thumbplay purchase with the title Bob Pittman’s Old-School Approach to New Radio Success.

Once again he comes off as a confident believer in radio, spelling out Clear Channel’s rational approach to digital, all the while emphasizing radio’s strengths. He notes that:

Clear Channel is a company of radio stations that have very powerful local brands, 850 stations in 150 cities. Everybody who's doing national is trying to figure out how to do local. We already have that kind of scope by having national and local reach.

Regarding the purchase of Thumbplay:

Thumbplay is really not radio, it's a playlist maker like a Pandora. It finds a bunch of songs and puts those on perpetual shuffle. We know people like (dynamic curation) so we want to deliver that as well. Thumbplay has already developed a great product, so we wanted to quickly add it to what we're doing with iHeartRadio.

Last November we suggested that:

Pandora may have a tremendous lead over its competition, but it remains to be seen whether the service can sustain its lead. As countless Internet companies have discovered, there is no “first-mover” advantage when it comes to new-media.

Nothing that Pandora does is proprietary. Every aspect of Pandora can be replicated, and ultimately improved upon.

The title of the post was Thanks Pandora, We’ll Take it From Here. It could well have been the title of the Ad Age interview.

Listeners Can Smell a Loser

Listeners are like animals. They can smell fear.

With today’s large consolidated radio groups, most radio stations have people with equal marketing and programming skills and similar resources. As a result of consolidation, radio’s playing field is more even than it ever was.

Yet a more level playing field hasn’t tightened battles, or made for fewer losers.

Look at any ranker and you’ll find that shares of stations outside the top two or three drop rapidly. Every market has a few stations with large audiences, but most have a fraction of the leader's listeners.

No format is a guaranteed winner. Every format has its share of losers. As of last Fall, winners in the 36 non-embedded PPM markets came from sixteen different formats.

Head to head battles are nearly always lopsided. As a rule, the second station in a format battle has a third fewer listeners than the leader. And these battles don’t seem to favor any one company over another.

It doesn't matter who owns the station. Clear Channel, CBS, Citadel, Cumulus, Emmis and Entercom all have winners and losers. No group has a lock on winning.

If every format has winners and losers. If every radio group has winners and losers. And if even within a market cluster there are winners and losers, then there must be some quality, some element that no brain-trust or deep pocket can replicate time after time.

What is it?

Winners possess an intangible quality, a winner's aura that transcends ownership, resources, and all the other tangible differences we tend to focus on when judging a radio station.

It is the winning aura that attracts listeners. Listeners sense a winner. They recognize it when they hear it.

And listeners can smell a loser. They sense when a station is faltering. People don’t like listening to a loser.

A station can play the best testing music, have the best jocks, and give away bigger prizes and still lose if it sounds like a loser.

Losers sound like they are going through the motions. Jocks sleep-walk through their shifts, sounding like they’d like to be anywhere other than the studio. Promos sound tired and repetitious, promoting the same recycled contests and events.

The music is predictable, the song choices uninspired. The music is scheduled with a similar lack of inspiration.

These things tell listeners that the station is a loser even when by every objective measure, radio people think the station sounds great.

How many times has a radio group taken the format of a successful station to another market and had it fail miserably? The second station may be a perfect formatic clone of the first, but unless the clone captures the aura of the first, it will fail.

Listeners know a winning station when they hear it. A winner draws them in. It lures them to listen longer.

The jocks sound like a neighbor. They live in the same town, have the same local experiences, and share them on-air. They sound like they want to be on the radio, they want to share with the listener, whether it is a song, a contest, promotion, or even just the weather.

The music of a winner is both familiar and yet a bit of an adventure. There’s a balance between the new and the known, a comfortable but wearing-well mix of music. There’s a natural flow to the music, like a mix tape made for a friend.

The marketing for a winner is an extension of the winner’s programming. It doesn’t try too hard. It is more a subtle inducement rather than bribe. It reinforces the feeling that the station is a winner, conveying the same confidence that the station effuses.

A local programmer and local talent are key to a radio station’s success not because they are smarter than anybody else. It is because they are local. Only local people can really care about the station and its listeners. Only local people can create a winner’s aura that draws people in.

Even as local radio’s competitors grow, competition is not local radio's greatest threat. It is consolidation and the nationalization of radio. If local radio ceases to be local and loses its aura, it will be consumed by the coming tsunami of national alternatives.

However, if broadcasters invest in local radio, leveraging local talent to create and enhance local radio's aura, no national service can prevail.