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| Saturday, August 13, 2005 |
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More of both, eventually 
| | The future of public radio may not be podcasting, but it will certainly be based on much lower-cost methods of producing and distributing most programs, and as incumbents in the industry, the WGBHs of the world are unable to cannibalize their own operations to the extent they must to survive. To do so would mean walking away from all the buildings and studios and firing 80% of the staff. Just as 3.5" disk drives replaced the 5" drives at a far lower price/performance ratio, so will the new public radio produce and distribute programs at a far lower cost. And it won¹t be done by the same organizations. |
| | In commercial radio we see the migration to the two models of talk and formulaic music. As others have said, there¹s no humanity left. Commercial stations will die the same way some of the telecoms bit the dust: They¹re competing for a limited base of customers with undifferentiated commodity products. It¹s ironic that the broadcast spectrum is a scarce resource yet those with license to use it are writing their own death warrants by using it so inefficiently. |
| | Public radio is on the same path. Sure, it's made worse by the facts that the Bush administration wants to rip the guts out of it, and that NPR and the local stations are always fighting over money and control. But the real problem is coming from the fact that listeners want long-tail time-shifted content. They want to hear programs that are more meaningful to them, and they want to listen at their convenience. The entire broadcast-radio system, with its distribution, simply can't provide what the customers want. It¹s not a flaw of management. There are very good people doing the best that can be done. The problem is inherent and systemic. |
| | Podcasting is to public radio what Garage Band and Pro Tools are to the music industry. Large recording studios are closing left and right because musicians good ones can produce great music in small project studios or even in their apartments. Moby is just one of the better-known examples. But more important than the stars are all the lesser-known artists. Because of iTunes and GarageBand.com, a significant portion of the market is shifting towards the long tail. The traditional music industry can only survive to the extent that it can support these new forms of production and distribution, and the same is true for public radio. |
| | I think Doug is right; but I think he's discounting the level of actual satisfaction that many listeners have with both commercial and noncommercial radio, and the incumbent technologies on the receiving end. iPods are a huge phenomenon; but they make lousy radios, and their sum population is a fraction of the car radio population alone. |
| | Satellite radio is a more immediate threat to terrestrial radio, and many cars now come equipped with it. But it's no less corporate than Clear Channel, and often sounds like it. My kid, who loves oldies, notices that Sirius' 50s and 60s channels are essentially tape loops that play exactly the same series of tunes, over and over. KRTH/101.1fm in Los Angeles, with a notoriously tight playlist of maybe 200 tunes, at least changes some of those tunes every week or so. |
| | It will be years before factory car radios (or players, or whatever we'll call them) support podcasting in a clueful way, and in large numbers. And don't hold your breath for the aftermarket radio business. Ever try to operate one of those? Even as radios and CD players, they have horrible UIs. The best they can do is offer a stereo input jack on the front and an AUX button, so you can play your iPod or whatever through them. And hey, we might do that; but will the rest of the driving world? |
| | And let's face it: there is much about the limits of conventional radio — it's scarce spectrum, its main street of familiar channels, and its currency (especially with news, weather and sports) — that listeners find familiar and appealing, in spite of the body-snatcher qualities of what one finds on most signals. |
| | Anyway, we'll get to where Doug's going (and leading the rest of us, frankly). But it will take awhile. |
| | So, for all the folks who rag on MSM and at the same time decry any effort to attach a business model to content: how the fuck are you guys going to pay for the news so that the news providers can reestablish the connection with customers? Last I heard, a person who isn't paying is not a customer. |
| | The only way that works, until we build the tech to make it happen in a better way, is voluntary payment, which supports both public radio and Doug's IT Conversations. |
| | I think the best first step is to make that as easy and efficient as possible. |
| | Meanwhile, most of us will make do with the familiar inefficiencies of what we've known all our lives. |
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