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| From | "Bob" <segarini@sympatico.ca> |
| Subject | More Credible Radio Info... |
| Date | Sat, 29 May 2004 19:26:17 -0400 |
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From the Southern Ontario/Western New York Radio Board...
The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum
[ Post a response | The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum ]
Super PD/consultant Guy Zapoleon on radio and the internet
Posted by Stan on May 28, 2004, 4:30 pm
User logged in as: abaco
66.185.84.196
BY GUY ZAPOLEON
Why has Internet radio taken so long to explode? Music fans know how good the streams that mass sites Radio@AOL, Yahoo! Launch, MSN Music, Rhapsody, Live365, and Shoutcast provide can be.
Kurt Hanson, in his excellent article, "The Future of Radio" (in RAIN here), quoted Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future. Amara's idea is called the "First Law of Technology," and reads:
"A consistent pattern in our response to new technologies is we simultaneously overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact."
There are some strong signs that the boom for Internet radio will be on us within 5 years, but old habits die hard. As is often the case, the most popular option for listening to and discovering music -- radio -- had to make enough mistakes for the masses to be ready for their longtime love affair with the medium to be over.
Broadcast radio becomes the dinosaur
The focus of the rating services on measuring listeners that use radio as a background has caused radio to focus on a consumer who really isn't passionate about music. This has chased the passionate music consumer to his CDs and to the Internet (including downloading MP3s).
What's worse is that radio studies the listeners that are left; and as it programs to those existing listeners, it becomes a "self- fulfilling prophesy," and no longer appeals to the passionate music listeners who no longer consume a lot of radio.
The result is a "dumbed down" form of programming which leads to format (and radio) stagnation. Add to that huge blocks of almost double the amount of commercials radio ran during its successful years, plus the lack of development of entertaining personalities, and you have a very stagnant medium that is "ripe for the picking" by other media.
At the same time, to take advantage of this stagnation, new forms of music delivery, easily used by the average person, have become available. You're about to see satellite radio, and soon Internet radio, have the kind of impact that FM radio had on AM radio in the early 70s, leaving broadcast radio in jeopardy of becoming the "dinosaur" this time.
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