The Infinite Dial

Kudos to PalTalk for one of the most inventive viral video campaigns I have ever seen. How good is it? In other news, as the video will explain, I am planning on alternate employment for 2009:

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A few years ago, several CBS stations were among those that briefly (and unsuccessfully, as it happened) stunted by telling listeners that they were going away. Now here's one that really is dead:

CBS yesterday debuted the Internet-only I Hear Dead People, under the auspices of CBS/Denver's Bill Gamble, also responsible for the recently launched AllNumberOneRadio.com. The station is currently on-line (and on the CBS player) only, not on a HD multicast channel (thus depriving the detractors of the inevitable "HD Radio is Dead" headline).

The motif of 'the planet's only multi-dimensional radio station" is that every song is by an artist or at least features a band member who is no longer living. The format is mostly Classic Rock, although the Vicki Sue Robinson song below was set up by a stager using Sesame Street's "One of These Things Is Not Like The Other."

(I did, by the way, look into the inevitable, "how different is this format from any classic rock station?" question; crosstown KRFX [the Fox] was averaging about 3-4 songs an hour that would have qualified.

Here's IHearDeadPeople.com at 9 a.m. local time; the less obvious

Elton John, "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" (Dee Murray)
Stevie Ray Vaughan, "House Is Rockin'"
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "What's Your Name"
Who, "I Can't Explain"
Pantera, "Walk"
Ramones, "Rock & Roll High School"
Vicki Sue Robinson, "Turn The Beat Around"
Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir"
Credeence Clearwater Revival, "Sweet Hitch-Hiker" (Tom Fogerty)
Styx, "Renegade" (drummer John Panozzo)

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WNYC New York's daily "Soundcheck" weighs into our ongoing Summer Song discussion today with an on-line poll. And despite the slightly more eclectic tastes of an NPR affiliate's listeners (who suggested Hold Steady's Constructive Summer," Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes," and the Feelies' "Crazy Rhythms" among others), it's still instructive that as of this writing, the No. 1 and No. 2 are still "I Kissed A Girl" and "Viva La Vida."

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Lots of activity this week on the HD Radio front, led off by Chuck Taylor's excellent piece in R&R (which quoted some Edison data) about the progress of HD radio adoption in the US. HD has certainly been a lightning rod for flames this year--note the differing headlines on these two sites, PC Week and the Washington Post, that use the same Chuck Taylor story!

Chuck was nice enough to interview me for this piece, which led Jon Gordon, from the excellent program on American Public Media, Future Tense, to call me and chat further about the progress of HD Radio adoption and what my thoughts were on the limiting factors behind its slow uptake. I've linked the interview below--luckily he called me in the early morning while I still had my good "radio voice" working :)

In both Chuck's piece and the Future Tense interview, I tried to establish what I thought were the real issues behind HD's slow growth. The central challenge is that you have a national "product," the HD Radio Receiver, with a national rollout and national messaging. The programming, however, varies considerably from market to market, and very little of it is driven by consumer demand or even consumer insight. Some markets have great HD programming, but here where I live, not so much. So it is hard for the typical consumer to get excited about HD when there is no clear content offering to sell. Soma FM is the same great online radio wherever I listen to it. Howard is Howard, no matter where your Sirius is located. But radio is trying to package and sell a national answer to these challengers with no consistency in product. It is as if we are trying to install Coke machines in every market, but some we forget to fill, and in others we only stock Mr. Pibb and RC Cola.

HD has to start with great, new digital brands first, with distribution over HD receivers AND online, and at least some of these have to be big, high profile national shows. Radio's goal should be compelling digital brands for the future, and in that context HD radio is just one means of distribution. I think there has been a lot of negative energy spilled over HD, just as there have been a lot of stakeholders who have led themselves to believe that HD is their "answer" to online and satellite radio competition. Our answer to online competition should be great online programming--additional, free distribution over the HD airwaves then becomes a strategic advantage. It isn't an "either/or" proposition.

There are simply too many "jukebox" HD-2 channels. At a recent summit on the topic, I heard one industry executive note that HD is taking time, but so did FM. The implication was that HD will follow the same natural progression. I think that is a mistake, and the "jukebox" issue exposes it. When FM was beginning its rise, free music was an economically scarce quantity--the only source for free music was the radio, so FM had greater economic value as one of its sole providers. Today, free music, in the form of online jukeboxes, file sharing and peer-to-peer music networks, is no longer scarce, but an economic commodity. So in order to provide real value (enough value to monetize), radio can't remain in the commodity business in that environment. The industry has to create value through the creation of strong, passionate brands that may be augmented by music, but that stand for something more than "one great song after another." One example is "The Strip," in Dallas. The programming on The Strip does a wonderful job of not just providing music, which is a commodity, but evoking a sense of place and a mood that is truly unique. The answer for side channels is not to replicate online jukeboxes (how many of them are really successful, anyway?) but to build unique brands that generate true passion.

The solution is not a programming issue but an HR strategy issue. Building those brands takes the time, resources and energy of radio's fantastically talented programmers and creative staff--all of which they don't have, because many are already programming 3-5 broadcast stations. So often the HD-2 channel gets relegated to the back burner. It's simple math, really--if a programmer spends 40+ hours a week making their broadcast programming compelling, what makes the radio industry think we can toss off HD-2 channels over lunch breaks? It is an old business school adage--you get what you measure. When the industry starts measuring itself on the quality of its HD-2 programming, then it will devote the resources it needs to create truly compelling brands, and get them in as many soda machines as it can.

Future Tense Interview: MP3 - iTunes

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An interesting column this week in a place where you don't usually find a lot for the radio business, the July 21-27 issue of Variety. In "Rip and Read: TV, Radio Will Rue Print's Plunge," Brian Lowry highlights an unexpected impact of the "draconian layoffs strafing the newspaper industry" and the likelihood that less news will be generated as a result. And that's bad news for the radio station that has come to depend on the local paper as the bulk of its morning news reports.

"Talk radio stations frequently employ a news person, which is really just a lonely gnome culling half hour updates from the paper and wire. Newsradio generally exhibits the same overlap with whatever happens to be in print," Lowry contends.

If that's a little harsh on the News/Talk format, it's a more-than-fair description of most music radio morning shows where enterprise journalism disappeared two decades ago. These days, if anybody is aggressively dialing the phone at 6 a.m., it's the producer looking for a celebrity interview. The only thing that keeps USA Today from being radio's newsroom is the increased reliance on TMZ.com, which, Lowry points out, is part of the problem.

"Sure, they have TMZ and other websites devoted to sleaze and celebrity dirt, but in terms of serious and specially, local, news, the options are relatively few," he adds.

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Up until now, I've stayed away from those single-artist channels that Sirius Satellite Radio does for a few weeks to tie in with a superstar artist release or some other event. It was an interesting concept when Todd Wallace signed on KYST (Beatleradio #9) in suburban Houston in the early '80s, but even with artists I like, it's usually too much of a good thing.

But I did check out Sirius' Abba Radio, appearing in place of Sirius Love on Channel 3 until the end of this week following the premiere of "Mamma Mia" the movie. Having slogged through "Mamma Mia" last weekend, I wanted to hear the songs sung well for a change.

During the 50 or so minutes I listened, there was a jingle that turned the Abba hit into "take a chance on [Channel] three"; interviews with the group members, a "story behind the song" segment with an Abba biographer. In other words, there was the level of production and staging that you'd like to hear go in to every jockless channel. (There are celebrity host segments on Abba Radio, but this stretch was jockless). It was also a good chance to be reminded briefly of some of the moments I'd barely registered at the time, like the group's attempt at '70s funk ("Man In The Middle").

Here's 45 minutes of Abba Radio; all songs are Abba unless otherwise noted:

"Summer Night City"
"Waterloo (French version)"
"Medley: Pick A Bale of Cotton/On Top Of Old Smokey/Midnight Special"
Hep Stars, "Bald Headed Woman" (Benny's '60s band)
"Ring Ring"
"That's Me"
"On And On And On"
"Super Trouper"
"Head Over Heels"
Amanda Seyfried & "Mamma Mia" Cast, "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)"
"Man In The Middle"
"Mamma Mia"
"I've Been Waiting For You"

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You haven't read much about Oldies WAKY Louisville, Ky., in the trades, but they deserve a mention today. WAKY is the former suburban Oldies outlet WASE; it picked up the call letters of (one of) the market's legendary Top 40 station(s) a year ago. And on Friday, it became the only Oldies station in the market when Cox switched longtime Oldies FM WRKA to Country as WQNU (New Country 103.1).

Like WLNG Eastern Long Island, N.Y., WAKY is one of those stations that operates in open violation of programming law (as it's interpreted in most places): longer playlist, heritage jocks, throwback formatics. Even with its signal issues, it was able to carve itself a 2.6 12-plus to WRKA's 3.7. And while it's certainly possible that WRKA would have left without a nudge--as Cox did with its Oldies outlets in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Stamford, Conn. -- it's still a nice story for independent operators and radio history buffs.

WRKA isn't currently streaming, but you can hear airchecks of them on the WAKY-AM tribute site.

Meanwhile, hearing Cox's New Country format on a better signal is intriguing as well -- while much of the format has evolved newer/younger/hotter these days, the Cox version of "New Country" is more pronounced than most. They're also running the attack ads that Cox used on Country KKBQ Houston and former dance outlet WPYM Miami. One charges that rival "WAMZ is all about commercials ... as many as 27 commercials an hour" punctuated by a Gomer Pyle-type voice exclaiming, "Commercials, commercials, and more commercials!"

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With Citadel's Adult Top 40 WYSF Birmingham, Ala., in its second week of stunting toward a new format at this writing, the radio message boards are a mix of frustration and admiration, the latter that the station has been able to drag out the publicity for so long. And in so doing, we can ask the larger question, how long should a station stunt? After two weeks, is there anybody with a button still set to the frequency other than radio geeks?

Ideally, a new format is friendly to the existing audience -- particularly if it's not the type of format that will immediately create its own buzz and its own cume. When Jack FM launched in New York City, its particularly aggressive version of the format was the wrong thing for any Oldies fans who weren't mad enough already. When WCBS-FM came back, it came back with a strategic amount of the '80s songs that had powered Jack.

Some stations have done the sort of extended stunts that should have made it harder to start clean, and still been OK. Rhythmic Top 40 WHZT (Hot 98.1) spent a month as a Hot AC in apparent hopes of dragging Top 40 rival WFBC (B93.7) further away from the eventual format. But in doing so, the station spent a month saying "no rap" and cultivating the kind of audience that was least likely to appreciate the ultimate format. In the end, Hot 98.1 got off to a quick start anyway.

I'm still a fan of stations that materialize full-blown at 3 p.m. one day and sound like they've always been there. So two weeks' worth of stunting makes more sense if the station sounds ready-to-go when it does show up -- a tall order these days. So it will be interesting to see how WYSF spent its summer vacation.

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With all the press this week about the new iPhone's radio apps and about Pandora in particular, it's important to remember that radio has the power -- or perhaps the imperative -- to recommend new music, too. With many broadcasters seeing radio's ultimate role as an aggregator and curator of new music, this week's Ross On Radio has some recommendations on recommending music.

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This shouldn't be remarkable, but it is.

I went to the Website of non-commercial Triple-A WFUV New York today, and front-and-center on the home page is this announcement:

"Due to a change in streaming service, your saved stream links may need refreshing." And then the "listen live" link takes you to a choice of four streams for multiple audio players.

In 11 years of heavy listening to Internet radio, I have never encountered such an announcement. Or, for that matter, an acknowledgement that you might want to or be able to save the stream link to your own player.

The station's goal is usually to force you to us their own embedded player -- lest you miss their pre-roll or don't log in to the frequent listener club. So you're left to see if you can figure out the stream on your own, enter it into your player, and then repeat the process three months later when the station changes the address of its audio again. And one well-known streaming audio provider recently announced that it was going to try and clamp down on any stream aggregator that allowed people to get directly to its station feeds.

I haven't been a regular WFUV listener, but they get points for transparency and being user-friendly. I've just bookmarked them. And I don't even mind that there's a (brief) pre-roll even on the stream I bookmarked..

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When considering the problems that broadcasters have had making listeners buy an HD Radio, consider that ethnic broadcasters once regularly found an audience that was willing to obtain a special receiver to listen to FM subcarrier programming. While the subcarrier market has declined with the Internet, it did create an audience that understood "stations between the stations" and broadcasters who knew how to market to them.

So it makes sense that Beasley WPOW (Power 96) Miami has switched its HD-2 multicast channel from dance to Reggae as "Pirate Radio 96-2." (Beasley is already doing a Reggae format in Ft. Myers.) Even though, as the name suggests, there are plenty of pirate broadcasters in South Florida, it's one of those markets (New York is the other) that has long needed a full-time station targeted to the Caribbean community. While this station starts off with all the challenges of HD Radio except one, it does begin its life with a viable franchise.

One of HD-2's challenges seems just to be staying on the air. At DCRTV.com, Dave Hughes gave Clear Channel's eRockster (now heard on WWDC's multicast channel) a plug only to note the next day (July 12) that it was off the air, as was WTOP's HD-3 traffic/weather channel. That's an experience I've had with many of New York's HD-2 channels as well, by the way. "What's even more pathetic about the "here-one-day-and-gone-the-next" status of local HD Radio channels is that I'm probably the only one who's noticing the absences," Hughes writes.

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If you are looking for a primer on where music is on the web right now, you could do worse than to study Listening Post's Top 10 Hottest Music Sites. Spend some time on these ten sites (and on some of the "runners-up," like Pandora) and you will get an education right quick. As a sidenote, the new Pandora app for the iPhone is fantastic: an almost perfect realization of what radio on a mobile device can and should be.

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James Lewin at Podcasting news tips us to this study, from Ipsos Mori, with data suggesting that podcast consumption boosts radio listening. The data is actually a bit of a mixed bag, but 15% of podcast listeners indicated that they were listening to more live radio since they began downloading podcasts, as compared to 10% who report listening less. Almost 40% of podcast users reported that they were listening to radio programs that they had not previously consumed. And in the glass half full/half empty department, "only" 31% indicated that they would pay for ad-free podcasts. My bet is that the podcast/radio listening correlations are just that--correlations, but any positive news associating new media consumption with increased radio consumption is just what the ole' stock market needs right now.

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So if you're a 40-year-radio veteran with a background in AC and Country ...

And if the name of your company is MOR Media ....

And you syndicate "The Country Oldies Show" and "Country Oldies Flashback" ...

What's the logical next syndicated offering?

An English-language show spotlighting hit music in Cantonese and Mandarin and targeting "teens and young-adults"?

Okay, so it may be a little surprising that the pending new show "Chinamerica Hit Radio" is coming from veteran programmer Steve Warren, but it's an idea that has been a long time in the offing:

Warren's demo -- a 30 minute (or five-minute scoped) prototype of what will be an hour show -- bounces from AC-flavored music to music that sounds surprisingly like early '90s rhythmic product to an '80s flashback (that actually sounds like a Country oldie). A few songs are in English; some will definitely sound very different to somebody with Western pop sensibilities.

But the need for a show like this makes immediate sense. Another veteran programmer, Warren Cosford, tried to find a Vancouver home for Chinese pop music nearly 20 years ago. Arbitron did its first study of Chinese-language listeners in New York and Los Angeles and 2005, and while the majority of listening was to Chinese-language radio, the top English-language formats included AC and CHR.

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Some radio clichés were probably ridiculous from the beginning ("Sean Ross wit'cha, folks"), others started for a valid reason and then take on a life of their own. Radio people will clone something from a winning station even if it doesn't make sense for their own situation. The early WHTZ (Z100) New York buried its legal ID at :50 to hide its calls and its Newark city of license. Soon, even stations that used their calls and were licensed to the city they served were burying them at :50.

So in our occasional series on pet peeves about the way radio stations are produced, we must now add this one: Local shows that are produced to sound like syndicated ones. I most notice this in rock radio -- the longest running stronghold of the syndicated daypart -- and can take two forms: The local host opens and/or closes each break with a produced bumper that identifies the show, but not the station. Or, in some cases, the local host uses a produced drop that mentions the call letters at the beginning or end of a break, but never lets them pass his own lips in between.

It's easy to understand why this might appeal to a lot of personalities. The production sounds big. It's what they hear on other shows. And they all secretly want to have the infrastructure in place just in case 20 other markets come calling tomorrow. And there are likely a number of program directors who would rather just let the producer make sure the calls get in there then have to nag the jock about it yet another time.

The downside, of course, is that producing your local show like a national show throws away the local advantage and sounds more generic. And it's too easy to sound generic and./or national as it is. From a listener need standpoint, there's no reason that every break must end with,a produced "it's the ____ show" any more than stations must ID at :50. It's just become what radio people are used to.

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