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| Thursday, March 2, 2006 |
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This is a crass attempt 
The only loser, I think, is Earthlink. And GoDaddy. And maybe Dave and Steve. Not sure.
Glad? Well, yeah!
Down the Oh Well
| | Brad Blog is upset over the axing of Air America from KXXT/1010 radio in Phoenix. So is Kos. Look up KXXT on Google and your top result is 1010kxxt.com. Given the letter to listeners now on the front page of that site, I gotta wonder if it's the site of KXXT itself or the website of somebody who loaned the domain to the station while it ran Air America. Here's how it begins: |
| | a message from air america phoenix |
| | Dear Friends of Air America Phoenix, |
| | Thank you to the staff, the listeners and the clients for all you¹ve done in the past 17 months. |
| | You helped take an unrated, unprofitable AM radio station and pushed it to a tie for 3rd place out of 25 AM stations in Phoenix. You took that same AM station and made it profitable in less than a year and even after the sale was announced you stood by Air America Phoenix and we kept on making money even when our future was in doubt and we didn¹t know when our "plug" was going to be pulled. In fact, the last month we were on the air was the 3rd best month we've had financially! |
| | Air America Phoenix has now disappeared into the ether and Phoenix is left with multiple Christian formats, some in English and others in Spanish, several "brokered" time stations (you know the radio stations selling you vita'ins, good bowel movements and financial advice) a bagful of right wing "Conservative Talk stations" featuring Rush, Sean, Laura, Bill Bennett, Savage, Medved and all of their local imitators, three "Sports Talk" stations that live off the largess of their sister stations in the big corporate clusters that dominate the dial in Phoenix. Is anyone enjoying Tony Snow on KTAR...did anyone ask for him? And there are 3 "nostalgia" stations on AM and another on the FM dial. (The inside radio joke on nostalgia is that listeners are "dying" for it!) CBS' new "Free" FM is another station loaded with sophomoric chatter, but without the interruption of overplayed songs! Free FM is a continuous loop of bad FM morning show humor 24 hours a day! CBS should have stood by Howard Stern and they will regret the day they didn¹t! |
| | Phoenix has 60 odd radio signals on the AM and FM dial and the best of those signals are owned by four companies; CBS, Clear Channel, Bonneville and Sandusky, they play it safe and considering the level of investment, it is certainly understandable. Innovation and change has to come from the smaller clusters and the one and two station owners. Will they innovate? Take a chance like we did with THE STATION WE CAN'T MENTION? Probably not, they never have and they never will, like the classic definition of insanity they "continue to do the same thing over and over expecting different results"! Only a special company like James Crystal would let me take the chance, Thanks, Jim! |
| | I gather James Crystal sold the station. |
| | As for facts, says here KXXT was most recently #22 overall (persons 12+), with a 1.2 share. And there's a limit to how well the station can do, given that it drops from 15,000 watts by day to just 250 watts at night. Ground conductivity is good in Phoenix, but still, the signal is marginal beyond a few miles from the transmitter, out off the southwest edge of town. |
| | I've got to admit that Air America is doing better than I expected. But it's still insufferably biassed to all but the true believers. Krush on Kos writes, |
| | More than anything in the whole world I detest lies. Even if the truth is ugly I'd rather hear it than be lied to. |
| | Air America was one of my only sources of media truth. Even NPR tries to be fair and balanced with the liars in the Whitehouse as they are fearful of losing government grants. They are now worthless and might as well pull the plug on themselves. PBS and the Daily Show are all I have left. |
| | What's sad here isn't just the loss of one radio outlet. It's that anybody sees any all-biased network as a source of Truth. And that terrestrial radio in general continues to hell in its own handbasket. |
| | Would anybody listen if auto makers didn't keep putting radios in cars? |
The Cult of Chuck
| | I have no idea what to make of this. |
Storeware
| | The answer is two things. |
| | Even when consumers aren't using portable devices, more are shifting their music consumption away from stereos. Among 1,031 adult respondents to a consumer-behavior survey published last year by the CEA, 34% said they listened to music at home primarily on a PC, compared with just 26% who said they used a stereo or surround-sound receiver as their main home listening system. |
| | The trend is leading some electronics companies to adjust their strategies. Decreased demand helped push Sony to recently end its Qualia brand of super-high-end home audio and video equipment. Part of the rationale for the shutdown was an effort to streamline the company's complex structure, and some Qualia products, such as flat-screen televisions, will be rolled into other Sony product lines. But among the products being discontinued are a Super-Audio CD player that retailed for more than $12,000. |
| | People are willing to trade quality for quantity. They got quality from CDs. They get quantity from MP3s. With the iPod Hi-Fi, Apple gives its users a handy way to add a speaker option to headphone playback, while eating into the soft underbelly of a home audio market already weakened by subordination of audio to video. |
| | In fact, home stereo choices are getting thinner all the time. There are few "stereo" receivers left, since all the mainstream manufacturers have gone to Surround Sound. Sure, you can run your iPod through one of those, but how many of us know how to do that? See, you plug this little thing into your iPod, and press the AUX button on your receiver. No, sorry. The CD player is plugged into the AUX. The iPod line goes to ... oh, right, VCR/DVD2. Or is it VCR/DVD1? Or is it Tape Monitor? Hang on. Lemme check. You got a flashlight? |
| | Add to this the sad fact that audio/video sales showrooms are a confusing mess. One guy who works for one of the big-box retailers recently told me the return/swap rate on flat screens exceeded 50%, because too many people are baffled beyond endurance by the complications of hooking them up, and the results afterwards. |
| | Which brings us to the second thing. The iPod HiFi is a perfect SKU for Apple Stores. |
| | Meanwhile, I think the field is wide open for independent audio and video equipment makers. Those folks can reclaim the territory they lost when mass-market audio got "good enough" back around the time CDs came along. |
| | I watched with baited breath yesterday as Apple made their announcement. I was on the phone with our radio suppliers in the Netherlands and exchanging e-mails with folks in the Valley who are also in this space. I watched the Mac Mini with the network connectivity and the play your media on your TV, and then heard him say "But now let's talk about music and the iPod". I said to myself this is it--a device that bring Internet audio to your stereo, no pc needed. A wifi stereo--something like what you and I saw in Vegas (at the Denon booth), what I've been trying to bring to develop (and finally am marketing), or what Sonos is deploying today. |
| | But then it didn't happen. "Powered Speakers!" was the message I got from our contacts. "It's just powered speakers!" It wasn't what it could be--the end of radio as we know it (at least for now). |
Waah!
| | There is no doubt Howard pushed the envelope of his lame-duck relationship with CBS during the final year of his tenure with the company — just as he pushed the envelope with everything in the life he lived publicly for more than four hours of every weekday for many years, making huge amounts of money for CBS and the stations on which his program ran. There is also no doubt that CBS, like all U.S. broadcasters, has suffered from an absence of humor hormones ever since they were neutered by the FCC's "decency" enforcement rulings. |
| | But lawsuits like this one are last refuges of losers. There was no way that any of the personalities CBS brought in to fill Howard's shoes could do more than shuffle around in them. Now the results are out, and the lawyers are in. |
| | The big winner here, as usual, will be Howard. Here's betting that the latest news will drive even more subscribers to Sirius. |
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