Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Commercial radio will have only itself to blame if the Internet ends up eating its pablum lunch.
May 24, 1999 | Like not a few people I know, I pretty much stopped listening to radio after I moved to New York. (Hereinafter "radio" excludes public radio, a genre which, in New York anyway, is largely a magazine for people with busy hands and eyeballs.) With a few exceptions, the 10-hits-
I'm not saying there's no decent radio in New York, though its quality is inversely proportional to its receivability in my apartment (like free-form WFMU, which I have to catch online). And I freely admit I'm making gross generalizations. But gross generalization is what makes or breaks radio, by its passive nature: You turn on the radio to leave it on, so if you find a station -- or the entire radio palette -- disappointing in general, you're not going to turn it on at all.
And gross generalization, especially in a big market like New York's, is what radio programming is all about: With a high listener-
In addition to thousands of Netcasts of offline radio stations and numerous DIY amateurs, a number of new-media companies are jumping into online audio. Recently Lycos and Yahoo have claimed a piece of a field that includes Viacom's Imagine Radio, Spinner.com and Rolling Stone Radio, among others. (The latter just hooked David Bowie, the recidivist Net opportunist, to DJ an online channel.)
Commercial broadcasters discount their online competition, and if it principally appeals to already-lost causes like me, they may have a point. Compared with the single-application appliance for receiving broadcast radio -- a "radio" -- sound quality is still a problem over low-bandwidth connections. And although Internet audio can allow listeners to customize their own "stations" and can offer theoretically endless micro-categories -- drum 'n' bass, a zillion variations of "alternative" (ironically, probably the most common category) -- content is still a problem for some. Lycos, with its whopping five channels -- Adult Contemporary! Smooth Jazz! -- has yet to catch up with the daring programming offered by an airplane-seat armrest. And sites are still struggling for viable advertising; many use banner ads, which I suppose are effective on listeners used to staring blankly at their radios. (There's also the potential for channel branding, hinted at by Spinner's "Doritos Radio," a mild ranch-flavored blend of alt-rock staples. The first broadcaster to offer channels of Gap and Banana Republic commercial music will be sitting on a gold mine.)
But if online music servers do someday cut into traditional radio's audience, the irony is that they'll do so by employing every strategy broadcast companies have used to ruin radio -- only better and more efficiently.
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