Back in October 2019 I published a response to the breathless news reported across the tech, music and popular press that “vinyl outsold CDs” for the very first time. While true in terms of raw dollars, as I demonstrated, it wasn’t true in terms of volume. More than twice the number of CD albums were sold than vinyl – the revenue difference likely accountable to the fact that records now typically cost twice as much, or more, than the equivalent CD.

Now the sales numbers for all of 2020 are out, and the headlines look much the same as they did. It’s true that vinyl did hit a new sales peak not seen since the late 20th century, increasing its revenue lead over vinyl. In fact, the format’s take increased 28.7% over 2019, while CD’s share dropped 23%.

Nevertheless, 38% more CDs were sold – 31.6 million to vinyl’s 22.9 million. Clearly, the gap is closing. Yet, as audio writer John Darko points out, overall digital album sales outclassed both, at 33.1 million.

Of course, this all seems like peanuts compared to streaming revenue, which racks up $10bn, compared to a combined $1.1bn for physical formats.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-vinyl. I’m also not arguing that CDs are better. Rather, I’m an advocate for looking at the whole picture. In 2021 CDs are simply cheaper and easier to get made than vinyl records. So, while they’re declining in popularity, compact discs are still a very viable medium for distributing music in a physical format.

I stream music pretty much every day, and I buy downloads. But an internet outage or label pulling its catalog cuts off my stream in an instant, while one bad hard drive easily separates a person from their downloads. My CDs, and records, are still the most persistent way to own my most favorite music.

Moreover, the RIAA report does not account for the used market. There, too, vinyl is popular. But so are CDs (and cassettes). In its mid-year 2020 report, online marketplace Discogs said overall physical media sales were up 30% compared to the first half of 2019. Vinyl was up 34% and CDs were up 31%. In terms of raw volume, Discogs saw 5.8 million records change hands, compared to 1.7 million CDs.

Of course, we have to keep in mind that vinyl had a 40 year head start on CDs, and these are global numbers – compact disc was much more delayed in some countries compared to the US or Western Europe. Though I’m not betting that it will surpass used vinyl sales, I expect to see that used CD volume will continue to grow. It will be fueled by renewed interest in physical media, inflation in vinyl prices and concomitantly lower CD prices, combined with the fact that there are thousands of albums on compact disc that never saw a vinyl release that are still hard to find in legitimate digital streaming or download.

As I’ve proclaimed before, now is a great time for music lovers to either get back into CD or give the format a try, especially if the compromises of streaming aren’t quite cutting it for you. Used racks are bursting at the seems with bargains, as are eBay, Discogs and thrift stores. It used to be that way for a fair amount of used vinyl, too, about a decade ago. But just like with records, the compact disc bargains may not last as more listeners realize what is out there, and what they’re missing.

The post More New CDs than Vinyl Records Were Sold in 2020, Yet Again appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This November 30 marks the 20th anniversary of the protests against meetings of the World Trade Organization that shut down the city of Seattle. It also marks the birthday of the Indymedia movement, which brought together grassroots media activists from public access TV, print, community radio and internet technology to create a radical open publishing system and network of affiliated centers that let citizen journalists instantaneously publish words, sound, pictures and video years before the advent of YouTube or Twitter.

In the U.S. this movement helped to further solidify much of the support for what would become low-power FM community radio. Established just two months later, in January 2000, LPFM allowed for the greatest expansion of community radio in history. Though the Indymedia movement was not a formal causal agent in the creation of LPFM, that energy sparked at the WTO helped to spur media activists to take advantage of the new service.

With these coming anniversaries, we at Radio Survivor would like to help tell this history, which still remains poorly documented. We need your support to do this.

We’re need to have 100 people making monthly contributions to our Patreon fundraising campaign by July 1, 2019 August 1, 2019. That will allow us to allocate the time and resources necessary to do the reporting, writing and product needed to begin telling this story on our radio show and website beginning with the November 30. For some of us, this means being able to prioritize this work over other freelance gigs or having the ability to do travel that is otherwise out of reach.

As of July 22 we have 42 monthly contributors, so that means we have 58 patrons to go. The good news is that it only takes a contribution of $1 a month to get us closer to our goal, though it’s great if you can contribute more.

To say thank-you, all of our patrons get access to bonus content, including bonus episodes of our podcast, ready-to-print radio station postcards and more. With contributions of $20 or more you can become an underwriter on our show, getting a monthly announcement that you’ll co-write with us.

We think this is an important history that risks being forgotten. In particular we think it’s vital for today’s community broadcasters, podcasters and listeners to know and learn from. When you support our work you help to educate thousands of community media activists while preserving this record for the future.

Please join our Patreon now to support this work.

Don’t hesitate drop us a line if you have any questions or suggestions.

The post Help Us Tell the History of Indymedia & LPFM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Podcasters wanting an inside look into how public radio and podcast experts evaluate new show ideas have an opportunity to peek under the hood of WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Pitch Session. On Friday at 3:30 PM PDT the Online News Association will live stream the five Podcast Accelerator finalists giving their last pitches to the judges: Dean Cappello, Chief Content Officer and Senior Vice President of WNYC; Glynn Washington, host of the popular podcast and public radio show Snap Judgment; and Emily Botein, Vice President of On-Demand Content for WNYC.

While the judges deliberate, Anna Sale, from WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast, will lead panel of well-known podcasters discussing how they discovered their unique podcasting voices. Panelists include: Sean Rameswaram, host of Sideshow from WNYC/PRI’s Studio 360; Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC’s Note to Self; Al Letson, host of Errthang Show and Reveal; and Lauren Lapkus of Earwolf’s With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus. The event is hosted by Anna Sale from WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast.

The five accelerator finalists have been working with WNYC podcast producers who have been mentoring them and helping to hone their pitches. You can learn more about the finalists in this post from ONA.

Tune in Friday 3:30 PM Pacific to watch their pitches and find out who wins at: ona15.journalists.org/sessions/wnycpodcast/

Music Industry Revenues from Streaming up 6%

Many listeners love streaming music services, while many artists and other critics complain that the royalties paid to musicians are paltry, and don’t make up for declining sales in CDs and digital tracks. Yet, there’s no sign streaming is going away, so it helps to understand just how much money is at play.

The Recording Industry Association of America just released its mid-year revenue report [PDF], showing a 6% increase in streaming revenues over the first half of 2014, for a total of just over $1 billion. Making up 32% of all music revenues, streaming still trails digital downloads, which brought in $1.23 billion, although downloads declined 3.6%.

Ad-supported on-demand services, like Spotify’s free tier, brought in the smallest portion of streaming revenues, $163 million, but 27% more than last year. SoundExchange–which covers most online radio–paid out $387 million, which is 20% more than the first half of 2014. Not surprisingly, paid subscription services paid out the most, at $478 million, marking a pretty impressive 25% increase over the same period last year.

The post Digital Watch: Watch the Final Pitches in WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Competition appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Monday Jay-Z’s newly acquired TIDAL streaming music service pulled back the curtain on its relaunch, but just a little bit. As predicted, TIDAL is adding a compressed music service, competing with the likes of Spotify, to accompany its lossless CD-quality HiFi service. The compressed service is $9.99 a month, while the lossless version is double that, at $19.99 a month.

Still a bit hazy is TIDAL’s plan to share a majority of the company’s ownership shares with music artist partners. Sixteen popular artists appeared at the launch event in New York City–including Alicia Keys, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Jack White and Madonna–to sign a “declaration,” the details of which remain unspecified. According to anonymous executives with knowledge of negotiations cited by The New York Times, participating artists will provide content that will be exclusive to TIDAL.

While multi-platinum and Grammy-winning artists may indeed be getting better deals from TIDAL than its competitors, it remains to be seen what is in store for the average recording and touring musician, if anything. As I mentioned in my analysis last week, many artists point their finger at record labels as being at least partly responsible for paltry royalties they receive from streaming services. Even most of the artists partnering with TIDAL at this debut are signed to labels that will need to be in on whatever deal the company wants to cut. That means TIDAL can’t necessarily improve the royalties situation unilaterally.

The question remains, will the average touring band on a major or large indie label have the opportunity for better royalties with TIDAL than they do with Spotify, Rhapsody or Rdio? Will labels agree in exchange for better royalties to provide exclusive content from an artist that sells tens of thousands of albums the same way they will for the artist who moves hundreds of thousands, or millions? Will those higher royalties even get passed on to artists?

No doubt TIDAL’s relaunch and alliance with major artists stirs things up even more in the streaming music world. Yet, it’s arguable that Spotify got to the number one spot by virtue of the free ad-supported service that artists decry but listeners seem to like. Without that free tier, will TIDAL attract enough fans based upon the feel-good promises of being artist-friendly combined with some unspecified number of exclusive tracks? Part of me would like to think so, but that’s a yet unsubstantiated hope, not based on evidence.

One possible outcome is that TIDAL will spark up a cozier relationship to one of the major label conglomerates, perhaps taking an equity stake. For anyone concerned about the welfare of artists who aren’t superstars this probably isn’t the most desirable outcome.

A more desirable one might be the evolution of an artists’ streaming co-op, where every participating musician has the chance to own a stake and a vote in how the company manages its business. That’s probably a bit too fantastic, too.

The new compressed TIDAL Premium service is available now, as is the lossless HiFi service. My test of TIDAL HiFi shows that the improvement in fidelity is real, but requires good quality listening equipment to be worth it. I hope to take the Premium service for a spin, too, in order to see how it measures up to competitors and the HiFi tier.

The post Beyond the Hype – Will All Musicians Benefit from Jay-Z’s TIDAL? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Welcome to our new Wednesday feature, Digital Watch. Each week I’ll be tackling news and analysis about radio’s intersection with the digital world, online and off. This takes the place of Podcast Survivor, but it doesn’t mean podcasting coverage is going away. I’ll explain further at the end of this post.

The week’s biggest news dropped on Wednesday, when FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler publicly revealed details for his Open Internet proposal to be voted on by all five commissioners on February 26. Most proponents of strong network neutrality–including public interest groups and internet companies like Twitter and Netflix–are cheering what is known so far. The most significant part is the proposal that the FCC will regulate internet service as a utility, under so-called Title II provisions. The surprise is that Wheeler plans to cover mobile broadband, not just wired internet service.

The Verge has a rundown of many of the pro and anti Title II reactions that have been published.

Matthew examines the possibility that the new rules, if passed, would kill “sponsored data” plans where services pay for users’ wireless data or plans like T-Mobile’s Music Freedom in which the carrier doesn’t charge for the data consumed using selected streaming music platforms. I’ve already argued that Music Freedom is really an “internet fast-lane” dressed up as a gift for music lovers, since T-Mobile picks and chooses which services benefit. Such “fast-lanes” are what the Open Internet proposal aims to prohibit.

As for wired home and business internet, so far there has been less of a thread to internet radio and streaming music services, principally because they use less bandwidth than high definition video as provided by services like Netflix. However, the burgeoning trend towards streaming uncompressed CD quality audio from platforms like Deezer Elite and Tidal does push audio closer to video-scale bandwidth territory. Furthermore, if high resolution audio of the sort that Neil Young’s Pono player delivers takes off, it’s not hard to see even more data-intensive streaming music services on the horizon.

For internet audio and radio the latent threat has been more about paid prioritization rather than limiting bandwidth. For radio this would look something like T-Mobile’s Music Freedom but with your cable modem, where one or more partner services would be given priority, especially for customers on inexpensive low-bandwidth tiers. In reality most “unlimited” home internet plans have a data cap of some kind, which could be activated or lowered at any time, potentially impacting a heavy consumer of internet radio or streaming music. The FCC’s Open Internet proposal would likely place the indie community or college station on the same ground as iHeartRadio when it comes to equal access to the home internet user.

Of course, even if the proposal passes wholesale at February’s open meeting, the chapter will not be closed. Court challenges and Congressional intervention are still possible. At the same time, passage would still set a tone and effectively set a new baseline for future debates or negotiations on the matter.

In other news…

Teens Prefer Streaming Services

Edison research just released more results from its fall 2014 Share of Ear survey on American listening habits. While not surprising, they don’t look so good for terrestrial radio.

Edison found that teenagers 13 to 17 now spend more time with streaming audio services like Spotify or Pandora than terrestrial radio, by a margin of 64 minutes to 53 minutes a day, respectively. AM/FM radio still leads for all other age groups. But, of course, today’s 13 – 17 year-olds are tomorrow’s 25 – 34 year -olds.

It doesn’t take much insight to see that today’s teenagers are raised in an on-demand environment, and broadcast radio is the polar opposite. But it would be a mistake to leave it at that, since a service like Pandora is not on-demand, even if it is customized. I would argue that mainstream commercial music radio, with its surplus of heavy rotations and voice-tracked non-local talent, is a poor alternative to Pandora, commercials and all.

Choosing amongst 50 cookie cutter CHR stations on iHeartRadio is nothing like choosing a Pandora station, even if you’re craving the current top hits. But this is old news, right?

Internet Radio Pays Record Royalties

SoundExchange is the independent organization that collects performance royalties from digital radio services on behalf of music artists. The organization reports that $773 million was paid out to registered recording artists in 2014, a new record high.

Admittedly, most stations with internet streams have a mixed relationship with SoundExchange because it’s another bill to pay for something that they don’t have to pay for their terrestrial broadcast signal. Yet, this record pay out indicates that there is increased interest in internet radio. Also, this includes performance royalties paid by profit-making digital services like Pandora and SiriusXM, as well as commercial and noncommercial radio stations.

From Podcast Survivor to Digital Watch

As I mentioned above, this week marks a shift from the Podcast Survivor weekly feature to this new one, Digital Watch. I wrote Podcast Survivor every week from November 2013 to January 2015. While I’m retiring the weekly feature, Radio Survivor is not retiring podcast coverage. Podcasting will definitely be part of Digital Watch, but the segment has grown so much in just fifteen months that we’re going to make it more of our everyday coverage.

I also made to decision to end the weekly podcasting feature because it started to seem as though I was saving up lots of podcasting stories, and then couldn’t quite get to everything in just one post. Much of those stories tended to be meta-reporting–making note of coverage in other press outlets. While I see the use in that kind of aggregation, it’s also not really the kind of writing I most enjoy doing. For me, continuing in this vein was a recipe for burnout, which isn’t good for anybody.

Clearly, I could do more primary source reporting and analysis of podcasting instead. However, with a day job also working in and writing about podcasting, this has become a difficult needle to thread. It seemed to me the best solution is to broaden the scope each week so that I can better look at bigger trends in digital audio, which includes podcasting.

Importantly, Radio Survivor will continue to provide regular coverage of podcasting, just not only on Wednesdays, but more as relevant news happens. I also will continue to write the monthly Podcast Extra feature which appears exclusively in our free weekly email newsletter (you can sneak a peek at January’s edition).

The post Digital Watch: Net Neutrality Is Here; Teens Prefer Streaming appeared first on Radio Survivor.

iHeartMedia (née Clear Channel) CEO Bob Pittman and radio/TV host Ryan Seacrest were both present at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, and they were stumping for radio. Pittman began an on-stage interview on Wednesday declaring that “radio is probably the most relevant product that rides on all this technology… radio is your best friend.”

He noted that in 1970 radio reached 92% of Americans, and in 2014 it still reaches 92% of Americans. The phone and computer now amount to additional radios, Pittman said.

Seacrest joined him, saying that “we can’t think of radio as just radio,” but as “everywhere,” since hosts like him spend so many hours a week with a listener. “We want to be their companion.”

Pittman talked up the live aspect of radio, which he said further differentiates it from television, which he said young people principally understand as always available. He also said that iTunes and streaming music is for when you want to escape the world and radio is for when you want to connect with the world.

On the face of things, it’s hard to find fault with Pittman’s and Seacrest’s assertions about radio, or at least live host-driven radio. The problem is that only a portion of commercial radio programming actually exemplifies these qualities.

Sure, morning drive programs are likely to feature dynamic hosts and live news, traffic and weather updates that connect the listener to the world. Even if the show itself is syndicated from a bigger market, I’ll admit that there’s a good chance there will at least be some local weather and maybe some news headlines inserted a couple times an hour.

But outside flagship stations in the biggest markets, most FM stations revert to automation for the rest of the broadcast day. Depending on the market and the company, the voice listeners hear and the programming decisions may not even be local. And good luck hearing any news and weather outside drivetime. There’s no more companionship or “being in touch with the world” in that than there is with a rerun of M*A*S*H on afternoon TV.

AM talk stations have a different kind of automation, with the vast majority of them piping in the same syndicated programs, again with very little local content. This may constitute companionship for the dwindling and rapidly aging AM listenership, but it really doesn’t for the millions upon millions of radio listeners who aren’t white men over the age of 35.

The utter bland sameness of most of the commercial radio broadcast day is probably one big reason why listenership for the iHeartRadio online platform has stalled out. As Edison Research reports, iHeartRadio added listeners at a fast pace beginning in 2011, peaking with 245,463 average listeners in May 2013. Since then, the number has dipped to around 242,000 and stayed there. By comparison, in the same period since May 2013 Pandora grew 32%.

To explain it, Edison observes that,

“most all of the sites that are geared (or mostly geared) to the streams of AM/FM Radio stations are flat or down since May of 2013. Cumulus is down 22% from that time in the September Triton numbers. CBS is down 14%. ESPN and Greater Media show modest gains. In general – it is more than fair to say the business of streaming the content of American radio stations is stagnant at best.”

That makes sense to me. Let’s just take for example the classic rock format. An app like iHeartRadio serves up dozens of stations with nearly identical playlists. You might use iHeart to listen somewhere you can’t use a radio, or if you’ve got a particular fondness for a distant station. And even I admit it can be fun tuning in stations from all over the country. But the novelty wears off quickly when you realize that the vast majority don’t actually vary much from your own local stations.

The sad thing is that there’s nothing inherent in this state of affairs. There is some good commercial radio out there. The reason there isn’t more is that the nation’s largest broadcasters built their empires by leveraging themselves with mountains of debt to hoover up stations, squeezing out profits by jettisoning DJs, producers, programmers and local management. It worked for a little while, but that era ended a decade ago.

iHeartMedia, Cumulus, Citadel, CBS – they can bring back the vibrancy of the kind of personality-driven live radio that Pittman lauds. They either just don’t want to spend the money, or they really don’t have the money to spend. That’s not because radio is dying, but because all the big owners spent the last 19 years starving the cash cow, while all but chasing away every new listener under the age of 30.

It’s reasonable to be optimistic about radio, especially the dynamic and live kind of radio Pittman praises. iHeartMedia-style radio, not so much.

The post iHeartMedia CEO Defends Radio at CES (with Unintentional Irony) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Antonio Cesar Guel and his Hispanic Christian Community Network have become infamous in low-power FM circles for their role in 245 applications for LPFM stations during last fall’s filing window–a full 8% of all 2,799 applications filed. LPFM advocacy groups and other applicants have filed informal objections and petitions to deny with the FCC claiming that the organizations listed on these applications are not genuine, local non-profits, and therefore in contravention with the rules for low-power FM.

So far 116 of the 245 applications have been dismissed. Four construction permits have been approved by the FCC. However, these applicants have distanced themselves from Guel, demonstrating a true local presence.

Now Guel’s HCCN seems to be running into financial straits. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Northern District of Texas Dallas Division on November 11, claiming liabilities of $500,000 to $1 million. Included amongst HCCN’s creditors are broadcast tower operators in Massachusetts, Florida and Connecticut, an antenna manufacturer, the IRS and Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia).

The company’s Statement of Financial Affairs filed on December 8 also lists a lawsuit which HCCN is defending in Los Angeles. The plaintiffs pursuing the case are also listed as creditors.

According to court documents filed in this suit–Jose Gonzales, et al v Iglesia Jesucristo Es Mi Refugio, Inc., et al–Guel and business partners are accused of defrauding a group of five Los Angeles area ministers, led by Gonzalez, out of $1,299,090. This money was paid to the defendants beginning in 2007 for the purchase of two low-power television stations owned by HCCN. The plaintiffs claim that no filing has been made with the FCC to transfer the licenses to them, and that they have not received the licenses they paid for.

Yet, the case is more complex than this. The plaintiffs also claim that the defendants promised to move the stations to new, better locations, that it turns out are not tenable because of potential interference with existing stations. Moreover, due to being off-air for a year, the FCC canceled the license for one of the stations in June 2010. The plaintiffs allege fraud because they say the defendants should have known that the stations could not be relocated and upgraded as they represented.

Now, this is only a very brief summary of the case intended to give a basic understanding of what Guel and HCCN have been accused of; there are many more details. The suit is scheduled for a jury trial beginning March 26, 2015, provided no settlements are reached before then.

HCCN currently has licenses for 24 LPTV and television translator stations. It’s still too early to know what effect the bankruptcy filing and the lawsuit will have on those stations or on any of the 129 pending LPFM applications associated with Guel and HCCN. Given the potential impact on low-power community radio we will continue to monitor this case.

The post Financial Troubles for Antonio Cesar Guel & HCCN appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last fall I wrote “an immodest proposal” that independent and community stations should work more closely with independent musicians. With that in mind I was pleased to listen to the first episode of a new series from XRAY.fm in Portland, called “The Future of What?” focusing on the business of music.

The show is hosted by Portia Sabin, president of the independent Kill Rock Stars record label, who explores some important issues facing working musicians today. She discusses performance royalties from satellite, internet and terrestrial radio with Hutch Harris of indie rock band The Thermals, legal journalist Emily Green, Michael Huppe of Sound Exchange and Daryl Friedman of the Recording Academy. Dual Tone records head Scott Robinson joins to talk about what exactly a record label does for artists, and then Hutch Harris returns to share what it’s like being an actual touring band.

This show is a great resource for radio folks to get some insight into why musicians’ groups are lobbying for terrestrial radio to pay performance royalties, and also get a little reminder about how most musicians work very hard for what income they are able to make. I’m looking forward to hearing future installments.

The post XRAY.fm Sheds Light on the Business of Music appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It certainly seems like for the rest of the year I’ll be mentioning at least one or two press articles covering podcasting’s newfound popularity. However, I’ll focus on pieces that are notable, cover new ground, or suggest a novel angle.

First, the New York Times’ inimitable media reporter and critic David Carr finally submits his take on podcasting’s recent rise in prominence. “And after dismissing podcasts for years, I am now dialed in,” he writes. Quite correctly, he compares the ability of podcast apps to bring up shows on-demand to Netflix, explicitly acknowledging the latter service’s disruptive force. While that’s a comparison I made back in January–arguing that we need the Netflix or Hulu of podcasting–it’s one I’m surprised I don’t see more often.

The second one this week is notable, in part, for selfish reasons. I talked with writer Lene Bech Sillesen for her Columbia Journalism Review article. More importantly, she also talked with Lea Thau, former executive director of The Moth and now host of her own podcast Strangers.

Thau makes a good point that,

“I think there’s a lot of opportunity to partner with radio stations,” she says. “A lot of them are realizing they might become obsolete if they don’t get on board with digital and on-demand."

How Much Does It Cost to “Broadcast” Serial?

One of the most critical, yet poorly understood differences between broadcast and the internet is bandwidth. While broadcast stations have relatively high fixed costs to transmit their signals, the number of listeners they can support with one broadcast signal is only limited by how many people with receivers can exist in their coverage area. The same 10,000 watt FM station can serve ten, ten thousand or a hundred thousand listeners with the exact same fixed cost.

In contrast, an internet broadcaster pays for every single person who tunes in or downloads. That’s why viral popularity on the internet can be double-edged sword. It’s nice to quickly gain a big audience, but every listener grows the bandwidth bill. The cost differential between ten listeners to a stream and ten thousand is monumental.

Writer and podcaster Glenn Fleishman did a little back-of-the-envelope math to try and figure out how much the bandwidth bill might be for Serial, perhaps the most downloaded podcast at this moment.

He estimates the show has seen an average of 4.5 million downloads a month, adding up to 135 terabytes of data being served out to listeners. Looking at published rates for a couple of content distribution networks, he thinks that kind of data transfer would cost anywhere from $3,700 to $6,144 a month. It’s an amount he compares to the salary of an entry-level employee.

I’m glad Glenn took up this question. An annual bandwidth cost of $73,728 is nothing to sneeze at. Yet, that’s still less than operating a full-power radio station anywhere in the US. And, at this moment, it’s an outlier. Most podcasts don’t have anything near Serial’s listenership.

Yet, I’m sure many podcasters would kill for that kind of success. And podcasting supporters certainly believe more shows will see that size of audience.

It should also be noted that 1.5 million listeners an episode gets you close to cable TV size ratings. And producing and distributing cable television shows is much more expensive than even producing Serial or This American Life. That disparity works in podcasting’s favor, since advertisers are willing to pay to reach that many listeners, even with a podcast.

A Few For The Road

For me, podcasts are a savior for holiday travel time. Whether flying or driving, taking the train or the bus, a good queue of shows helps pass the time, especially during inevitable traffic jams and delays. So, I thought I would share a few shows I’ve added to my list that might be of interest.

The first one is almost custom designed for an old-school geek like me. On his Internet History Podcast, producer Brian McCullough is interviewing some of the most influential actors in the early days of the internet. He’s using these interviews as the source for a book on the same topic.

Having been online since 1993 I know of many of his guests, and certainly admired some from afar. So it’s a real kick to hear Wired’s founding editor John Battelle discuss the first days of that magazine, or ReadWrite.com editor Owen Thomas tell the story behind the illustrated daily humor and criticism site Suck.com.

Reply All is the new podcast from Alex Blumberg’s Gimlet Media. It’s hosted and produced by two veterans of NPR’s On The Media, Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt. They say it’s a show about the internet, which is true. Though more accurately I’d say it seems like a show about how the internet works in our daily lives. In that way it feels like an outgrowth of the TL;DR podcast Vogt and Goldman produced for On The Media until the end of October.

The first episode tells the story of “how a woman in Washington DC who tells her ex in California that she loves him through stocky blond man who neither of them have ever met.” There are only two episodes, and they’re both under 30 minutes. So there’s not a ton of listening there, but worth putting into your queue.

Finally, if you want to laugh hysterically and out loud, perhaps looking like a maniac on the plane or train, then I suggest you check out Superego. This show is one part improv and one part radio drama, produced by some of the best podcasters and comedians working today, like Jeremy Carter, Matt Gourley and Paul F. Tompkins, along with guests like Patton Oswalt, Neko Case and Kristen Schaal. The shows don’t come out frequently, but there are enough episodes in the archive to keep you in stitches from Columbus to Wichita and beyond.

We cover podcasting news and analysis every Wednesday in our Podcast Survivor feature.

The post Podcasting News and Shows for your Turkey Day Travels appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The business of podcasting continues to attract serious coverage, which I report here each week. This week coverage comes from the Columbia Journalism Review and PBS’s MediaShift. There’s good reason for this attention: the business of podcasting is booming. This is a good thing for listeners, producers, and even stations

The CJR piece focuses exclusively on Alex Blumberg’s podcasting startup, now named Gimlet, and how he integrates the ads on his show, Startup, as short story breaks done in his own voice. As I’ve noted, this style of ad read is consistent with the dominant podcasting practice, although Blumberg puts his own unique stamp on it.

At MediaShift the business of podcasting is the topic for the most recent episode of the MediaTwits podcast. Mike Pesca, host of Slate’s The Gist, Kerri Hoffman from PRX and American University Professor Andrew Lih are the guests for a discussion that touches on the relationship between podcasting and broadcast public radio and funding models.

Speaking of funding, PRX’s Radiotopia is running a Kickstarter that has already surpassed its $250,000 goal with 23 days still left to go. It certainly doesn’t hurt that 99% Invisible producer Roman Mars–himself a veteran of wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns–is the curator and principal public face of Radiotopia. The campaign for season 4 of his show racked up 11,693 backers contributing a total of $375,193.

Nevertheless, Radiotopia garnering 6,407 backers–with weeks left to bring in more–is no mere fluke. There is serious support for the kind of story-driven podcasting Radiotopia producers like Mars are creating. That fact is also evident in Blumberg’s fundraising performance starting up Gimlet. But, really, there is strong support and growing audiences for all forms of consistent and well-produced podcasts, from patron-funded shows like Tom Meritt’s Daily Tech News Show to the ad-supported ’casts from Slate, Nerdist and Earwolf, and independent shows, such as WTF with Marc Maron.

This doesn’t mean that starting a podcast is a license to print money. What it does mean is that listenership and funding for the medium are growing hand-in-hand, across a few different of funding models.

While I am a whole-hearted supporter of podcasting as an amateur or hobby medium, it is also vitally important for there to be opportunities for talented and dedicated producers to be compensated for their efforts, and perhaps make a living.

By breaking free of the shackles of broadcast podcasting opens up opportunities for new producers, new voices and for experiments in narrative form, as well as paying the bills. The strict definitions and structural constraints of commercial and noncommercial radio as practiced don’t leave most stations or producers much leeway for raising money creatively.

One particularly critical aspect is that podcasters don’t need radio stations, which are capital-intensive enterprises, no matter their size. For most listener-supported community stations, any funding that can be allocated to producing programming is over and above the most significant burden of properly operating a transmitter and studio. And, frankly, most commercial stations don’t spend much on production either, relying primarily on syndicated programming and automated music.

The $260,000 raised so far by Radiotopia is equivalent to the annual operating budget for a mid-market community station with a few employees, a lot of volunteers, and very little money allocated to program production. With podcasting that kind of money can go very far, unburdened from maintaining a physical plant and all kinds of regulatory compliance.

What if a community station could add that extra quarter-million to its operating budget to fund program production? Even a half or a quarter of that could enable quite a bit of innovative community service.

One of podcasting’s persistent problems with its perception in the press is that even a crowd-funding blockbuster of hundreds of thousands of dollars seems pale in comparison to the tens or hundreds of millions shelled out by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, or paid out by Facebook or Yahoo to acquire companies like Whatsapp or Tumblr. What gets lost in the comparison is that many podcast ventures are finding sustainability and profitability without these kinds of massive investments or buyouts.

That’s why the increasing press coverage of the medium’s business successes is refreshing, and a positive thing for podcasting as a whole. Like it or not, the press helps to inform public perception, which, in turn, introduces more listeners, and potentially more funding. This makes for an expanding opportunity for both new and veteran producers.

I think it also creates an enormous opportunity for noncommercial radio stations. Unfortunately, the biggest barrier is not creating podcasts–that part is easy. The biggest barriers are the stations themselves, and entrenched ways of thinking and operating that sees investing resources in something like podcasting as a too-challenging adjunct to broadcasting, rather than a potentially rejuvenating chance for growth.

In the spirit of Ann Alquist’s recent post on how community radio can adapt to digital disruption, I will next address ways in which community stations can use podcasting to both serve new audiences and broaden their funding base.

The post Podcast Survivor: The Business of Podcasting is Booming appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Twitter has 49 million users every month in the US. Facebook has 198 million. There are about 6 million US Spotify users. What about terrestrial broadcast radio, that old-school, supposedly dying analog medium?

Radio has 241.8 million listeners per week, not just per month. Take that, Silicon Valley.

Those numbers are according to Nielsen’s December RADAR Radio Listening Report, which also shows an increase of 700,000 weekly listeners over December 2012, and an increase of 5.3 million since 2009. There was particularly strong growth in Hispanic listeners, accounting for an increase of 372,000 in the last year.

This data illustrates how out-of-whack popular conceptions of popularity and relevance can be, especially those reflected in the press.

As an educated, middle-class white male I certainly know many people who do not listen to terrestrial radio, preferring music services like Pandora or Spotify, podcasts or maybe satellite radio. I also know folks who really don’t own radios, professing them as superfluous when they can listen on their computers, tablets and smartphones.

When the topic of radio comes up at social occasions it’s not at all unusual for the conversation to swing to the theme that “radio sucks,” and that the only radio worth listening to is public radio, and maybe a college or community station, but not too much. Folks inevitably tell me how loading up their smartphones with music, audiobooks and podcasts beats the hell out of relying on the radio, except under extreme circumstances.

Like me, these people are mostly educated and from the middle class. We have smartphones, wifi and more listening choices than we know what to do with. Radio is a choice, mostly not a necessity.

I’ll bet that this milieu isn’t too different from those of most journalists and commentators, especially those working a tech beat. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of writers mostly only listen to the radio for news, and suffer commercial radio only if they have to. Like so many people I know they have plenty of choices online and elsewhere.

That’s where the “radio is dying” theme comes from. It does not come from radio’s actual fortunes and performance. It’s a perception based upon real data, just not data that is representative of the country as a whole. It comes from our own relatively rarefied experience and the experience of those around us. It does not come from being around and talking to the millions of people who still use radio every week, if not every day.

I’m not trying to deny reality. Radio profits have taken a dive in the last decade (but where are Facebook and twitter profits?). 17 years of industry consolidation obliterated localism and local service in all but the biggest markets, while playlists got tighter, talent was fired and the overall commercial radio listening experience went down the toilet. So, sure, when the internet and mobile technology gave us more interesting, diverse and customizable alternatives, those of us with access took advantage as soon as we could.

But not everybody has access to these alternatives, or the same kind of access. Knowledge workers in a cubicle with constant internet access can jam to Pandora all day long, provided their employer doesn’t block or limit it. But what about somebody working on a shop floor? Or a contractor on a job site where headphones would block out important communication and running Spotify on a smartphone all day would kill both the battery and data caps? The radio is still a reliable companion for someone who drives a car, truck or taxi all day. Radios work great in these environments, and the classic rock, country or spanish-language station beats having nothing at all.

Lots of people choose radio, too. Millions love getting their daily dose of Rush and Hannity, or news and weather on the 8s. Many of these listeners are middle-class knowledge workers, and plenty are middle-class folks who don’t work behind a desk, or who are retired. And many, many of these listeners are not middle class, or are working very hard to stay in the middle class. They are not Luddites, nor are they unsophisticated. No, they get a service that is adequate, useful, or even timely and enjoyable, all for a very low cost and next to no hassle. And there are 700,000 more of them in 2013 than in 2012.

Now, has the commercial radio industry rested on its laurels? Hell, yes. Did big players like Clear Channel foolishly fail to pay heed to the internet threat that began looming at the turn of the century? Most certainly. Did owners squeeze the life out of commercial music radio in search of quick profits? Double hells-yes!

But radio is not a lost cause, nor is it an obsolete medium. Radio’s problems can be solved by radio broadcasters taking a fresh look at their listeners and working hard to deliver better service. Importantly, broadcasters need to take a long hard look at the listeners they’ve lost, and the very hardest look at the potential listeners who have never tuned in.

There is a lot to learn from Facebook, Twitter, Mashable, Upworthy and even Amazon, both from their successes and mistakes. The biggest lesson is to start taking chances, making changes and moving a shitload faster than radio ever has before. I still see debates in the radio press about the classic rock format, and nobody thought would work… twenty freaking years ago!

We need to see new and tweaked formats every month and every year, not every decade.

While adding 700,000 listeners in a year is good news, radio cannot rest on this modest growth. Radio hasn’t totally screwed the pooch, which means there’s still a strong platform to build on. But it’s time to raze some old edifices and build lots of new ones on that platform. Listeners who want radio are there. Take them for granted at your own peril.

The post With 241 million users radio kicks Facebook and Twitter ass appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Tom Scharpling and Julie Klausner at RadioVision 2013

The Best Show has a uniquely strong audience for a community radio program. This stems from a few factors. Importantly, WFMU is located inside the nation’s largest radio market. But the station has also been a leader in archiving its programs online, giving The Best Show a strong internet presence from the very beginning. And one must not underestimate how much The Best Show benefits from the popularity of comedy podcasts in general, along with having famous friends drop by.

In making the announcement at the end of his show, Scharpling said “It is a huge commitment… It’s hard to do something that’s more or less a full-time job for free. I’ve done it for as long as I can do it… the reality of this is I can’t sustain my life and this show and the commitment it takes to do it right.”

This is a sentiment that many a college or community radio broadcaster can understand. I’ve known dozens of people during my time in radio who pour enormous energy and passion into producing programs on noncommercial stations, with their only return being the intrinsic satisfaction of doing it, and perhaps the recognition of listeners and peers.

While some are able to do it for years or decades, others find that saturation point, where the time and stamina of producing a radio show week after week starts to compete too aggressively with other responsibilities. Or they find that, like Scharpling concluded, they can’t continue to do it at the level of quality with the amount of energy they have left to dedicate.

I’ve been there myself a couple of times. Most recently, I ended production of my weekly radio program and podcast Mediageek at the end of 2009, after producing it for seven years and racking up fifteen affiliate stations. I simply found that the weekly grind of producing a half-hour news and information show–for free–was not compatible with having a challenging full-time job and some semblance of a social life.

This is the difficult flip side to independent media. While we should be supportive of platforms and technologies–like community radio and podcasting–that greatly lower the bar for people to communicate to large audiences and communities, the sustainability of these individual efforts must be considered, not just the sustainability of the platforms. That’s what was on my mind when I asked the Scharpling-led comedy podcast panel at RadioVision how sustainable their podcasts will be in the face of other professional demands, or a dry period. That was only two weeks ago, and come to think of it, I don’t think Scharpling really gave an answer to that question.

Most fundamentally, a potential radio producer or host needs to be able to put food on the table and pay the rent before she can think about making a show. While some people have the means, time or simple drive and wherewithal to create something, sometimes with little regard to their material circumstances, this isn’t something we should expect or demand of our independent media creators.

As I was finishing writing this piece, I stumbled upon the transcript for a talk given by Christina Xu at the XOXO festival in Portland this past September which also gets at this conflict, from the perspective of independent publishing:

“A system that depends on trailblazing for success will see two groups of winners: a small group of exceptionally talented/hardworking/lucky people, and people who have the privilege (wealth, education, social connections, otherwise) to try stuff without worrying about the full weight of failure. Everyone else, all the creators who are talented but don’t want to or can’t afford to risk everything, will shy away.”

I would add that the first group–the exceptionally talented/hardworking/lucky–may win, but may also burn out in time. In many ways Tom Scharpling is a member of this first group who won, by creating a program over the course of more than a decade that garnered a significant fan base. But The Best Show still doesn’t put food on the table, even if it may have opened up other opportunities for him. Is this really a win?

This is an enormous question, for which I have no easy answers. Access for creating and distributing mass media has become greatly democratized in the last two decades. Access to funding and making a basic living as a media maker is not yet so democratized. Independent media–community radio, podcasting, internet broadcasting, etc.–will continue to face problems with sustainability until we figure out how to bring these two things into better alignment.

Podcasters and community broadcasters gotta eat. We shouldn’t expect them to starve for our art.

The post Podcasters gotta eat; Tom Scharpling to end The Best Show on WFMU appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On the heels of the news that Monitoring Times will close this year, comes the news of the closure of another radio publication. Industry magazine Broadcast Engineering announced on Friday that it will end publication this Thursday, October 31.

Though probably not well known outside of the world of radio engineers and the people who love them, Broadcast Engineering has been a source of news and information for broadcasters for 54 years. It isn’t clear if the closure of this magazine is due to challenges in the overall publishing industry, or is more of an indicator of the fortunes of broadcasting, and the broadcast engineering trade more specifically.

My experience in radio during the last decade, especially when working outside of a major metropolitan area, shows that experienced broadcast engineers are increasingly hard to find. A couple of in demand engineers I knew in Central Illinois had contracts with multiple stations that could take them all over a radius of several hundred miles for work. Yet, with the number of FM stations continuing to grow, and hundreds of new LPFM stations coming on line in the next few years, more broadcast engineers are needed, not fewer.

While there are still trade publications that serve broadcast engineers, it is always sad to lose another voice and the diversity of coverage and information it provided.

(hat-tip to Tom Taylor Now)

The post Broadcast Engineering magazine to end publication Thursday appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Terrestrial and digital radio revenue went up in 2012, with 4th quarter revenues surging even more. That’s according to a report from the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Revenue from commercial spots inched up 1% for the year overall, but increased 4% in the 4th quarter, mostly likely due to political advertising during the presidential election. This comes after a down year in 2011.

Digital revenue was up 8% for the year, and increased a full 11% in the last quarter. The digital category includes revenue from websites, online streams, as well as digital HD Radio signals.

Since the digital revenue numbers aren’t split out between online streams and other platforms, we can’t use this report to punch holes in Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey’s assertion that he doesn’t see a business model in streaming. Nevertheless, it does appear that building out a strong online presence is a good business strategy for commercial stations. This should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody, except the big radio execs who are just starting to awake from their consolidation-induced slumber.

The post Radio revenue up in 2012, especially on digital platforms appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The National Association of Broadcasters annual show and convention just started in Las Vegas, bringing together nearly every sector of the broadcast industry to show off new products, discuss trends and hob nob. Unfortunately, the Radio Survivor travel budget doesn’t yet cover more than cab fare across town, so we don’t have a correspondent on the ground in Vegas. But, like the Consumer Electronics Show, we’re watching the reports from NAB as they come across the wire, searching for radio-related news.

These days radio tends to be overshadowed by television, video and wireless broadband technology, but it is far from left out altogether. Emmis Communications, Intel and iBiquity were scheduled to show off their new prototype HD Radio-enabled smartphone on Monday, but as of 11 PM EDT I haven’t heard any additional news about the unveiling.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made his annual address on Monday and his overall message was that the broadcast industry’s fortunes are looking good. In particular he emphasized that the broadcasters who see themselves as being in the content creation business have a great many opportunities to take advantage of internet and mobile platforms alongside broadcast. Genachowski told broadcasters that too many stations are missing out, explaining,

“Many stations don’t have local news and content-creation operations that they can leverage over multiple broadband platforms; and on a percentage basis that’s also particularly true in the larger markets. The economics are the economics.

Genachowski also observed that “radio listening remains robust,” noting that,

“more than 90 percent of Americans listen to the radio weekly. And even with the many new digital sources of audio, radio ad revenue is up 9% since 2009.”

He also did a little shilling for the Obama administration by pointing out how advertising from the auto industry has grown strongly across the broadcast industry. Genachowski asked broadcasters to, “imagine the effect on broadcasters if the administration hadn’t prevented the collapse of the American auto industry.”

Closing out his address Genachowski made a pitch for broadcaster’s public inspection files to move out of the file cabinet and online, something we’ve covered here at Radio Survivor. He took on opponents of online public files by referencing a litany of editorials and other comments in support of the FCC’s proposal. Genachowski quoted a statement from a group of journalism school deans, who said

“Broadcast news organizations depend on, and consistently call for, robust open-record regimes for the institutions they cover; it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principle to themselves.”

He also said

“Bloomberg View looked at the burden and jobs arguments that have been made by opponents of online disclosure and concluded that ‘neither is credible.’ The New Republic examined broadcasters’ position and concluded: ‘the arguments they offer are so flimsy they collapse on inspection.'”

That signals pretty clearly that Genachowski’s FCC seems pretty intent on pressing forward with having broadcasters move their public files online, just as he encourages them to make the most of digital platforms in other ways.

Many broadcasters in the audience did not receive Genachowsi’s remarks too warmly, and were especially annoyed that he didn’t take questions. They were particularly miffed to hear that the Commission doesn’t seem to be backing down on online public files.

I guess when you’re FCC Chair, you don’t come to NAB to party and make friends. Some broadcasters will be disappointed that what happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas.

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Rush searches for his national advertisers.

More than a week after Rush Limbaugh proffered a weak apology for his repeated misogynistic comments on-air about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, his show is left with virtually no national advertisers, but he remains mostly unrepentant.

On Monday word broke that Limbaugh’s syndicator, Clear Channel-owned Premiere Radio Networks, is suspending all national advertising on his program for the next two weeks. As it is Limbaugh is left with only two national advertisers, Lifelock and online gold peddler Lear Financial. Think Progress counts a total of 140 local and national advertisers who have pulled their support for Limbaugh’s program, while Media Matters is keeping a daily tally of the ads heard on the program’s flagship station WABC in New York.

Predictably, Limbaugh himself isn’t backing down during his program. On Tuesday’s show he bragged that despite the outrage and criticism of his treatment of Fluke, for his political opponents “it wasn’t a big winner for them. Didn’t work out the way they had all envisioned.”

Whether or not Rush is reigned in, Sandra Fluke isn’t backing away from her vocal support in favor of private health insurance coverage for contraception. On Tuesday CNN.com published an Op-Ed piece from Fluke in which she calls out the “smears” against her and other women as an attempt to silence her and others who support the same cause.

She also counters the deceptive claims made by Limbaugh and others that she and other advocates are asking for government-supported contraception. Fluke writes,

despite the misinformation being spread, the regulation under discussion has absolutely nothing to do with government funding: It is all about the insurance policies provided by private employers and universities that are financed by individual workers, students and their families — not taxpayers.

Despite the advertiser exodus, I’m not surprised that ol’ Rushbo is still there. While I’m certain the bleeding will hurt in the short run, since that’s how Premiere makes a good portion of its money from the program, it will take more than a few weeks without national ads to give either Limbaugh or Premiere a reason to change strategy. Apparently Rush even refused to take back a sponsor this week which was amongst the first to pull its ads when the backlash hit.

However, if the big stations, like WABC, start losing more of their own advertisers, then they might be pressed to find a less risky alternative. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s new program is the one being cited most often.

It does appear that watchdogs like Think Progress and Media Matters will be helping to keep up pressure on Limbaugh advertisers for the moment. Whether that will last long enough to have any lasting impact on Limbaugh’s program is an open question. I daresay there will be quite a few new, perhaps less prominent advertisers lining up once the smoke clears. I’m doubtful that Rush will lose a substantial number of stations, nevermind lose his show altogether.

I suspect the lasting impact will be a bit more subtle. Limbaugh may be a bit more cautious about attacking women who are not established political actors. The program may also be less able to rely on big-name national advertisers for a longer time. But in the end, I doubt it is likely to add up to more than a few percentage points difference in Limbaugh’s already substantial yearly salary.

However, if he slips up this royally again any time soon, I do think he’ll be in a bit more jeopardy.

The post Sandra Fluke continues to speak out while syndicator suspends national ads on Limbaugh show appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last Thursday, on the eve of the company’s tenth anniversary celebration with Bruce Springsteen, SiriusXM CEO Mel Karmazin appeared for a thirteen minute interview on Jim Cramer’s CNBC investment show Mad Money. There are two big questions on the mind of satellite radio watchers: will John Malone’s Liberty Media buy up more of SiriusXM, and why are Karmazin and top execs selling off shares in their own company? The former question has been tugging at investors because Liberty currently owns 40% of SiriusXM from a 2009 loan deal, which as of last week permits Liberty to purchase more shares. However, the interview revealed no substantive answers to these concerns.

To me Karmazin’s most interesting–but not surprising–admission was that SiriusXM’s costs are going down because there is no longer competition in the satellite radio market; since their merger SiriusXM is the only player. In particular this means that if a content provider is interested in being on satellite radio, there’s only one game in town, and no other company to spark a bidding war with. On top of that, there’s no competition for would-be satellite radio consumers, putting aside the fact that there’s plenty of competition for radio listeners across platforms.

Of course, there’s nothing revelatory in that admission. In fact, it borders on stunningly obvious. Nevertheless, I always appreciate it when big industry players come out and admit simple truths like this. In part, that’s because it validates the criticisms of folks, like me, who see through claims that these monopoly-generating mergers are somehow in the public interest. They’re only ever about reducing competition in order to lower costs and increase revenue. Any other objective is peripheral, at best. Why else would SiriusXM wait until now to raise its monthly subscription rate? Again, Karmazin pretty much admits as much in his Mad Money appearance. A rate increase was counter-productive as long as there was another satellite provider that could compete on price.

Indeed, it’s good to be a monopoly.

The post SiriusXM’s Karmazin pretty much admits it’s good to be a monopoly appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last week the FCC released its report on the economic impact of low-power FM stations on commercial radio. The report was mandated by passage of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010 (LCRA), and its primary conclusion should surprise nobody with any knowledge of LPFM: “LPFM stations are unlikely to have more than a negligible economic impact on full-service commercial FM stations.”

A pithy comment made to a post on The Hill’s technology blog sums it up even more vividly: “It sounds like a study investigating the Salvation Army thrift stores to see if they unfairly compete with Walmart.” In effect, this comment and the report make clear that the idea that LPFM could be a real threat to commercial radio is and always was a red herring tossed out by the commercial broadcast industry to try and thwart any addition to the radio dial that would not be under its own umbrella.

Of course, I’m certain there are many low-power radio advocates who wish low-power stations could be a bigger threat to the commercial radio establishment, especially given how the likes of Clear Channel decimated the medium in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. However, the ability for low-power FM to be an actual threat is mitigated by many of the same factors that blindsided the largest commercial radio companies while they were too focused on buying up stations, consolidating operations and firing staff around the turn of the century.

Nevertheless we are on the cusp of adding many more low-power community stations to the airwaves of towns and cities across the country. The stats uncovered in the Commission’s report paint an interesting portrait of LPFM that underlines both the power and limits of their reach.

With regard to the question of effect on commercial stations, the most significant face is that LPFM stations have a miniscule impact on ratings, if they show up at all. The station with the highest listenership managed to rank only 18th in its market.

The flip side of that coin is that, according to the report, amongst those stations that appear in Arbitron ratings, LPFM stations have a high value for “time spent listening” (TSL). This means that LPFM listeners tend to stay tuned in for longer periods of time. This fact leads the Commission to conclude that, “these measures suggest that the popular LPFM stations tend to attract a small but loyal fan base, which tunes in for long periods of time and/or switches stations less frequently than the average full-service station listener.”

LPFM stations are more likely to carry niche programming. So the National Association of Broadcasters told the FCC that it should consider the potential harm LPFMs would have on the small segment of commercial stations that cater to a niche audience. In particular the NAB argued that niche stations are more vulnerable due to having lower average revenues from a more typically formatted station.

However, the Commission notes that the NAB provided no examples of an LPFM that current duplicates or previously duplicated an existing commercial station’s format. The Commission cites comments filed by LPFM advocate Wesli Dymoke who contends that it is unlikely that a low-power station would choose to compete head-on with a more powerful commercial station. It also notes that the NAB provided no plausible explanation why a LPFM station would choose such a Quixotic path. In the end the FCC concludes that there is no evidence that low-power stations pose any threats to commercial stations with niche formats.

The completion of this report represents the penultimate hurdle in front of the expansion of LPFM, which it has now successfully leaped over. The final one is the outcome of the FCC’s proceeding to resolve the queue of pending applications for translator repeater stations, many of which could take up frequencies that would be suitable for new low-power stations after the LCRA. As of last June the Commission was leaning towards establishing a minimum number of LPFM-qualified frequencies that must remain available in a given market after translator applications are approved.

With luck the commissioners will resolve that proceedings in the first quarter of this year. In turn that could pave the way for a new LPFM license application window in the second or third quarter. Then it will have taken only twelve years to overcome the NAB’s attempt to cut low-power community radio off at the knees. Yet, after all that time communities of all sizes across the country still need true community radio, perhaps more than before.

The post One step closer to more low-power community radio; FCC says LPFM no threat to commercial stations appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This post by John Anderson originally appeared at DIYmedia.net and is republished here by permission.

The Medium is our Message at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Dan Patterson

Today, more than 10 years on from LPFM’s inception, unlicensed broadcasting remains alive and well, although the act is not as explicitly politicized as it once was.

This could change.

Last week, the Occupy Wall Street encampment established a microradio station at 107.1 FM. The station simulcasts the 24/7 live stream which provides coverage of life inside Zuccotti Park, as well as street-level reportage of daily protest actions in New York City’s financial district. The growth of the occupation has been impressive, and the establishment of a microradio station is another step in the action’s evolution.

One idea that’s been batted around involves integrating broadcasting into the occupation’s General Assembly, which functions as its governing body. City ordinances forbid the use of amplified sound systems in the park, which has resulted in the development of a “human microphone” system – speakers talk in sentence-fragments, which are repeated by the crowd so all can hear the dialogue. While it’s a very participatory method of group communication, it’s slow going and not necessarily scalable as the Assemblies grow.

In this instance, microradio could be employed to provide a non-amplified public address system – simply plug the speaker’s mic into a transmitter. Radios are cheap, and many smartphones have built-in FM reception capability. Some involved in the NYC action are brainstorming along these lines.

As more occupations are launched around the nation, their organizers have taken notes on how Occupy Wall Street has grown. Adding microradio to the tactical media mix makes lots of sense.

Radio still remains one of the most powerful tools of mass media available; one need look no further than the right-wing bastion of talk radio which has done so much to sully political discourse in this country. Microradio is easily accessible to a large audience and relatively uncomplicated to deploy. Unlike most other tools of protest-media, the critical infrastructure that makes radio work is pretty much self-contained, which adds to its reliability.

Microradio is also extremely useful as an outreach tool. The station in Zuccotti Park broadcasts to the occupation and immediate neighbors, which can be useful in the maintenance of good community relations. Microradio stations have been deployed in similar situations, such as festivals, farmer’s markets and picket lines, to extend the reach and impact of such events beyond their physical presence. In addition, opening up access to the airwaves in such a public manner helps to demystify the act of broadcasting and introduce folks to the notion that the airwaves, too, are a public space.

This leads to the final rationale for incorporating microradio into occupations – it’s an occupation of its own kind. One of the grievances expressed by Occupy Wall Street directly addresses corporate control of the media. There is no better way to address that grievance than by becoming the media directly, and unlicensed broadcasting has a long and storied history in the United States. Nothing signifies independent media quite like a microradio station.

Microradio is no more or less civilly disobedient than taking over and transforming a public space. Considering that the airwaves are ostensibly public property, they should be no less off limits in this context than a park or public right-of-way. Provided they do not interfere with other broadcasters, the addition of new signals to a local radio dial is materially non disruptive; what’s more, the FCC does not have police powers (and they also abhor confrontation).

Occupy Wall Street’s media team has been integral to sustaining the encampment, spreading the word, and inspiring others. New and future occupations are learning much from what’s happening in New York, where they’re heavily engaged in multi-platform citizen journalism, utilizing everything from the newest of new media forms to publishing their own newspaper and, of course, the human microphone. Microradio falls comfortably within this continuum and can help bootstrap more intensive media efforts.

The post Occupy Wall Street occupies the airwaves, too appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Paul McLane

In his “From the Editor” column Radio World’s Paul McLane takes up Matthew’s recent calculation finding that pirate radio generates a half-billion dollars worth of jobs. Recall that my esteemed Radio Survivor colleague was riffing off a recent study sponsored by the National Association of Broadcasters that claimed $135 billion in economic output is attributable to commercial radio and television broadcasting.

McLane admits that he “chuckled” at Matthew’s “poke of NAB’s huge, speculative ‘ripple effect’ numbers.” But apparently he can’t let the joke continue to ride on his high horse as he chides Matthew’s subject of choice, writing,

“Lasar would have done better to discuss the economic value of other legal forms of radio rather than that of pirates. I do not endorse illegal radio, and neither should you.”

McLane goes on to explain that he is a supporter of eclectic college and community radio and sympathetic to “people who want to bring more diverse, nontraditional voices to the broadcast spectrum,” but only provided, “they comply with the law.” He advises that those who disagree with the current legal and regulatory regime should “work to change it, just as LPFM advocates have done.”

Even though LPFM is only a decade old, it would seem that Mr. McLane has forgotten the circumstances that led up to the FCC creating this service. Let’s consider one of LPFM’s strongest and most tireless advocates, Pete TriDish, a founder of the Prometheus Radio Project, which advocates for the service and helps LPFM stations get on the air. What did Pete do before Prometheus? Why, he was an unlicensed broadcaster with the Radio Mutiny collective in Philadelphia during the 1990s.

Radio Mutiny was not alone as unlicensed micropower stations went on the air across the US during the latter half of the 1990s. Many of these stations–especially those calling themselves “micropower” rather than “pirate” –were broadcasting as an act of civil disobedience, protesting the negative effects of the radio consolidation in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the lack of licenses available for low-power community radio.

I would argue that former FCC Chairman William Kennard was responding to dual pressures when he spearheaded the creation of LPFM. Yes, on one hand he was answering the calls made by a growing number of civic, community and religious groups for an expansion of community radio. But on the other hand, Kennard was actively battling, and arguably losing, a war against a rising tide of unlicensed broadcasters that the Commission was unprepared to defeat. Kennard and his fellow commissioners wisely recognized that creating a low-cost low-power radio service would help take the wind from the rhetorical sails of many microbroadcasters, while also making the FCC appear supportive of true community service radio. The Commission also was betting that some would-be unlicensed broadcasters would abandon their plans in favor of pursuing an actual LPFM license.

McLane observes that Radio Survivor, “professes to love radio ‘in all its forms’ and is up front about including illegal radio in that.” I don’t claim to speak for my fellow Radio Survivors, but I’ll admit to some fondness for pirate radio. However, I do not love all pirate radio, in the same way that I do not love all commercial and noncommercial radio. Like so many other underground activities, unlicensed broadcasting often exists to fill a need that is unmet by licensed or legitimized services. The most responsible pirates run technically clean operations, taking care not to cause interference with other stations. I am not a fan of pirates who broadcast dirty signals that trounce on adjoining stations and spit out interference.

We would not have LPFM if it were not for the pirates and microbroadcasters who forced the FCC’s hand. They demonstrated that there was room on the dial for low-powered community stations not through lobbying and engineering studies, but simply by showing their communities that it could be done, and without interference or harm. This could only have been done without a license, the FCC would have endorsed no exception or trial.

I’m sympathetic to the fact that the editor of Radio World can’t really come out in support of pirate radio. And, to be honest, we appreciate the nod from Mr. McLane, even if it comes with a dose of criticism. But it’s important not to lose Matthew’s original point. An underground economy is still an economy. Pirate radio has made significant contributions to broadcasting in the US, and our dials would not be the same had it never existed.

The post Radio World editor chuckles at Matthew’s economic analysis of pirate radio, but forgets his radio history appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here are several responses to my post guesstimating that pirate radio stations produce about 19,220 jobs per year worth $576,600,000 in income. Obviously my finding, calculated in about an hour, was a bit of a stretch. But it has stimulated an interesting discussion, as I hoped that it would.

The first response comes from John Broomall of Christian Community Broadcasters. The second from broadcast technical consultant Robert H. Branch Jr.

John Broomall:

[This] is an informal analysis of the financial impact of pirate radio on American society.  It – supposedly – is based  on professional studies about the economic s of commercial FM radio.  In reality it is science / economic fiction.  If that is a indictment on the professional study as well, so be it.

False assumptions in the Pirate study:

1. That there are 450 pirate stations in the USA with all economic impact of a “half-billion.”

2. that all pirates are commercial

3. that are pirates are equally successful

4. even if jobs created are “worth” $30K a year each, that (without pirate radio) these individuals would be homeless with no economic impact on society.  (in reality, even the homeless have an economic impact).

As LPFM operators, let’s apply these assumptions to the Low Power industry.  Since there are about twice as many LPFMs as pirates with $576 million impact, that means that the 850 legal LPFMs have about a billion dollar impact, i.e. more than a million dollars impact each.  How many LPFM’s have a million dollar impact on society each year?  Any?

There is a pirate station near me.  He is automated and apparently operates from his home with a family “volunteer” staff.  Near zero financial impact.  The same is true for legal WPCG-LP, operated by me and my wife on a volunteer basic from my home.

There is a non-financial difference – WPCG has six local newscasts; the pirate airs an Internet feed most of the time.

Robert H. Branch Jr. (responding to Broomall):

There is a major difference in the kind of pirate radio you describe and the reality in places like New York City and South Florida.  These are full-on commercial radio stations that employ staff and “protection” attorneys to protect their interests. From their formats it would appear that they have sizeable incomes.  In many cases, they are minority interests who have their city ways of staying in existence, despite state and federal laws that protect them.  They are ruthless in their pursuit.  I have some first hand experience with triangulating locations and mitigating this interference caused to legitimate broadcasters.

I agree that the study may be skewed, but it is absolutely not baseless.  Also, it is much more profitable for them to be pirates than LPFM’s because they do not honor any power or height limits.  The standard FCC fines for a pirate operator are small in comparison to the revenues.  I have had personal knowledge (even photos) of pirate radio stations that operate from 500 watts to 2.5 kW in major metro’s.  Many advertisers on pirate radio stations have no idea the operations are not legitimate radio operations.  These include press packets and rate cards.  The impact is not insignificant.  However, my experience in smaller markets is as you describe.

A couple of comments and clarifications from my end. John Broomall is right to argue that my estimate of the number of unlicensed stations in the United States is speculative. A more precise jobs calculation would have to ferret the correct number out.

But I never said that all pirate stations are commercial or equally successful. Here’s what I wrote:

Many pirate stations run on volunteer power. But not a few, such as recently prosecuted Daz Hits radio, have strong roots in their communities. They run income generating community events and sometimes air commercials. Thus these stations employ paid deejays, managers, event managers, food service workers, entertainers, and engineers. Thus I estimate that on average, your pirate radio station employs eight people in full or part time positions. That’s 3,600 direct jobs.

This was an estimate of job creation on aggregate, not assuming the same individual station job creation level across the board.

But I do think that this sort of methodology can be applied to LPFM stations, and they may have more of an impact than we suspect. Another “report” coming soon . . . <bwahaha!>

The post Do pirate radio stations create jobs? Two responses appeared first on Radio Survivor.

credit: von holdt doodle-a-day (dollar signs added)

I have often wondered how many jobs “unlicensed” media produce, be it P2P file sharing sites or pirate radio stations. A new study commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters inspires me to attempt a rough cut of the pirate radio question. Based on my guesstimate study, broadly modeled on its methodology, I think that pirate radio stations in the United States annually generate 19,220 jobs worth $576,600,000 to American workers. That’s more than a half a billion dollar yearly boost to the US economy.

The NAB backed report says 2.52 million jobs are “attributable” to the local commercial radio and television industry on an annual basis. The study was produced by the Woods and Poole economic research group.

Here is the gist of the study’s methodology and findings:

First, the direct impact of the industry is the result of its significant size: 1,370 commercial television stations and more than 11,700 commercial radio stations sustaining more than 300 thousand jobs and more than $49 billion in output.

Second, as with any industry in a developed economy, workers in the commercial local broadcast television and radio industry consume goods and services in all other sectors of the economy supporting more jobs and creating more income and output. This ripple effect is estimated to result in 833 thousand jobs and $135 billion in output.

Third, the output of commercial local broadcast television and radio industry stimulates economic activity by providing a forum for advertising that is free to consumers. The stimulative effect of advertising on local commercial broadcasts is very significant. An estimated $986 billion in United States output and 1.38 million jobs are attributable to the stimulative effects of advertising on local television and radio.

Ok. You get the idea. Direct jobs. Supporting jobs. Stimulative effect. Let’s apply this to the pirates.

Direct jobs

I estimate that there are 450 pirate radio stations in the United States. How do I get this? Wikipedia lists about 45 pirate stations. After years of following the unlicensed station phenomenon, my sense is that these lists should always be multiplied by a factor of ten, given the frequency with which pirate stations clandestinely launch.

Many pirate stations run on volunteer power. But not a few, such as recently prosecuted Daz Hits radio, have strong roots in their communities. They run income generating community events and sometimes air commercials. Thus these stations employ paid deejays, managers, event managers, food service workers, entertainers, and engineers. Thus I estimate that on average, your pirate radio station employs eight people in full or part time positions. That’s 3,600 direct jobs.

Indirect jobs

In addition, pirate stations buy and maintain radio station related equipment (from transmitters through computers) consume utilities such as electricity, water, and ISP/telecom access, and rent space. Volunteers must use public transportation to reach the station. They must buy some of their music to broadcast. They must hire t-shirt makers and other publicity related vendors. They must hire webmasters and network ISP people to stream.

Equipment acquisition, maintenance and repair: 3 jobs per station x 450 = 1,350 jobs

Utilities: 2 jobs per station x 450 = 900 jobs

Space rental (keeping landlords employed): 1 job per station = 450 jobs

Publicists: 2 jobs per station = 900 jobs

Commercial music sellers: 2 jobs per station = 900 jobs

Web/network related: 2 jobs per station = 900 jobs

Then there are the legal costs related to running a pirate radio station.

FCC anti-piracy enforcement bureau: 20 jobs

Commercial station engineers and consultants who monitor, complain about, and report pirate stations: 100 jobs

Attorneys who assist fined stations: 200 jobs

Stimulative jobs

These are the jobs that are stimulated by the music and public affairs activities of pirate radio stations. These include the income (aka jobs) that accrue to musicians, clubs, bookstores, community organizations, political groups, restaurants, digital and analog music sellers, and other entities as a result of the constant publicity they receive from the pirate station.

musicians: 4 jobs x 450 stations = 1800 jobs

clubs: 2 x 450 = 900 jobs

bookstores: 2 x 450 = 900 jobs

community organizations: 1 x 450 = 450 jobs

political groups: 2 x 450 = 900 jobs

restaurants: 3 x 450 = 1350 jobs

digital and analog music sellers: 3 x 450 = 1350 jobs

other individuals and entities: 5 x 450 = 2250

Some of these jobs, such as the FCC enforcement bureau jobs, engineering jobs, and legal cost related jobs, pay quite a lot. Many pay less. I estimate that the mean (average) income related to these jobs comes to $30,000 a year. Thus:

19,220 jobs x $30k income = $576,600,000

I think that this is a conservative guesstimate of the job value that pirate radio stations bring to the US economy. Feel free to correct my arithmetic. If you think that my methodology is off, fine. But this logic isn’t terribly different from that used in your typical trade association commissioned industry job estimate study. The biggest difference is that I did this one in about an hour and received no consulting fee for my work. You’re welcome.

The post Report: pirate radio generates over half billion dollars for US workers in jobs appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Fundraising Tips At NFCB 2011 (Photo: J. Waits)

The National Federation of Community Broadcasters‘ 36th annual community radio conference was an incredible few days full of radio education and community radio bonding. Held in San Francisco from June 1st to June 4th, it featured an action-packed schedule of sessions, keynotes, and workshops. I’ve already recounted the Saving College Stations panel and Matthew has recapped the session that he moderated, Great Music Programs, in a 2-part series (part one, part two).

For me it was exciting to attend this conference for the first time and I was impressed by the passion that everyone had for community radio. There was a huge sense of both camaraderie and urgency in terms of communicating to the world the importance of public media. Not only did I gain some practical radio tips in sessions about programming, fundraising, and legal issue in radio; but I also learned about activism and consensus-building, which are particularly relevant to the efforts of people trying to save college radio.

In this post, I’m going to focus on some of the fundraising tips that came up in 2 of the conference sessions: “7 (or 17) New Ideas in 75 Minutes” and “Lunch and Money: the Philanthropist Next Door.” The first break-out session that I attended on Thursday, June 2 shared a number of suggestions for radio stations embarking on fundraising campaigns. It was interesting for me to hear a bit about the tactics used by several San Francisco Bay Area public radio stations, as it had been awhile since I’d checked in on their on-air fundraisers.  A handout compiled by the panelists outlined the following 10 innovative fundraising tips:

1. Smackdowns: In a recent fundraiser, San Francisco public radio station KALW utilized “short, pre-produced messages to drive fundraising” during their on-air drive. General Manager Matt Martin also described a “celebrity smackdown” feature that they ran during their fundraiser. Each day during their news program they would feature guests battling it out for the most fundraiser donations. In their fundraiser, KALW also emphasized shorter fundraising breaks (60 to 90 seconds) and creative fundraising spots. This “no-interruption” fundraiser also garnered some media attention for the station as people saw this as an innovative way to solicit funds.

2. Challenges/Matches: Many stations attempt to increase donations through the use of “challenge money, matching funds, and employer matching gifts.” Some even solicit matching funds from potential donors in advance of on-air fundraisers.

3. One Day Drives: Diane Hering of KZYX (see my profile of this rural community/public radio station here) talked about the one-day on-air fundraiser that her station did. She first learned about this idea from the consultant John Sutton & Associates. She pointed out that a radio station can raise needed funds in just one day if the fundraiser is done in a certain way, adding that “the idea of getting regular programming back tomorrow motivates people.” Hering said that pre-promotion played a huge role in their 1-day fundraiser.

4. Groupon: Yoon Lee from San Francisco public radio station KQED talked about how her station has worked with Groupon in order to offer coupons for KQED memberships for half price. For KQED this turned out to be a good tool for acquiring new members. It’s important to remember that this sort of deal can’t be promoted on-air since it’s a revenue-sharing arrangement. Others mentioned that this type of offer might not work in every community and that there are a number of potential partners one can consider for a coupon promotion, including local newspapers.

Sales Department at Commercial Radio Station in NYC (Photo: J. Waits)

5. Collaborating with other Non-Profits: Although not thoroughly discussed in the session, the concept behind this is for radio station to donate gifts to other non-profits in response to a fundraiser donation. An important thing to keep in mind is that it is illegal for a non-commercial radio station to fundraise on-air for another organization (although this rule has been waived by the FCC following specific emergencies, including Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti and the recent earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan), so tread carefully.

6. Countdown Shows for the Final 24 Hours of the Drive: Panelists described various countdowns that they have aired in the final day of a fundraiser. At KALW during each hour they played a numbers-related song (1 to 24) chosen by their music programmers. Other stations have had listeners vote for favorite songs and those have been played in the final 24 hours of the fundraiser.

7. Sweepstakes/Raffles: In KQED’s recent fundraiser they included a few raffles for bikes, TVs and $1000 gift cards. Listeners were told that if they donated within a certain time frame (for example, by 12 noon today, within the hour, or on a specific day), they would be entered into the drawing. With raffles and sweepstakes it’s imperative that stations have clear guidelines so as not to break FCC rules related to “consideration” and underwriting, as well as regarding contests. Additionally, anyone who calls up asking to be included in the raffle should be included, regardless of whether or not they make a donation.

8. Special Day Programming: Instead of doing a traditional fundraiser, some stations air special programming that incorporates a fundraising message. An all-classical station in New Jersey does a 1-day fundraiser every month in which they air special programs that can range from a celebration of Strauss’ birthday to a day filled with complete symphonies. Apparently they have managed to cut their fundraising time in half. Rather than promoting these events as fundraisers, they describe them as special programming days. June Fox of consultancy DEI argues that this is a way for stations to show their “commitment to quality programming.”

9. Pledge Free Streams: KQED recently offered access to a “pledge-free” Internet stream for listeners who donated in advance of their fundraiser. This second audio stream was free of fundraiser pitches and required the use of a special pass code.

10. Pre-Drive Buy Down: Another fundraising strategy is to reach out to listeners in advance of an on-air fundraiser, encouraging them to donate early (before the drive begins) in order to reduce the length of the pledge drive. KALW’s Matt Martin agreed that sending an email newsletter in advance can help to reduce the length of a fundraiser.

The conference closed with a steak lunch on Saturday, June 4th focused on the topic of “Lunch and Money: The Philanthropist Next Door” (you can listen to an mp3 of that session here). Fundraising consultant Kay Sprinkel Grace spoke of her own college radio past at KZSU (Stanford University) and talked about her passion for radio as one of the most “intimate” forms of media. She said that we need to re-think the way we categorize people who donate to radio stations and should consider “how much they care” rather than “how much they give.” She shared 4 main points, including: “people give to you because you meet needs, not because you have needs,” a gift to a station is “a gift through you and into the community,” fundraising is about “relationships” and not about money, and “it’s not about you. It’s about the donor.”

Darryl Lester of Hindsight Consulting  asked the audience to rethink their ideas about what a philanthropist is and argued that everyone is a “giver” in some way and that you are still a philanthropist if you give your time. He also suggested that often organizations focus more time on getting grants from foundations, when in reality it’s individuals who provide most of the donations. He said, “give everybody a chance to tell you no.”

Alice Ferris from GoalBusters shared some wisdom, saying, “If you want to get money, ask for advice and if you want to get advice, ask for money.” She said that in this economic climate stations should also be re-examining budgets, looking for donated equipment, and investigating how vendors can provide support. She suggested that stations “diversify” sources of funding and talked about how a casual conversation in a cocktail bar ended up resulting in a big donation for a station that she works for.

Our complete coverage from the 2011 NFCB conference can be found here. Future posts will recap additional sessions from the conference and audio archives of several presentations (including a few others related to fundraising and underwriting) are here.

The post NFCB Sessions’ Fundraising Tips for Radio: Celebrity Smackdowns, 1-Day Drives and the Philanthropist Next Door appeared first on Radio Survivor.

In a scenario that’s becoming too familiar to Radio Survivor readers, the Chicago-based Latino community radio station Radio Arte is now up for sale by its parent organization, the National Museum of Mexican Art. In fiscal year 2009 the museum reported a deficit of $677,121, and according to President Carlos Tortolero the museum has been unable to obtain loans to finance its entire operation. The museum is also selling the building that houses the station.

Radio Arte, WRTE, has been on the air for fourteen years, providing an opportunity for youth in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to learn broadcasting, in addition to airing social justice programming. At a meeting with station volunteers, Tortolero said that the museum’s objective is still to maintain its programming. A group of stations volunteers are looking to form a cooperative to buy the license and maintain the station’s operations.

According to Chicago public station WBEZ, its parent organization, Chicago Public Media, has been meeting in discussions to buy Radio Arte’s license. The report says nothing more about the possibility. At question is if CPM bought the license would it maintain Radio Arte’s current programming schedule or look to merge operations with its experimental Vocalo service which broadcasts from a transmitter outside of Chicago just over the state line in Indiana. Originally conceived of as a station airing all listener-contributed programming, Vocalo recently underwent a makeover adding daily drive-time hosts. Vocalo has been a thorny issue for CPM in part due to low listenership, which stems from having a signal that does not cover much of the north side of Chicago. Radio Arte’s transmitter located in Chicago’s near South Side would provide a little better coverage, even though it is only licensed for 73 watts.

For all intents and purposes Radio Arte is the city of Chicago’s only true community radio station that isn’t affiliated with a college or university, and therefore more of a hybrid college/community station. It is all the more unique because of its focus on Chicago’s large Latino population. Any significant change in programming brought on by a station sale would represent a real loss for the city.

The post Chicago’s Latino community radio station Radio Arte up for sale appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am a monthly donor to my local public radio station so that I don’t even have call in during its pledge drives — they’ve already got my donation. So despite their attempts to make the morning drive pledge pitches compelling, by the second or third day I turn the station off in the morning because I’m sick of pledge drive. I know it’s a necessary evil, and I’ve been just as responsible working in community and college radio. So I do empathize with the listeners who pledged early to the stations I’ve worked at, too. Nevertheless, when I’m just the listener who has already donated, I just want to go back to regular programming.

San Francisco’s KQED has come up with a remedy for its early donors — a pledge-drive free webstream. This feed is only for folks who have ponied up $45 or more, and it is only online. While the station had been toying with the idea for a while, it is only with the growing popularity of mobile devices that can stream online radio that it seemed feasible.

I think KQED is smart to publicize this option well in advance of the actual drive, which begins May 5. This way they’re giving a lot of incentive for would-be donors to get their pledges in early. They’re also garnering a fair degree of publicity for their drive, which otherwise wouldn’t be newsworthy at all. Getting in a significant number of pledges in advance of the start date may also help the station reach its goal faster, cutting the drive short.

However, like all good marketing techniques, it will be interesting to see if this one has legs, and if other stations also take up the mantle. Putting up a pledge-free stream does require producing a whole other stream of programming, which may be too expensive and complex for smaller stations. And as the idea loses its novelty the incentive may wear off for many listeners who will go back to needing to be reminded dozens of times on air before they finally make their pledge.

The station also potentially risks losing multiple donations from a single donor who is moved a second or third time by a new pitch or special premium gift. I don’t imagine that these donors who give multiple times make up more than a small percentage of overall donors. But having worked and coordinated many pledge drives in the last fourteen years, I do know that these donors do exist and their overall contributions really do add up.

I predict that KQED’s pledge-free stream experiment will be successful in helping the station hit or break its goal ahead of schedule. The novelty and publicity will help see to that. Then I expect that other public stations in larger markets with the resources to pull of a second live stream of programming will jump in and see some gains, too. But I’m not entirely sure that we’ll see the idea still going four years from now. Or, we may see the idea get diluted, with the pledge-free stream turning into the fewer-pledge-breaks stream.

I am very interested to see how this plays out.

The post Public station rewards donors with pledge-free web stream appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Editor’s Note: Radioactive Gavin has collected more than 300 articles on radio and digital music over the past 3 months for Common Frequency. This is the first of a series of seven posts he will be contributing in the coming weeks, looking back at the end of a rough year in radio.

Conservatives crying “Defund NPR” at the top of their lungs might have gotten the most attention in 2010, but look beyond the headlines and it gets worse.

Nonprofit groups all over the country who hold FCC construction permits for new community stations are struggling to come up with the bucks to build.

The massive new contract for Ryan Seacrest is part of a dangerous trend perpetuated by Clear Channel that can only mean fewer net jobs in the industry. (Remember when Rush Limbaugh was given a $400M raise and Clear Channel chopped $400M from the rest of its payroll?)

Major cuts are coming to the BBC, following a frustrating few months highlighted by journalists going on strike. President Obama’s depressing “deficit commission” has recommended the US stop funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Public Telecommunications Facilities Program entirely by 2015.

The Pacifica Network is apparently on the brink of bankruptcy after six decades and the KPFA fight has turned allies into foes. Free Speech Radio News is threatening to shut down its daily operations despite endorsements from journalism advocates like author Bob McChesney.

Look to the fighting spirit of the Save KTRU movement if you like, but the ugly takeover story in Houston is a reminder of the grave situation student radio stations are struggling against nationwide, as cash-strapped university administrators see FM licenses as dollar signs.

At least college students have stations on the air to fight for. The dedicated volunteers in Salem, OR who want to launch KMUZ have found today’s economy much more difficult than expected.

The Radio For People Coalition knows of around 100 groups who applied along with KMUZ in 2007 and were granted permits, but are now facing mandatory FCC construction deadlines. Economic hardship is the key factor in almost every case. Sadly, the inspiring WGXC barnraising in Hudson, NY was a rare exception.

Including me, there are basically only four people in the country whose job descriptions include capacity-building support for new stations. Prometheus Radio Project, Common Frequency, Latino Public Radio Consortium and Native Public Media can’t do it all.

But radio is still the best communications technology for reaching the American people. It is free to listen, of course, and community radio provides citizens with access to the public airwaves, and opportunities to amplify voices underserved by NPR and Clear Channel.

According to Camille Lacapa at Native Public Media, only about a quarter of First Nations radio projects with construction permits are in “good” financial shape yet 16 are required to be on the air sometime in 2011. Reports vary about the exact numbers but it seems clear that with 500 recognized nations spread out across the land, every frequency counts.

Wannabe public service operations are facing the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Think about progressive folks trying to change the landscape in Red State America. Let’s take Boise, Idaho and Spokane, WA as examples. In a piece titled “Never a Better Time to Fund Noncommercial Radio,” my friends Jeff Abrams and Lupito Flores point out:

Boise and Spokane represent the Northwest’s third and fourth largest population bases.  New licensees in these two cities are now planning the largest combined expansion of noncommercial radio service in the entire country.  Boise Community Radio (KRBX) and Thin Air Radio (KYRS) will be serving populations of 469,000 and 249,000, respectively.

Both groups have received $415,000 in Commerce funding and are now seeking matching funds totaling $152,000 to help build strong, listener-supported community radio stations that empower people – especially ethnic minorities, low-income, and other marginalized groups striving for a more just and sustainable world.

Combined, their programs will help make a stronger and more effective regional social change movement by promoting and facilitating communication and collaboration among nonprofit organizations, and by encouraging and enabling increased participation from community members.

However, these new licenses expire in 2011.

What makes no sense to me is why the social justice community, from MoveOn.org to the NAACP, doesn’t get behind the build-out of community radio right now. Instead of repeatedly handing over millions of dollars to corporate broadcasters for fleeting ad messages, MoveOn.org could help communities build and sustain new infrastructure for communications using affordable radio equipment.

The passage of the Local Community Radio Act in the US Senate, finally, means the FCC will offer up hundreds of new 100-watt licenses for community radio stations. Great! But first… how about supporting these one hundred secular, alternative, independent community stations right now? With unemployment rising, idiotic Bush/Obama economic policy, and dried up foundation funds, many nonprofits who have done everything else right may never launch their FM stations without financial support from the activist community. The clock is ticking.

More funding stories you might have missed, in brief:

• KPFK’s new solar energy project overshadowed by Pacifica’s battles
• The nation’s 3rd largest radio conglomerate, Citadel, rejects two takeover offers from Cumulus, the 2nd largest
• See Howard Stern’s expensive contract in context
• Community group promises “added local emphasis” in acquisition of Long Island public station
• Beloved outlet Democracy Now! offers donors the most expensive coffee ever
• Incoming House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet Chairman Greg Walden is a former radio station owner
• New Jersey public broadcaster lays off 130
• Hard Knock Radio veteran explains why he left KPFA
• Peek inside KUT’s controversial staff salaries
• Veteran jock Danny Holiday threatens 3 hours of Manilow if nobody pledges
• and Alec Baldwin delivers some mildly funny pitches for WAMU.

The post Radio’s Fall – Part One: No Money, Mo’ Problems appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Howard and Sirius still stuck with each other

So much for the drama. Howard Stern announced this morning that he signed a new five-year contract with Sirius satellite radio, ending a protracted negotiation. He did not indicate how much the contract is for, only saying that it is “very fair.”

The end of this contract will be a different sort of drama since Stern also said that this will be his last five years in radio. Whether that means he’ll pursue other media opportunities or choose to retire altogether is anyone’s guess. No matter what he decides I’m sure that Stern will milk the mystery for all it’s worth.

Of course, this puts to bed the absurd rumor that Stern was contemplating a $600 million contract with Apple to distribute his show exclusively on iTunes. However, we still don’t know the terms of Stern’s new deal with Sirius, although eventually investors are going to want to know the details. There has been some speculation that a new deal would involve a little less cash and more stock, though the stock isn’t exactly performing its best. Nevertheless Sirius (SIRI) stock was up over 6% this morning following the news. I’m guessing that’s all the bump the stock is going to see unless it turns out Sirius got some real cash concessions in this contract.

We don’t know yet whether Sirius decided that a Stern-less future was too risky, or whether Stern realized that there are likely no more lucrative options than staying put at Sirius. Status quo is obviously the safest option for both parties, especially as Sirius closes in on celebrating the milestone of 20 millions subscribers. Losing Stern and triggering a possible exodus of possible hundreds of thousands of subscribers would have certainly marred the occasion.

The post Howard Stern is staying with Sirius for another five years appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As Matthew puts it, “We’re the voice of listeners, participants and consumers, rather than the ‘voice of the industry.'” There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites with this kind of perspective on television, movies and music. We believe strongly that radio deserves at least one.

Every so often we will ask for your support in helping to keep Radio Survivor updated with high quality commentary, news and ideas about radio. Right now our plans include a visual redesign, an increase in the number of posts and an expansion in the range of voices you read here.

Luckily, it’s very easy for you to support Radio Survivor at no addition cost to you. If you ever use Amazon to buy anything you can help us earn a little bit from our affiliation. Just come to Radio Survivor first and enter through one of our Amazon links. Then Radio Survivor will receive a small commission for every item you buy, and it will cost you nothing more.

Of course we’re always happy if you just want to give us a little donation to out tip jar in order keep things running. The money we take in goes right back into hosting the site and investing to make it better. Nobody is drawing a salary here, we do this for the love of radio.

Thanks again for stopping here at our little corner in the internets.

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I also learned form Carr and Arano’s article that the Tribune board had twice since hiring Michaels retained an independent counsel to investigate claims of harassment at the company, the most recent happening right after the first Times article hit the news.

Who knows how much the Board spent or was ready to spend to learn what most employees at Tribune, and several reporters outside the company, already knew. Whatever Tribune pays Randy Michaels to split is too much, and is just more good money after bad. Nevertheless, I’m sure many employees are still glad he’s gone.

The post No massive severance for Randy Michaels appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Lee Abrams contemplates his next innovative memo.

It’s been quite the fortnight over at Tribune Tower. Almost two weeks ago NY Times media reporter David Carr dropped a bomb of a story detailing the sophomoric and sexist behavior of Tribune’s top management, led by Clear Channel’s former eternal frat-boy-in-chief, Randy Michaels. Then, almost as if on cue, Randy’s hand-picked “innovation officer” Lee Abrams let off the proverbial fart in an elevator by sending a memo around the company that was a textbook example of the sexually juvenile stuff reported on in the Times article.

Timing that comically poor wasn’t even funny to Randy who suspended Abrams almost as soon as news of the memo hit the press. Abrams then submitted his resignation by the end of last week.

But one head doesn’t seem to be a high enough price to pay. On Monday the Times reported that the Tribune board of directors also would be seeking Randy Michaels’ resignation this week. This drastic move comes just ahead of a possible deal between Tribune and its creditors to restructure and emerge out of bankruptcy. Such restructuring often involves management changes, thus tossing out the CEO before the deal has been finalized demonstrates just how much the board must view Michaels as a growing liability, rather than a joker who can be tolerated for a few more months.

Even though just yesterday Michaels was reported saying “I work here and I’m still working,” his own company’s flagship paper, the Chicago Tribune, reported that his resignation will happen before the end of the week. Now, at this point there is no love lost between Michaels and the professional journalists running the Trib. In fact, the paper’s editor, Gary Kern, was one of the most prominent Tribune employees to step up and formally complain about the fateful Abrams memo and the behavior of the Michaels-led band of overgrown teenagers.

Randy Michaels will trade his pink slip for CASH!

While some commentators credit Michaels with increased revenue at Tribune, helping the company to climb out of bankruptcy, others note that the increase has come with a high price of jobs lost, along with the recent damage to the company’s reputation. Most ironically, Tribune has seen the fortunes of its flagship radio station, WGN-AM, decline under the Michaels regime. Recall that Michaels was once the money-printing genius of Clear Channel’s ascent in the late 90s and early 2000s. But after tossing out popular hosts and bringing in ringers from other markets lacking the loyalties of Chicago listeners, the station fell from 14th place in August to 20th place in September for the coveted 25 to 54 demographic. Furthermore WGN saw a decline in every daypart in every demographic in September. Aside from making breast jokes and hosting poker games, the only other thing Michaels seemed to be good at was writing up long lists of words and phrases that should never be used on air.

Although this situation has the look of a major fall for Michaels, it’s a little too soon to send a sympathy card. Even if Michaels decides to fall on his sword, he is likely to receive a sweet severance package amounting to 2.5 times his current salary and bonuses of about $8 million. Not a bad way to go, eh?

Then a new management team will need to step in a clean up Randy’s messes, just like the private equity firm that took over the money pit he left behind at Clear Channel. Shock jock, indeed.

The post Randy Michaels to leave Tribune, crying all the way to the bank appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Randy Michaels with 2 great tastes that taste great together?

Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. These are the sorts of reports that circulated throughout the radio industry during Michaels’ heydey at Clear Channel as the company snarfed up stations across the country, unceremoniously firing their staffs and consolidating them into cheap, voice-tracked and consolidated outlets. But in those heady days at Clear Channel the whole company was flying high with a sturdy stock price and an exploding roster of stations. The situation at Tribune, however, is quite different.

Tribune declared bankruptcy in 2008 and has shed 4,200 employees since the company was bought by real estate mogul Sam Zell in 2007. Right after the purchase Zell promised that there would be no job losses. Right. Anyone believing that should have done just a little bit of research. Zell once owned a little radio company called Jacor, which gave Rush Limbaugh his start in national syndication and employed none other than Randy Michael. Jacor was sold to Clear Channel in 1999 for $4.4 billion.

In debt for $13 billion while possessing assets of only $7.6 billion, Tribune nevertheless paid out $57.3 million in bonuses to the current management team between May 2009 and February 2010.

But really, none of this should be a surprise to anyone who has followed the history of Randy Michaels’ old home of Clear Channel which was bought by a private equity firm in 2008 and taken off the public market lest its stock become junk.

Radio is really only a small part of Tribune’s business, owning just one station, the well-known WGN-AM in Chicago. Vocalo.org media blogger Robert Feder has done a great job of covering the gutting of WGN’s once iconic status, and was the source of some the primary research sited in David Carr’s New York Times piece.

So, now Michaels and his old boss Zell have brought their own special brand of frat-party consolidation radio management to the newspaper and television business, and they have the decline in circulation and income to prove it. According to Carr the company intends to debut a news television format that seems like the TV equivalent of radio automation and voice-tracking:

there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

For his part Michaels sent around an email memo to the Tribune staff in advance of David Carr’s article. In it he warns employees that David Carr is trying to influence management changes at Tribune and reminds them that “it is our intention to create a fun, non-linear creative environment,” whatever a “non-linear” environment is. He instructs them to “ignore the noise.”

I advise caution, they might wear out their ignoring muscle.

The post Ghosts of Clear Channel continue to haunt Tribune Company appeared first on Radio Survivor.

John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge has a great interview with Ken Freedman, station manager of WFMU-FM in Jersey City, New Jersey. WFMU is a trailblazing radio station which was in the forefront of both the free form and dot.com eras. The dialogue is a terrific read, because it encapsulates all the dilemmas facing Internet radio right now.

“The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works,” Freedman says. “And that’s just not the case with FM, or broadcast television, or cable. But, the Internet doesn’t have to be like that, but I don’t see much realistic hope for changing that.”

The economics on broadband streaming are “just terrible,” Freedman adds, “which is very frustrating to me because that’s where all the market is going. And at this point now, my radio station WFMU has twice as many people listening online as we do over FM, whereas it was only two years ago that we had finally crossed that barrier, where we had more people listening on the Internet than we had listening over FM. Now, two years later it’s twice as many.”

Bergmayer asks Freedman about WFMU’s online costs versus FM broadcasting.

“Oh, there’s no comparison,” Freedman explains. “It’s so much more expensive to pay for bandwidth than, you know… The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk. Now, we just buy huge, huge contracts of bandwidth. So, we’re only paying, I don’t know, we’re paying $5 or $10 a meg of throughput because we buy so much of it.”

And the interview continues:

John: Well then, since we’re talking about broadcast versus FM, I do have a few questions on what you think the future of broadcasting is in the Internet environment. I mean, I know a lot of tech geeks. A lot of my friends just essentially see broadcasting as a totally obsolete technology. And in fact, the other day I sort of slagged off FM as being a sort of outdated technology in one of my blog posts, and got heat from some of my friends who work in community radio and similar projects. So, I was wondering if you just had any general thoughts. I mean, do people still want to listen to broadcast?

Ken: Old people do. Young people don’t. I think it is an obsolete technology, but it’s hard to make predictions as to what’s going to happen since the future of media, nobody’s ever been able to really accurately predict it. When television came out, everybody predicted the end of radio and that didn’t happen. Radio just kind of reinvented itself. And when FM took off, people predicted the end of AM, and AM ended up reinventing itself as a talk format.

So, it’s hard to predict, but I do see FM and AM and the radio model in general as being incredibly archaic and out of date now. It’s hard to imagine how it’s going to reinvent itself. The experience that I can get listening to a radio station on an iPhone or an Android with all the interactive features, it’s not just a return to transistor radio. It’s way beyond that.

Read the rest of the discussion here.

I should add that I too gave Bergmayer a little grief for his comments on FM in one of my Ars Technica posts, but I agree that there’s just no comparison between FM and the range of interactive options I get on my Droid X. And that’s why the technological moment we are in is so simultaneously wonderful and frustrating.

Any comments from Radio Survivor readers about how we get out of this bind and onto the next phase? Is there some sustainable way to merge the affordability of FM with the versatility of broadband? Has that already been done?

The post WFMU on the “catch 22” of Internet streaming appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Please stop all the censoring!

As most radio enthusiasts have probably already heard, veteran talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger appeared on the Larry King Live program Tuesday night and announced that she would leave her show at the end of the contract. Schlessinger made the decision in response to growing flack over her repeated use of the so-called “n-word” with a black caller on the Aug. 10 edition of her program. The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters organized a swift and effective campaign calling attention to Dr. Laura’s remarks and joined with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Women’s Media Center, and UNITY Journalists of Color to “hold [the program’s] advertisers accountable and find out exactly where they stand.”

In announcing her departure from the airwaves Dr. Laura put forth a curious interpretation of the Bill of Rights when she told King, “I don’t have the right to say what I need to say. My first amendment rights have been usurped.” Lest anyone be confused, the current state of US law and policy makes it perfectly legal for Dr. Laura to use the “n-word” and most other words in the English language on the radio. The only exceptions to this are in cases of indecency, which only pertains to discussing matters of sexual and excretory functions; racial, gender and other types of epithets are not policed by the FCC in any fashion.

Rather, what happened to Dr. Laura is that she felt the harsh sting of the marketplace at work. Rather than attempting to bring any sort of governmental action the coalition led by Media Matters took aim squarely at Dr. Laura’s advertisers and called them on the carpet for supporting her program and the speech it contains. As it turns out, it looks like big companies like General Motor’s OnStar and Motel 6 decided they’d rather not be associated with a program that tosses around the “n-word” and pulled their advertising.

That is not censorship, and it has nothing to do with the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech[.]” It does not read, “GM shall not pull its advertising dollars from a program featuring speech it does not wish to be associated with.” In fact, there’s nothing stopping Dr. Laura from continuing to be on air except Dr. Laura, and maybe her production company and affiliates.

That’s the funny thing about the Constitutional right to free speech. One has the right to say just about anything she likes, in nearly any forum, and the government has very few Constitutionally valid reasons to either stop the speech or punish the speaker. But that right to free speech does not mean the speaker cannot be held accountable by others for what she says and the venue where it’s said.

Dr. Laura has benefited significantly from commercial radio consolidation, which made it both feasible and profitable for her show to be carried on hundreds of stations. It’s that size of reach that has made her show attractive to big advertisers like Motel 6. But big companies like these are also protective about their public image. Obviously Dr. Laura miscalculated the public’s tolerance for such brazen use of the “n-word,” especially in confronting an African-American caller. Motel 6 decided it can ill-afford to make the same miscalculation.

Now, advertisers’ tolerance for challenging or offensive speech cuts both ways, making it difficult to get sponsors for programs that are more left-leaning, too. But I always find it curious when free market loving conservatives like Dr. Laura decry being held accountable by the consumers who patronize the companies that fund their paychecks. I’m doubly amazed–but not surprised–that someone with her record of callous remarks should be so thin skinned to begin with.

There’s an observation of the commercial media system from the journalist A.J. Liebling that is often tossed around by media scholars: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” We might paraphrase that as: “freedom to broadcast is guaranteed only to those who own radio stations.” Furthermore, even if there is a right to speak freely, there is no commensurate right to profit. Dr. Laura could certainly take some of her sizable fortune and buy up a few stations to spout her nonsense without regard to what Media Matters, Motel 6, GM or any advertiser thinks.

But somehow I don’t think she’s really willing to put her money where her mouth is.

The post Dr. Laura lived by the market, died by the market appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last week AT&T announced that new smartphone customers will no longer be eligible for the unlimited data plans that current customers enjoy. Instead, two somewhat less expensive plans will be available. For $15 new customers may download 200 MB of data per month, with a charge of $15 for every additional 200 GB over the limit. 2 GB per month will cost $25, plus another $10 for each 1 GB after that. Current data plan customers pay $30 for unlimited data. For its part AT&T says that either of these new plans provides enough data to satisfy 98% of their customers.

While it may be true that the vast majority of AT&T customers use less than 2 GB of data in a month, I would argue that’s because data-hungry mobile streaming media is just starting to take off. But the these new caps threaten to stunt that growth just as mobile internet radio is gaining steam.

The 200 MB of data offered by the least expensive plan covers only about 200 minutes of streaming stereo music at the common bitrate of 128kbps. And that’s without any other data usage for email, web browsing or anything else. Even listening to a lower-quality mono talk station at 32 kbps will only stretch listening to 800 minutes, or 13 hours.

The 2 GB plan will cover about 34 hours of stereo music and as much as 136 hours of low-bitrate mono talk. At first blush that seems like a fair amount of listening time, but how does it measure up against real-world radio listening? Someone whose commute lasts about an hour each way will easily listen to over 40 hours of radio in a month. If that commuter wants to use her iPhone or Blackberry to listen to Pandora, last.fm or another streaming music station she’ll be over her limit by the last week of the month.

Without access to hard statistics on how many hours the average mobile Pandora or last.fm user listens it’s hard to say for sure how many new AT&T customers are likely to be affected. However, I do think it’s fair to say that these limits will make many smartphone users cautious about how much time they’ll spend listening to internet radio on the go, especially in order to avoid overage fees.

Of course, AT&T is not the only wireless data carrier in the US. As long as you don’t have your heart set on an iPhone there are lots of other carriers to choose from who still offer unlimited data plans. But for how much longer? Computerworld quotes several analysts who predict that Verizon, the nation’s second largest carrier, will set caps in as soon as six months. While there may be some pricing competition on these plans, I’m guessing they’ll offer pretty similar amounts of data for prices that only vary by a few dollars a month.

With a cost between 75 cents and $4.50 and hour, listening to mobile internet radio on an AT&T smartphone starts to look pretty uncompetitive compared to traditional broadcast, which is free, or satellite radio which offers unlimited listening for $10 – $20 a month. While it may be inevitable that the days of unlimited data plans will come to an end, I hope that the metered pricing quickly becomes more reasonable, permitting a reasonable amount of streaming radio listening. If not, this vibrant new way of listening to radio might be stunted before it has a chance to blossom.

The post New AT&T data plans threaten to stunt the growth of mobile internet radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Wednesday Sirius XM radio (SIRI) announced that it added 171,441 net subscribers in the first quarter of 2010. While this is certainly better news for the company than a net loss, the gain still doesn’t quite put its subscriber base at the same level it was at the end of 2008. Then the company had 19 million subscribers, but tumbled during the first quarter of 2009, losing 404,422. Subscribers now stand at 18,944,199.

Sirius CEO Mel Karmarzin attributes the rebound to “the broad appeal of our unrivaled programming, the benefits of a recovering auto industry and an improving economic environment for consumers.” I’d reckon that increased car sales is probably the biggest factor, given that satellite radio is heavily dependent on its appeal to drivers, most of whom still can’t listen to internet radio while on the road. The downside of this reliance is that the first year or so of satellite radio service for a new car is free. The real sign of recovery will be whether or not these new non-paying subscribers re-up when they have to shell out for it. For the quarter that just ended 45.2% of customers decided to stick around and pay, which is a little better than the 44.6% who did in the first quarter of 2009.

The news caused Sirius stock to bump back up over a dollar today for the first time since February. Nevertheless, the company remains delisted from out of compliance with NASDAQ. It will be interesting to see if Sirius’ subscriber base grows over its 2008 level again, or if 19 million ends up being a plateau. Satellite radio faces very still competition from mobile broadband this year as higher-speed 4G rolls in many major cities and those first Pandora-capable car radios hit the streets.

The post Sirius Subscriptions Bounce Back a Bit appeared first on Radio Survivor.

While we commonly accept that broadcast stations and, especially, their licenses to broadcast have a market value, for most of US broadcasting history there was no direct cost to obtain that license. Sure, there were engineer surveys to conduct, lawyers to pay, and so on. But the license itself came at no cost from the FCC. That license was supposed to be in exchange for operating in the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” Given that this obligation was rendered mostly unenforceable, if not laughable, by 1996, Congress figured it was better to try to cash in.

So, for all intents and purposes the Telecommunications Act of 1996 pretty much changed the whole free license thing for commercial stations, instituting an auction process for new commercial radio licenses whenever there are competing applicants. Since there it’s a rare occasion when there’s only one applicant for a commerical frequency, in practice most new licenses are auctioned off. There hasn’t been much hubub about this change in part because there have been relatively few new broadcast radio licenses available in the last fourteen years; most major metropolitan radio dials pretty well filled up by the 1990s.

Nevertheless, there are a few spots on the dial left, scattered about the country. In fact the FCC will be auctioning a total of 15 radio licenses this coming July–thirteen commercial FM, one commercial FM translator and one commercial AM [public notice PDF]. Before you start counting your pennies and cashing in savings bonds, understand that if you haven’t already submitted an application to the FCC, then you’re out of luck. The participants in the auction are already determined because they’ve submitted applications for frequencies for which there are other competing applications.

The number of bidders for a single frequency range from just two to as many as seven (that’s for a spot on the dial in Idalou, TX, just outside of Lubbock). The FCC sets a minimum opening bid, which each bidder must also submit as an upfront payment. This opening bid is based upon the prices obtained in earlier auctions from the same market. To bid on a license in the Hudson Valley town of Rosendale, NY you’d have to pony up $100,000 to start, whereas in New Holstein WI, about 25 miles northwest of Sheboygan, the starting bid is just $15,000. A hundred grand may not sound like chump change for a station license, but compared to the market value it’s a bargain. An existing station in New York’s Hudson Valley is likely to be at least five times that, if not more.

We’ll be watching to see what the selling prices end up being when the final gavel falls. Stay tuned.

The post That Next License Is Going to Cost You appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I–along with many other online radio fans–was surprised to learn this morning that online indie rock station WOXY abruptly shut down its live stream this morning. The only explanation was a short blurb on their website blaming “current economic realities and the lack of ongoing funding” for the closure. The situation was all the more surprising given the station’s intensive participation in SXSW just last week.

WOXY website's farewell message

Pop Candy received some information directly from WOXY music director Matt Shiv who said the staff knew there were financial troubles, but maintained operations last week at SXSW because “a deal was ‘in motion’ to continue funding.” The staff only received notice of the closure from owner Future Sounds on Monday and were given no opportunity to say goodbye to listeners.

WOXY has certainly had a bumpy ride going from being a commercial FM station in Oxford, OH, going online-only in 2004, being bought by lala.com in 2006, and then being being sold to Future Sounds and moving operations to Austin last year. As I wrote last month, WOXY was one of my favorite commercial broadcast stations and I continued to be an online listener.

Unfortunately the closure of WOXY only reminds me that online streaming radio is not necessarily an inexpensive enterprise. By comparison traditional broadcast has higher fixed costs. A station must have a real brick-and-mortar studio and a transmitter with tower, and must maintain these technical operations in accordance with federal laws and regulations. Without even accounting for staffing, and depending on location, these base costs easily start at the low six figures annually.

Streaming stations don’t require much in the way of a physical studio–though certainly some of the best ones, like WOXY, have them. They also don’t require transmitters and the power to run them, nor compliance with FCC rules. But while free of these liabilities, streaming stations do have other significant costs to bare.

First, streaming music stations must pay royalties for the right to play music online, which scale up in cost as listenership increases. Second, and most significantly, streaming stations have to buy bandwidth to deliver their streams. And here’s where popularity can become a double-edged sword. Unlike broadcast, each additional listener requires additional bandwidth, which in turn costs more money. If your listenership grows, so does your bandwidth bill.

On the one hand streaming online has been such a boon for small niche stations because it can be relatively inexpensive to reach a small number of simultaneous listeners. For instance, the streaming radio host Live365 charges $112 a month for a plan that accommodates up to 25 simultaneous listeners using a stereo 128 kbps stream (not including any royalty charges). While 25 listeners doesn’t sound like a lot, remember that listeners tune in and out of online radio, and so a station with only that many listeners at any given time may still have an entire listenership of hundreds or thousands.

But when you scale up to broadcast-level audiences the costs also scale up. Back in WOXY’s old home broadcast market of Cincinnati even the lowest rated stations have an average simultaneous audience of about 7000 people. Using Live365’s published rates as a guide, it would cost $26,000 a month to reach this many simultaneous internet listeners. Now, I’m certain that a station with that many listeners can negotiate a better deal, but even extrapolating from a smaller, lower-cost company’s published rates would set the cost at $13,300. That’s a big difference from $26k, however it demonstrates that reaching the same number of listeners online as a small, low-rated broadcast station in large radio market will run at least $10,000 a month.

At that point a streaming station looks like less of a bargain, even if it is less expensive and complex than operating a broadcast station. But then my argument isn’t that a streaming station is more expensive or more of a hassle than a broadcast station. Rather, I’m pointing out that operating a live streaming music station can still be expensive, with costs getting higher as listenership goes up. One advantage of a broadcast station is that additional listeners don’t cost a thing — the costs of running the station are much more fixed as long as the price of rent, power and such remain relatively constant. Reaching 70,000 listeners costs the same as 7,000, provided that many people live in your listening area. Obviously, in broadcast it’s not economically advantageous to have 25 simultaneous listeners like it is online.

I honestly do not know what WOXY’s revenue model was. I know the station ran ads on its website but I don’t recall hearing ads on its live stream. I think the station had show sponsorships that sounded more like underwriting on public radio. WOXY was also being broadcast on the HD2 channel of Cincinnati public station WXVU, which would have prohibited regular ads being run. (As a side note, one has to guess that the HD channel is now silent, too.)

Given that the station had a studio and staff of six, in addition to bandwidth costs, my conservative guess is that WOXY operations ran at least $300,000 annually, and likely closer to $500,000. That’s a fraction of a top station in a major market, but it’s still not chicken feed, either.

WOXY was often mentioned in the same breath as other indie rock online stations like Seattle’s KEXP, Jersey City’s WFMU or Minneapolis’ The Current. But the difference is that that those other stations are also non-commerical broadcast stations that rely on a listener-supported revenue model to fund operations. So, I will be surprised if we see the resurrection of WOXY, at least in a form that sounds anything like it was. The brand may rise again, but it’s unclear if the funding and revenue is there to bring the spirit back to life.

The post WOXY Abruptly Goes Offline; Streaming Ain't Cheap appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Next Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission will reveal the entirety of its National Broadband Plan, over a year in the making. Required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which authorized $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus spending, The Plan will weigh in on about a thousand broadband related subjects—how to help more people get it, how to help industries provide it, ways to encourage innovations that the FCC hopes will stimulate more broadband adoption, like IP video.

The chances are, though, that it won’t have much to say about radio

Oh yes, it will talk about “radio” spectrum a whole lot—in the sense of licenses from 500 KHz to 2.5 GHz that licensees use to transmit video, voice, text, audio, and whatever. But unlike every other broadband related medium, from social networking through web video, almost no one has anything to say on a policy level about radio delivered over high speed Internet, either through desktops, laptops, netbooks, or smartphones.

Indirectly, however, the National Broadband Plan will no doubt have an impact on both Internet and broadcast radio. Here are my speculations as to why and how. But nota bene, this is strictly thinking out loud stuff; as the saying goes, ‘I’m just talking.’

The plan will get more low income people online, where they will listen to Internet radio more often

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s latest statistics indicate that about 35 percent of all households have no broadband access at home, and over 30 percent of Americans don’t use the Internet at all. Other surveys suggest that it’s a little more complicated than this, in that lots of low income folks cobble together broadband use via the computers of neighbors and libraries. And a Pew Internet and American Life report notes that lots of minorities get their Internet from their mobile phones.

While the National Broadband Plan isn’t going to suggest a South Korea or Australian massive subsidy solution to the digital divide, it will urge Congress to require all Universal Service Fund phone service providers to offer broadband within a given time frame, it will recommend that the USF’s Lifeline program subsidize low income broadband use, it will recommend that Congress support some kind of free or low cost wireless service, and it will offer a myriad of other ways to boost Internet adoption from the bottom up.

This is going to bring more people into cyberspace on a regular basis, especially low income people who currently make up a huge constituency for broadcast radio (and much of its advertising base). They’ll change the nature of the Internet radio, which currently plays to a more middle class audience.

The plan will boost mobile radio

A big focus of the National Broadband Plan will be about getting more spectrum to the wireless industry, which is facing a huge crunch as smartphone adoption and use goes through the roof. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski has already pledged to get about 500 MHz of license spectrum moved over in various ways to wireless broadband providers. The plan is to create a “Mobile Future Auction,” in Genachowski’s words “an auction permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures.”

This is not going to be a smooth transition. The TV broadcasters have already made it very clear that they’re quite leery about this proposal. And even the FCC’s efforts to transition much smaller bands like the Wireless Communications Service region to WiMAX have met with fierce opposition from WCS’s spectrum neighbor, Sirius XM satellite radio.

But as powerful as the National Association of Broadcasters is, if it puts up a full court defense against this trajectory, it’s going to find itself in combat with the wireless industry—without question the most sophisticated communications lobby in Washington, D.C.—and allied with the device manufacturers and to some extent the cable industry, which already regularly does battle with the broadcasters over retransmission consent issues.

Slowly but surely, if only one TV station after another, the spectrum is going to move from the broadcasters to the wireless companies.

What does this mean? It hopefully means faster mobile broadband speeds and lower prices. The wireless industry has a much better record at providing progressively cheaper and better services than cable. That, again, has got to be a boon to Internet radio, which will find itself broadcasting to a progressively larger and more diverse base.

The migration to digital will deconsolidate broadcast radio

It seems likely that traditional over-the-air television broadcasting will fade over the next decade. More and more Americans will watch TV via cable or telco provided optical fiber or IP video. The value of TV licenses will decline and the power of the entities that own them will decline as well. Many of those entities also own conventional broadcast radio stations. Gradually cut loose and allowed to operate on their own or in small networks, these entities could find their rebirth by providing the kind of brick-and-mortal localism that has eluded the Internet so far. It could be that, in the long run, the Internet will be the best thing that could happen to plain old analog broadcast radio.

But again, we’re just talking here. The future is hard to see. One thing I really regret, though, is how little radio fits into policy discussions about broadband. I hope you’ll take a moment to comment on my speculations and ideas.

The post Rough notes: What does the FCC's National Broadband Plan mean for radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Given the state of the economy, last week wasn’t so bad for radio/media company investors. And this week might improve depending on what Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke says, and what Sirius XM reports in its fourth quarter and full 2009 earnings press conference on Thursday.

Saga Communications, Cumulus Media, Entercom, and Citadel all reported slight trading gains on Friday. Emmis, Westwood One, and Sirius all reported slight declines (although Sirius is still on the dollar menu). The week’s mildly bright spot was terrestrial and Internet radio giant CBS, whose stock rose nearly a point. On Thursday CBS reported revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 came to $3.50 billion, down just 1% from $3.53 billion for the same quarter in 2008.

Here’s the radio excerpt of the report:

“Local Broadcasting revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 decreased 8% to $680.0 million from $735.8 million for the same prior-year period reflecting lower radio and political advertising sales. Revenues for CBS Television Stations decreased 3% to $358.2 million from $369.3 million, and CBS Radio revenues decreased 12% to $322.2 million from $366.7 million for the same prior-year period, partially reflecting radio station divestitures. Non-political advertising sales increased 11% for CBS Television Stations and were flat for Local
Broadcasting.”

Perhaps this isn’t so bad, given the beating that radio took last year. Anyway, it’s not nearly as big as the drop CBS radio experienced in Q3: $318 million in revenue compared with the previous year’s same quarter: $392.5 million. And with the exception of troubled Citadel, most of these stocks are on the upswing after a period of decline.

The day before Sirius XM reports its earnings, Fed boss Bernanke will testify before the House Committee on Financial Services. And on that Thursday, he will speak to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. The big question of course is how is the economy doing, and how fast will it mend? Last week the Fed raised the Discount Rate by just a smidgeon (1/4% to the surprise of some analysts) “in light of continued improvement in financial market conditions.”

Anyway, a somewhat optimistic report from Bernanke and a nice report for Sirius could mean a good week for radio by Friday. As RS’s Paul Riismandel noted last week: “The prevailing opinion on Wall Street seems to be that investors think Sirius XM has finally gotten its financial affairs in order, along with adding a net of 257,000 listeners–more than expected–in the fourth quarter of 2009.” So hope springs eternal, but we’ll have to see.

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After languishing in near-penny-stock territory for the last year, Sirius XM Radio stock hit the dollar menu on Wednesday, topping out at $1.05 a share. Investors who bought their stock a year ago when it sold for less than 20 cents are probably cheering. Sirius hasn’t seen the plus size of one buck since September of 2008.

The prevailing opinion on Wall Street seems to be that investors think Sirius XM has finally gotten its financial affairs in order, along with adding a net of 257,000 listeners–more than expected–in the fourth quarter of 2009.

There also seems to be a growing confidence that, despite all the recent hoopla, Howard Stern will sign a new contract with Sirius. I don’t really understand how that’s a strong sign of strength for Sirius, although I guess it can be seen as a indicator of stability. If Sirius has to cough up another $300 million to keep Stern I really wonder if it will really be worth it. Even given Stern’s recent headlines over his claimed invitation to join American Idol, I doubt he has the magnetism to draw a significant number of new listeners. At best, Sirius can hope to hold onto the current crop of die-hard Stern fans.

But, then again, getting the stock price over $1 is only a relative achievement. Although the increase will likely help the company avoid a reverse stock split. Sirius’ viability will depend on how costly it is to retain Stern and how well it can continue to add listeners, despite very few new receivers being announced at last month’s CES.

The post Sirius Stock Back on the Dollar Menu appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Conservative commentators may be cackling about the failure of Air America radio, trying to make it into an indicator for both the inherent weakness of liberal-leaning radio and liberal politics. But any reasoned analysis of the radio industry demonstrates that neither is the case. Rush Limbaugh, in particular, and the rest of the nation’s most popular conservative hosts owe much of their success to first-mover advantages taken before and after the Telecom Act of 1996 completely changed the business of radio. The fact that they are politically conservative is less important than the cleverness, deviousness and luck of the companies that made it happen.

Fundamentally, Air America was a mediocre idea, poorly executed. Make that, disasterously executed. As former Crossfire co-host and current talk radio host Bill Press notes, Air America was insufficiently funded from the very beginning and

Even before its launch, it was taken over by a con artist who was later convicted on un-related charges of business fraud. Managers spent money lavishly on talent and studios, while generating little advertising income….

Except for Jon Sinton, few of their executives had ever worked in talk radio. In many ways, it was amateur hour from the beginning.

Putting aside even that inauspicious start, any new radio network started in 2004 would have faced an uphill battle, regardless of its political leanings. Simply put, timing was not on Air America’s side.

He'll trade you a 3-hour show for 15 minutes of ad time.

That may be how it looks today, but let’s turn back the clock to a time before AM talk equaled all-conservative, all the time. 1988 was the year when Rush Limbaugh’s program first went national with the support of former ABC Radio executive Edward McLaughlin’s newly founded EFM Media Management. While the radio business was stable, at the time AM radio was having a tougher go of it, relative to FM, which offered higher fidelity for music, the mainstay of radio programming for the last quarter century.

It’s a simple fact that Limbaugh’s program grew quickly, reaching a nationwide listenership of two million in 1990. But the question that doesn’t get asked so often is, how did he get there?

Bill Mann, a former contributor to Inside Radio, reminded us just last year:

[a] little-known practice in broadcast syndication called a “barter deal.” (Barter deals were briefly mentioned in Michael Wolff’s first-rate recent piece on Rush in Vanity Fair).

Here’s how a barter deal works: To launch the show, Limbaugh’s syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks [then EFM] — the same folks who syndicate wingnut du jour Glen Beck — gave Limbaugh’s three hours away — that’s right, no cash — to local radio stations, mostly in medium and smaller markets, back in the early 1990’s.

So, a local talk station got Rush’s show for zilch. In exchange, Premiere took for itself much of the local station’s available advertising time (roughly 15 minutes an hour) and packed the show with national ads it had already pre-sold.

So, imagine you’re a small operator of a local AM radio station in 1990. This is before the Telecom Act of 1996, so, in essence, most radio station owners are small. Also, this is before automation equipment was inexpensive enough to be cheaper than a DJ or operator’s hourly wage.

During drive time you might be doing pretty well with some local news and talk programming, supplemented with call-ins and network features. But during the midday, it’s a little rough. You could just play music, but nobody really listens to music on AM anymore. You’d like to have some entertaining talk programming, but talent costs money, and the ad revenue isn’t there yet. You could pick up some syndicated programming that might be cheaper than good local talent, but that, too, costs money up front that you’re not sure you have.

Then, along comes EFM or Premiere with a great deal for you. You get three hours of a popular talk program out of New York City from an established station with a nationwide reputation. And it won’t cost you one red cent. In exchange you just have to give up some of your (nearly nonexistent) ad inventory. What would you do?

I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s hard to deny: it’s hard to compete with free. In 2010 good ol’ Rushbo’s show isn’t quite so free anymore, but that’s only after building up a pretty good 21-year track record.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 1997 Jacor communications, then an owner of 66 radio stations, bought EFM. 20 of Jacor stations were AM stations in major markets. And guess what show they’d soon be airing if they weren’t already? Yes, the Rush Limbaugh Show. Though not a significant boost to Rush’s overall listenership, the deal foreshadowed the growing relationship between owning stations and owning content.

The benefit of this arrangement wasn’t lost on the new #1 in radio ownership, Clear Channel, which bought Jacor just a year later and merged syndication operations into Premiere. At that time Clear Channel only had 625 stations, but would go on to own over 1200 at its peak. While Limbaugh didn’t necessarily need the boost of these extra stations–he was already heard in almost every market in the country–the deal certainly opened up opportunities for future Premiere hosts like Hannity and Beck.

Now, lets look back at Air America, which started 16 years into Limbaugh’s reign, and six years after the full merger of Jacor, Premiere and EFM into Clear Channel. How do you compete with the nation’s largest radio station owner and syndicator? That’s like asking, how do you compete with Microsoft Windows? Sure, Apple’s been a good competitor for Windows, but it’s success relies heavily on products like iPods and iPhones. And how many other significant desktop operating system competitors are there?

Sure, maybe Air America could have tried the same strategy that EFM did with Limbaugh and give away their programming. The trick worked the first time around, and maybe there were enough stations out there ready to take the deal. But you can’t just wish 2004 into being 1988. EFM and Limbaugh had the distinct advantage of not having to make deals with companies like Clear Channel, Cumulus or Entercom. They built that business from the grassroots on a mixture of cleverness, conniving, business savvy and Limbaugh’s talent as a radio entertainer, taking advantage of weakness in the AM radio marketplace. To trot out another tired cliche: lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Air America’s chances of success as a new nationwide radio network weren’t good from the start, whether it was liberal, conservative, centrist, fascist or socialist. For all intents and purposes, today’s other top conservative talkers started out with access to several hundred AM stations owned by their syndicator’s parent company right out of the gate. Air America had to start from scratch, owning a total of zero stations, with each deal with each station costing time and money.

At the same time, there’s arguably more nationally syndicated liberal-leaning talk on commercial radio than there was in 2004. In part this is because Air America lost hosts like Randi Rhodes, and never cornered the market on liberal talk in the first place. Many stations that were Air America affiliates ended up building a roster of liberal talk programming alongside AA’s offerings. Chicago’s “Progressive Talk” WCPT tells its listeners:

WCPT AM&FM is not Air America and we are not going away. Although Air America became a generic term for the “ Progressive Talk” format, we are a locally-owned radio station that is committed to a voice that speaks about issues which are vital to Americans as well as balancing the Chicago radio dial. …

Programs such as Bill Press, Stephanie Miller, Ed Schultz and Thom Hartmann come from other sources. That’s why virtually all of our current programming will continue to be heard….

Air America’s failure is nothing more than the failure of one radio experiment, nothing more and nothing less. Commercial broadcast radio has been a tough business since the likes of Clear Channel squeeze the life out of it beginning in 1996. The kind of success Air America was hoping for required ownership, and they were eight years too late for that.

The post The Death of Air America: It's the Ownership, Stupid! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported news that’s no surprise to radio industry watchers, that the third largest radio owners in the country, Citadel Communications, is about to declare bankruptcy in a deal pre-arranged with its creditors. The loudest critic of Citadel has been industry-insider Jerry Del Colliano who predicted last week that the company would declare Chapter 11 ahead of a January debt hearing.

Citadel's 5-year Stock Price Performance

Various reports attribute responsibility to the overall decline in the radio industry, combined with the loss of two major personalities: Paul Harvey, who died in March, and Sean Hannity who was lured to Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Network. Certainly these events didn’t help Citadel along. But I side with Del Colliano in attributing the true responsibility to the disease of consolidation. Well, that and lame-brained business practices, like cutting off non-Citadel stations from carrying ABC network news, and the typical consolidator practice of firing local personnel and moving to voice tracking.

At this point in the economic crisis I am having a much harder time swallowing the line that radio is a uniquely dying business than I did even in 2006. Instead, the largest radio owners were a perverse type of innovator, way ahead of the curve in hollowing out their own companies by taking on mammoth quantities of debt based on the pipe dream that the industry–and the economy–would only continue on a steep upward climb. They weren’t alone, as we all know, since real estate, banking, insurance and other industries would follow in their tracks some 12 – 18 months later.
Frankly, the situation isn’t that different for newspapers–where the owners of companies like Tribune took on massive crippling debt in order to acquire and consolidate. Different industries with slightly different modus operandi, but otherwise the same disease of greed and consolidation.

Without a doubt the loosening of radio ownership rules in the Telecomm Act of 1996 provided the perfect storm for the creation of Clear Channel and Citadel, but that is not the only impetus. Indeed, the same investors and financial managers taking tokes off the same pipe filled with greed who created radio’s consolidated wasteland are those who who also engineered the financial collapse of 2008. Each had their own set of wet-kisses from Washington in the form of relaxed regulations, lax regulators and overheated enthusiasm. But the root cause is the same.

Unfortunately there’s nothing unique about the Citadel bankruptcy; it might as well be Chrysler. The radio lover’s best hope is a fire sale that might return some of these stations to local ownership.

The post Greed and Consolidation Trigger Another Bankruptcy in Radioland appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Pulse Flatlines

Perhaps it was too good to be true. The overcrowded FM dial of the New York City metroplex offered no easy opportunity to bring a new cutting edge dance music station to the radio. But an opportunity was found at the far left end of the dial in the space occupied by TV channel 6 audio. So in February, 2008 87.7 FM the Pulse went on the air using the analog audio of low-power TV channel 6. Then, just 20 months later, the station pulled the plug yesterday at 5 PM, only four hours and forty-five minutes after announcing its imminent demise on air.

The death of the Pulse was not unexpected, given that the station’s owner Mega Media Group filed for bankruptcy in August. No doubt, commercial radio is a tough business in the 21st century, especially following nearly thirteen years of rampant industry consolidation which triggered ruthless cutting of ad rates in order to drive independent operators out of business and into the arms of megabroadcasters like Clear Channel and Cumulus. It’s fair to say that the Pulse had an uphill battle to begin with. Even with a unique format and a potentially very loyal audience, there’s fewer and fewer ad dollars to go around.

WNYZ's signal coverage area

But exploiting the channel 6 backdoor arguably made the climb all the steeper, putting the station at a spot on the dial that made it difficult to stumble upon. On top of that, being a low-power station limited it’s coverage area more than if it were a real FM station. With a transmitter located in Long Island City, Queens, according to the FCC its coverage area misses lower Manhattan and most of Brooklyn, which strike me as areas that the station would want to cover.

Mega Media leased the station from its owner Island Broadcasting Co., which acquired a minority stake in Mega Media back in May. However, Mega Media still owed Island $500,000 when its lease for the station ran out yesterday at 5 pm.

A post to the Radio-Info dance music board reports that WNYZ is now stunting with dance music in anticipation of new programming. (“Stunting” is radio jargon for when a station plays constrained and often unidentified programming for a short period before it changes format.) According to the Wikipedia page for the Long Island dance music station WPTY, that station’s programming will take over 87.7 FM this coming Monday, Nov. 2. If that turns out to be true then it may be too soon to write the obituary for dance music on LPTV channel 6 in New York, even if the Pulse is now dead.

The post NYC's the Pulse Flatlines appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you are looking for the bright spot in radio’s future, it’s streaming from a digital platform. The Radio Advertising Bureau’s report for this year’s second fiscal quarter makes this abundantly clear. Local and national over-the-air radio saw a 25% drop in revenue, while digital saw a ten percent boost. Digital radio’s revenue from advertising has grown from $180 million in 2007 to $298 million this year. And the Bureau projects continued growth to $908 million in 2013.

That’s in comparison to over-the-air radio, which lost almost a quarter of a billion in revenue in Q2. The Bureau’s analysis tries to put a brave spin on this, comparing that drop to Q1, when terrestrial truly and spectacularly tanked, revenue wise, declining by over half a billion bucks. “We are most likely past the Q1 low point for Radio revenues and are now on the rebound,” declared Jeff Haley, RAB’s President and CEO.

But the contrast between digital and terrestrial is pretty hard to ignore. “Digital will be an increasingly important sector as Radio continues to evolve into a cross-platform medium,” the report flatly notes. It’s unclear, however, to what degree terrestrial radio will participate in this cross platformness.

Abandoned in large part by the automobile industry, its most faithful remaining advertisers are now cheapo restaurants and fast food joints like Arbys, Dunkin Donuts, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and Subway. “Even while they’re tightening their belts, Americans still want to reward themselves with a restaurant meal,” the report notes.

Coming in second to this slender reed are advertisers whose products will,  ironically, cause  consumers to listen to less terrestrial radio. AT&T and Verizon are pushing cell phone services hard on radio, RAB says, albeit less than in better times.  “Offsetting cutbacks by the two titans, a number of smaller carriers stepped up their spending to help buoy the category in Q2: Qwest Communications (+57%), Leap Wireless (+44%), Boost Mobile (+34%), US Cellular (+26%), and Metro PCS (+19%).”

All this, of course, will help terrestrial radio listeners discover apps like Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm, and who knows what else at an ever faster rate. It’s difficult to see how terrestrial radio is going to recover from this recession in any condition comparable to its recent past.

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