He owns two radio stations in Aspen.<\/p>\n
And they only have two minutes of commercials an hour.<\/p>\n
As they say on the broadcast, you’re only two minutes away from music.\u00c2\u00a0 If all terrestrial stations adopted this paradigm, could the terrestrial radio band have a resurgence, could it dominate?<\/p>\n
We all hate terrestrial radio.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of the COMMERCIALS!<\/p>\n
And Pandora is programmed by a computer.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why it always gets it so wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 When it comes to music, when it comes to taste, we need a human being.<\/p>\n
Satellite’s got human beings, but you pay for it.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s hard to convince people to do so.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just not an instant close.\u00c2\u00a0 Because satellite doesn’t know who its audience is.\u00c2\u00a0 The way you succeed today is to turn your customers into evangelists.\u00c2\u00a0 And satellite hasn’t had that ability since the merger.\u00c2\u00a0 It used to be a club of renegades, now it’s where the terrestrial talkers go to die.<\/p>\n
Except for Howard Stern.<\/p>\n
But there are always exceptions.<\/p>\n
But maybe in the future we won’t be spoon-fed.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we’ll choose all our own music.<\/p>\n
But maybe we won’t.<\/p>\n
Jeff used a great word today, EXHAUSTION!\u00c2\u00a0 When you come home after a hard day at work do you really want to dig in and pick what you want to listen to, or do you want someone to do it for you?\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, a muso is dying to curate his own playlist, then again, how do you discover anything new?<\/p>\n
At two minutes an hour, if he sells out, Jeff’s stations make money.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s not quite there yet, he’s still got unsold inventory.\u00c2\u00a0 Because the price is high.\u00c2\u00a0 But advertisers are seeing the light.\u00c2\u00a0 If you support a station that puts the listener first, it burnishes YOUR image.<\/p>\n
Terrestrial radio is no different from the rest of America.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s all about short term profits.\u00c2\u00a0 It killed the major labels, it’s anathema to developing something with credibility, with longevity.\u00c2\u00a0 We need to believe.\u00c2\u00a0 And belief takes time.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re taking the easy way out, we don’t want to go along for the ride.<\/p>\n
Look at Apple.\u00c2\u00a0 They break every rule.\u00c2\u00a0 The products are unique, what you didn’t even know you wanted, and they’re anything but cheap.\u00c2\u00a0 Could radio succeed at this game?\u00c2\u00a0 Giving people what they should hear, not what they want to hear?\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, if you throw research out the window and trust your gut do you actually GROW your audience?\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a business in me-too, but the true riches are in being unique.<\/p>\n
We had a great hang today at Le Pain Quotidien.\u00c2\u00a0 I follow Jeff on Twitter, he responded to what I wrote about Troy Carter and when I wrote back he told me we should get together.<\/p>\n
And what did we do when we connected this afternoon?\u00c2\u00a0 We talked about MUSIC!<\/p>\n
It’s hard to talk about most Top Forty music today.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s there to\u00c2\u00a0 say?\u00c2\u00a0 Ke$ha brushes her teeth with Jack Daniel’s?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the big story online.\u00c2\u00a0 Or do we want to read an expose on Diane Warren or Dr. Luke?\u00c2\u00a0 Interesting, but what we like most is artists, with a point of view, doing it their way.\u00c2\u00a0 How do we foster this?<\/p>\n
The economic crash in the music business is weeding out a lot of those looking to get rich quick.\u00c2\u00a0 Used to be you played music because you were inspired by the blues, now you’re inspired by "American Idol" and the cash.\u00c2\u00a0 If you put fame and riches first, you end up with today’s popular music, tripe.<\/p>\n
Not that there’s not good music out there.\u00c2\u00a0 What if someone programmed the best of the best?<\/p>\n
Do we really need narrow niches?\u00c2\u00a0 What if we had personalities listeners could believe in?\u00c2\u00a0 Who were beholden not to the boss, but the fan.\u00c2\u00a0 Who kept their jobs not only because they didn’t air tune-outs, but because they had something to say, because they had a point of view.\u00c2\u00a0 Ryan Seacrest is today’s most popular deejay…\u00c2\u00a0 What does he stand for again?\u00c2\u00a0 Questionable sexuality?\u00c2\u00a0 A willingness not to offend?\u00c2\u00a0 A desire to be ubiquitous?<\/p>\n
The stations of yore survived on the personalities.\u00c2\u00a0 WNEW FM was carried by Scott Muni, never mind Alison Steele and Zacherle.<\/p>\n
If you build it, they will come.<\/p>\n
But you’ve got to build it with them in mind.<\/p>\n
That’s what’s wrong with Pandora.\u00c2\u00a0 They say it’s about listeners, but it’s really about getting rich.<\/p>\n
Not that radio stations should lose money.\u00c2\u00a0 But if they see themselves as a service, a life force, they’ve got a chance to survive.<\/p>\n
Terrestrial could kill satellite and Pandora overnight if they turned down the commercials and opened up the playlists, if they became Apple instead of Microsoft, if they appealed to those who cared and learned to care instead of being a commodity.<\/p>\n
We can’t bring the public back to what once was.<\/p>\n
But we can corral them to where we want them to be in the future.<\/p>\n
But only if we put them first.<\/p>\n
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