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Sunday, August 4, 2002
Quick question 
| | What's the best cheap (is any of them are) color PalmOS PDA? I don't need the fancy stuff. I just want to be able to read schedules and phone numers in the dark. The grayscale ones I've seen suck at that. The color ones don't. |
Blog of the Day
| | Wecome Adina Levin, whose Bookblog is "mostly for conversation about books I'e been reading. Other stuff too." A good chance to see a promising blog grow from bud to bloom. |
| | Reading Bookblog I find myself thinking, What would the world be like if publishers controlled everything from produciton through distribution and retailing as thoroughly as the record industry controls music? Or, What if the publishing industry had been as hip to the "threat" of the Web as the entertainment industry was? |
| | You might not be reading this right now. |
| | Publishing has certianly had its share of consolidation by conglomerates, and the spread of big box stores has squeezed out countless small bookshops. And yeah, publishing (or the part of it called Adobe) used the DMCA to put Dmitry Skylyarov in jail. But publishing didn't stab Amazon in the cradle like the record industry did to Napster (probably because it was obvious that Amazon sold books and wasn't "stealing" anything). More significantly, publishing didn't regulate Web sites to death like the record industry is doing right now (through its congressional and regulatory sock puppets) to Internet radio in the U.S. |
| | I dunno. Just blogging out loud about it. |
| | Of course, Internet radio isn't dead. It's just being killed in the U.S. Eventually it will route around the damage by moving to the Third World. Just watch. And listen. |
Spelling B
Overheard
| | By the way, all I want when I croak is for somebody to play the music from Garrison's "The Writer's Almanac." And to read anything by Whitman. (No, I'm in no hurry. I'm only 5 years old. (An age I like so much I've repeated it 11 times.) |
First and last
| | Sheila Lennon: Bob Dylan, a phony cowboy in a wig and phony beard, returned to Newport yesterday, but this time he didn't rock. We left early. |
Earphone sex
'Rolling Dad and the kids
| | Here's my blogtree. Not sure where to put the permalink that goes to the linked page. For now I stuck it at the bottom of the 'roll on the right. Also added my two children. |
More on what's fucked about radio (sorry, I can't stop)
| | It's a good story. But like all the rest of its type, it places some blame on deregulation — specifically the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The blame is deserved, but it misses the real dereg story. |
| | That Act did two big things in respect to radio: 1) it finished releasing commercial broadcasters from any sense that they held their licenses at the grace of the public, or had any obligation to perform a public service other than whatever derived from pursuing their own corporate interests; and 2) it raised the limit on the number of stations any one owner could hold in a any region. |
| | What the Act did not do was change the nature of the commercial radio business, which has always had a split between its customers and its consumers — one that was deep and profound, yet easy to ignore. |
| | Commercial radio's customers are its advertisers. It's consumers are its listeners. Its business is selling air time to advertisers. It raises the value of that air time by attracting the largest possible number of listeners, in the most desirable demographics. How it does that is irrelevant to the business itself. |
| | Commercial radio programming is not a service. It's bait. The listeners pay nothing to consume that bait, and have approximately zero influence over the kind of bait any station chums onto its airwaves. Even if a listener receives one of Arbitron's ratings diaries, and has the privilege of representing thousands of other listeners in an Arbitron's ratings survey, there is no direct market influence on that listener's favorite stations beyond whatever numbers the listener's diary yields (usually very tiny fraction of the most meaningful numbers used by the stations in selling advertising). In fact, it's the diary-holder's obligation to remain anonymous. So zero is where the influence stands. |
| | Yet behind every deregulatory move in broadcast history is some kind of market rhetoric. We deregulate the airwaves to "let the market decide." We (through the FCC) did it to AM stereo. And in 1996 we did it to station ownership. Both yielded unintended consequences. AM stereo has had approximately zero adoption, and one company — Clear Channel — has homogenized commercial radio. |
| | This was made possible by the customer/consumer split, which goes unseen. Because lawmakers and regulators assume that radio's consumers have real customer-grade market influence over broadcasters, they think deregulation will increase listenener influence. Big mistake. |
| | They also forget that there is not an infinitude of possible signals, even though the FCC, under pressure from the industry, has gradually allowed many more stations to be packed onto the dials than would ever make sense on technical grounds (ask any broadcast engineer). But even though the dials are overpopulated, the number of stations is still finite. To illustrate the point, consider this: Even if there might be five Starbucks in your town, there's nothing to stop you from opening your own coffee house; meanwhile your chance of opening a new signal on your local radio dial is zero. So deregulation of ownership only allowed fewer owners to control more of what you hear. |
| | Of course, public radio is a different animal. It does have a direct market relationship with its listeners. Its consumers are also its customers. Public radio stations retail programming to listeners that they buy wholesale from NPR and PRI. Corporate sponsors do chip in; but public stations primarily thrive at the grace of their listening customers. |
| | Unfortunately, public radio is largely operated by lefties who don't realize they have a terrific business story to tell — and that their business model is one that could port very well to the Net. Instead, they give us these pathetic beg-a-thons every few months. |
| | (Is there a public station with a PayPal account out there yet? Or anything to make paying for the station's services quick, easy and (as those right-wing economists like to say) low-friction? Instead all we've got is the tired old make-a-pledge routine.) |
| | Meanwhile, Internet radio stations had the new system figured out a long time ago. In fact, they've been pioneering a lot of stuff that public stations would do well to follow. |
| | What commercial and public radio have both needed, desperately, is competition from other, unregulated broadcast media. Internet radio was getting ready to give them a run for their money. Maybe it still will, from signals originating outside the U.S. |
| | But Internet radio can't take off in a big (i.e. mass appeal) way until the demand side gets equipped with radios that aren't computers. |
| | Given the cartelization of the radio receiver business (the chipsets in nearly all car radios and home stereos are pretty much the same) and the disappearance of VC funding for hardware start-ups (like the late Kerbango, which never got to finish the radio pictured at the top of this post because 3Com bought and killed them) we're still a long way off on that one. |
Planning a gas
| | It's too late to head for Burning Man this year (Aug 27-Sep 2), even though we're a highly spontaneous family. 'Fraid we're booked. |
| | But I'd like to start planning for next Summer. Hey, I'm still a Sixties kinda guy. I love harmless fun on a huge scale. |
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