Been thinking about this a lot. There is a dynamic surrounding actual choice, the perception of having choice, and the value of said choices, I find difficult to get my mind wrapped around.

(flame suit on, checked, and am prepared for ignition! Game on people, here we go!)

Expectations. Expectations are funny things. Say we've got somebody doing something, and it really doesn't matter what it is, just that something is being done. What is the worth of this thing being done?

Answer seems simple at first doesn't it? If the thing is done well, and in a timely fashion, at a solid cost, then that thing is worth something, unless it's a thing nobody is interested in.

So, let's just say it's an interesting thing and leave it at that.

Now, factor in expectations. Let's say the expectations run low. The thing gets done in the exact same way as described above, so what is the result? Those people doing it are heroes! Good job, way to go!

Now, say expectations run very high. Again, the thing gets done in exactly the same way. No changes. What is the result? Almost there! Good effort, will be better next time, etc...

So now, let's put that into the context of choice and more importantly, the perception of choice.

Right now there are more choices on the radio dial than I've experienced in a long time. We've got the move in's happening, HD, HD2, and whatever else they can cram in there.

So, physically, that's a lot of choices right?

Damn right it is.

Now, what's the expectation surrounding that?

See where I'm going yet?

The expectation is that with so damn many choices, I should be able to make a solid choice easier, or be more satisfied, or have a better chance at being satisfied because the number of choices is greater!

That's raising expectations! Worse, it's raising them without any merit to that being demonstrated.

10 channels of crap, equals 10 channels of crap right?

So, what's the difference between 10 channels of crap, and 100 channels of crap?

The person paying for 100 channels, or maybe who just knows there are 100 channels is highly likely to be more upset about them being crap than the guy dealing with 10.

So that's one case I'll make for there being too many stations. Maybe add to it:

Think about small market radio. Only a coupla stations on the dial right? What do people think of that? What are their expectations surrounding that?

They are LOW EXPECATIONS because they are in po-dunk, west undershirt USA, that's why! They know they are lucky to get ANYTHING, so when it's actually appealing, they feel damn good about it, right?

Right.

Less is more then, in this regard.

Now then, we've got radio adding to the sheer number of actual, physical choices, AND raising expectations at the same time. That's ugly, given all the cost cutting and content dilution stuff going on.

The perception of there being GOOD choices goes down, devaluing the physical choices! Result = net value loss for increasing the number of actual, physical choices.

What's uglier still is that should any station see real success, that success is diluted by the sheer number of alternatives.

Thought problem for you all:

(cont)

Say there is ONE radio station. KONE - "You are lucky to have us" radio po-dunk, FM. Yeah, go guys!

Every single person in po-dunk, is either a listener, or they are not. Easy cheezy. Truth is, KONE can just suck huge, and they will still get a mega share of the community, because expectations are very low, perception of choice boils down to listening or not, or maybe just time of day, and that's it.

Board people, will lower their expectations to be entertained also.

Now, we have somebody who sees that set piece, and decides to add a station. Coupla things happen. First thing is that KONE is now - "Your first radio choice", instead of "you are lucky to have us". Major shift there. Bummer for the sales guys.

Seriously, let's factor that out, and let's just say the new kid on the block does well. They get a mega share, and still KONE gets a solid share.

Now 10 stations hit town. Now people are either listeners, or not, or if they are listeners, they are listening to one of 10 stations.

One thing to bear in mind is that given choices, people will absolutely choose. You could have two stations, DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING, and people would still choose them. They would choose them based on BS reasons too. They would choose them because that bastard down the street listens to that one station, so they will just listen to the OTHER one.

You get the idea.

More importantly, NOBODY gets a worthy share. This is saturation, and it's no good for anybody involved, including the listening public.

One artifact of this then is that the more stations there are, the less chance of any one of them just NAILING it. They can't!

Why?

Because there always is another choice! That's why.

As the number of stations rise then, the expectations surrounding the level of acceptable performance worth being loyal for rises also.

This does not work, when combined with all the cost cutting removing the very kinds of things that people identify with.

(those are the people things, hashed out here many times, so we won't go there right now)

So there it is. Adding more stations actually insures each of them suffers a greater chance of not being viable.

(cont)

Now I was tuning the dial repeatedly over the holidays. Spent some time in the car, and the talk radio just sucked. So I hit the FM and went for it.

Guess what? It was very easy to choose something else when I was not happy, because there were at least TWO choices for each major niche. Of course they identify differently, but they share a lot of tunes.

KINK plays stuff heard on KNRK, for example. KGON plays stuff heard on KUFO, for another one.

You get the idea.

Edit: It is also worth noting, that when stations do this, I DON'T HAVE A REASON TO BE LOYAL. Why bother? There is always the other guy, and everybody loves playing the one guy off the other guy for the better deal.

Now, here's another interesting dynamic. The number of stations and their impact on choice and loyalty appears to be divided by the number of clear and highly differentiated genres present on the dial.

So, if we've got 4 rock stations, all of them are gonna have a hard time of it, because people will choose a lot, because they can.

If there is only one, then that's it! Either you like rock or you don't, and if you do, you will get board, and we've got ourselves a KONE po-dunk scenario where a station can easily out perform the LOW expectations set for it, and snag a nice share.

The ideal scenario then is to frame the perception of choice down as low as is possible, in terms of physical station choices. Call it the KSKD highlander theory. "there should be only one!"

The perception of choice then boils down to choosing HOW to listen to that station, not WHETHER to listen to it.

See?



Now, there are things called markets, and in markets people compete. Fair is fair. There will probably be two stations a lot of the time, not one.

Fine.

This is where media consolidation had harmed us, and corporate radio harms itself. Each owner of a group of stations knows about the choice bit, so they co-opt all their competetors stations with matching offerings.

Kind of like the NBA. Setup your teams for the best matchup, so nobody can just go dunk it.

There is no end to this cycle that is good!

The more stations we have, the more bland and indistinct they get, the lower the share they have, the more they fail to meet cost expectations, the more layoffs, the blander content, syndicated content, and it goes on and on and on.

This is where radio is at today.

I would fix this by dividing the number of permissible radio stations by two in every single market, everywhere but the smallest ones.

That's it. Shut them down, pay the things off from the treasury, and put those that owned or worked at them on the street.

From there, the remaining ones would then have a greater share the very next month, and a pool of the very best people to go after that share, and we RESET RADIO EXPECTATIONS.

After it's running good, vibrant, we then review adding new ones with this dynamic in mind, for you know, the public interest and maybe to save corporate radio from itself.

(could widen up the AM's too! bada-boom!)

Brutal, but effective.

It could be that somebody could post up the best station possible right here in PDX and get a 4 share. Isn't the reality that a 4 share just sucks?

I think so. It's not much. It's not differentiated. I know I would have a bitch of a time selling this, because selling poorly differentiated products into a saturated market comes down to a loser, don't make quota, suck ass, price war.

You guys know this. It's gotta be as true for air-time as it is any other thing being sold. Sales wants to sell a LEADING and DIFFERENTIATED product. If you give that to them, they will sell it, and sell it hard because they will be motivated, and the only thing they like more than solid products to sell, is the money they get from selling them.

I think somewhere upstairs they know this, so they DON'T BOTHER, and are just racing to the bottom, as that's the only path, barring some REGULATION.

Regulation that would do us, the listening public some real good, and that would also to the radio industry some real good.

Fewer stations means a greater potential share per station, which means a greater chance and reward for viability and all of that means an incentive to actually get after it and do radio that matters, not radio that fills the dial.

If you add in the Internet and pods and satellite, then it's even more important for radio to focus down and present it's best face MORE of the time and make the most of it's niche.

There are simply too many people in the business, all trying to snag a viable piece of the pie.

It's time for a darwin effect. Start the highlander process right now. Who's even close to viable? Put them in a lottery, and pick and choose. Done.

The rest? Ditch them, pay them some value and be done with it.

Everybody goes and has lunch, and the best of the best focus on being the best, get two digit shares and has something to sell then.

Then the tag line is "radio is BACK!" No screwing around! We've put the very best of the best on the dial, doing what they know how to do well, and...

"You are lucky to have them!"

Like the sound of that? I do.

Kind of miss feeling lucky to have radio.

Heck, one other thing.

With cable and sat TV, adding choices is good. Everybody knows they are getting a ton of shit channels. And all of those channels get minor league shares, because there are a LOT of them, but the audience size is HUGE.

This is why it works!

With terrestrial radio, the audience is fixed, for the most part. Now, buying lots of stations all over the place adds to that, but here's the kicker:

Nobody, who is an ordinary listening person, gives a crap! They think radio is local. Their expectation is that it is local, because they can point to the tower and say, "well, there it is right there! That's OUR radio station." Their parents did that, and we did that, and the KIDS STILL DO THAT.

This is a case of mis-matched expectations, which is why the pressure to add choices is the WRONG thing to do.

When expectations are misaligned, confusion happens, where there is confusion, people don't buy in! Confused people can't be loyal people. They can't identify with the station either.

And if you are in sales, well that's gotta all suck! What exactly are you selling?

Exactly.

(and I think I'm done now. Flame on!)

>>It's time for a darwin effect. Start the highlander process right now.

We may see this happen soon without regulation as the most viable talk and Spanish formats migrate to FM and the least viable AMs begin to shut down.

True that.

There is something interesting about Spanish stations. I've read over and over here that a Spanish FM would rule.

Damn right it would. (And we have one I can hear out here in Forest Grove. Lots of people listen to it as well. Hear it regularly.)

Why?

Because that's the highlander situation. Po-dunk city. Either you understand Spanish, or you don't. If you do, then you are a listener, or you are not.

That's a damn short decision tree. The clearer that is, the greater the potential share, period.

Also, because it's another language, I think adding Spanish stations would actually improve the state of things on FM to a degree. People either understand or they don't.

If they don't, then that station is IGNORED, meaning the share potential, in the form of lower expectations would be greater, and everybody left, after the Spanish station hits, would see a small bump in the book.

Add a coupla more, and it's a few small bumps.

(there is some overlap where kids will entertain all stations, but generally this dynamic is true, IMHO)

Talk is the same way.

People either will accept it, or won't, for the most part.

So, talk, plus Spanish = a very nice share for one of the remaining music FM's, willing to step up and do good radio.

Still, there are just too many FM's. For a place this size, we don't need that many. In fact, having that many harms everybody.

Given the media pressure from Internet, etc... it's actually as if the city were smaller, where thinking about the audience size is concerned.

Forgot something in the above.

If there were ONE rock station, ONE hip-hop station, one country station, all would do very nicely.

If we've got clusters, doesn't it make ZERO sense then to dilute one of your other stations? I think so.

So they will dilute the other guys station! But that sucks too, because of the share, viability and overall expectations problem. This is the nuclear option. "If I can't make money, at least the other guy isn't making any either." Isn't that lovely?

If this were more clear, then the right answer would be clear also.

If you are gonna add a station, you've got to carve out a NEW niche period. There are lots of niches, so how come they are not being carved out and differentiated?

Because that costs more, that's why!

The industry is hurting huge because it spent it's money on promoting more choice; diluting what viable revenue prospects it had, and invested in a bunch of tech that has some quality merits on FM, and EVEN MORE CHOICE.

(I would can the HD2's, BTW)

Make the primary stream as kick ass as it can be, call it good, and hope that people actually buy radios.

I don't know if there is anything that I can add, other than the overall observation having a lot of choices in media has to go hand-in-hand with consolidation for the large number of choices to be sustainable from a business point of view. It does not matter which comes first; the other will follow.

If a large number of choices exists by the nature of how the medium operates (as in the Internet), you will see mergers happening to keep all of the highly specialized offerings afloat. Just look at how Google has been buying a number of popular websites in recent years. The same principle applies to cable and satellite TV.

If consolidation occurs as a result of de-regulation, as with broadcast TV and radio, then you see the now-larger owners try to saturate the medium by licensing new stations and moving-in stations from smaller communities.

To the owners, I'm sure that consolidation seems like a great blessing because it allows them to approach advertisers with packages that reach a number of (supposedly) well-defined audiences. I remember that some years ago, the owners of KBNP, according to a story in The Oregonian, wished to buy another radio station in the Portland area simply because selling advertising for a single radio station is difficult in today's climate.

On a somewhat related subject, a few days ago, I was thinking about some classic KISN airchecks from 1963, and it hit me that even though AM radio is supposedly on the way out, we have had a net gain in the number of AM frequencies in use in the greater Portland area. Somebody please correct me if there are errors in my lists below--

Stations added since 1963:

860
940
1010
1040
1480
1640

Stations that have gone dark since 1963:

1290
1570

Buying another station doesn't solve the problem. They then are just trying to sell just two stations.

Of course, then somebody comes along and says "I'll sell them all", and so it goes...

The Internet comparison doesn't quite work for me here. Expectations are different. Considerably different.

Google could own half the net, and it just wouldn't matter. New stuff is always created, and people are always choosing.

And the more they saturate, the more bland their offerings are, because the more choices there are, the more people will choose, meaning the less targeted they are, etc...

That kind of scaling out only works to a point, then it's a net value loss.

Which is where I believe we are now, for the most part.

I think the AM on the way out stuff is funny! Recently, as in within the last year, I had good conversations with 20 somethings listening to talk radio. And they brought it up!

Ever wonder why they are there?

Daily relevance, that's why. If that is present, and the listener can relate to it, AM / FM / Sat / high quality / low quality does not matter. They will listen because they relate to the basic drama, not because it's got some technical attribute.

Alfredo: 1480 went on the air in 1956.
Side note: KOIN occupied 940 for 15 years.

We've got too many stations.

Shouldn't it be

We have too many stations, or We've too many stations?

Sorry, Always been one of those word combos that grinds my teeth like chalk on a blackboard.

Usually when an announcer gives the weather and says, "Outside, we HAVE GOT 50 degrees...."

or a car dealer ad where they state "We HAVE GOT the deals..."

Everything else was DEAD ON!

;-)

Now, how do we convince the big boys they are on the wrong road?

Don't worry Roger. Sooner or later the stock price will show them the way. The big boys can only chant " war is peace" for so long, until reality catches up with them.

This is the most discombobulated topic I have ever read (a small portion of).

Roger, absolutely it should. However, there is no editing in the headliner. It is what it is!

For the brevity challenged:

We have too many stations.

This is bad.

We should regulate this for the good of the medium, and the public.

There! Happy now?

I like to detail why and how I came to post what I post, and you have a scroller. Game on!

BTW: I found Charlie to be an enjoyable experience more often than not. If the choices are all marginal, then Charlie, being somewhat random and automated, means more tunes per hour, less distractions, and it's random with the least effort!

In hindsight, after just not listening much at all for a year, this was pure genius! --> and I take back my earlier "Chuckie" themed anti-Charlie posts! Give 'em a cookie!

PUII

Posting Under the Influence of Intoxicants.

LOL!!!

I wish! Just a long post. Either it's interesting, or it isn't.

I dont know how you found that much time to write with kids/spouse/holidays/jobs/etc.

I certainly dont have enough time to read all of that though it does sound interesting...

were you trying to make the point about too many stations by writing too many words?

I think you guys are all just goofy about that. There are times when an idea is more than just a few words. The how, why, when and such matter and provide context.

Hell, I can read the thing in 10, write it in 20, no big deal.

The thing is, given how few of you there are left, I figure those remaining will have an increasingly vested interest in some greater thought about how you might continue on.

It isn't my industry.

In mine, we do this thinking, and we are still around and growing despite very tough times.

Just something to think about. You should be so lucky somebody even gives a shit.

you usually don't get so much flack.....

It's because I touched off a BIG NERVE.

Knew it too. But, it made sense, so I'm gonna post it. The good stuff doesn't happen, unless somebody steps up and takes a little heat. I want to know how defensible that position is, and it appears very defensible.

Too many people in the business. Period.

What I am really looking for is the "but it won't work because" posts.

Not seeing those. It would work. The real question on the table, not bloody likely to be asked anytime soon is, "Would it work WELL".

The other thing I honestly expected was to explore the alternative; namely, to reduce ambiguity in the FM band. Clarity of presentation, reduction in common tunes played, and introduction of new genres would work to better meet the increased expectations, by reducing overall choice.

Frankly, people are often a lot happier with fewer choices over many of them.

They are least happy when it's difficult to choose.

Having a bunch of identity challenged FM's makes it difficult to choose; therefore, people are highly likely to be less happy with, or satisfied by their choice.

LOL!!!

I did put the flame suit on. No worries.

I have a hypothetical question here that is a bit related: if the poor economic conditions of 2009 prompted some owners to jettison poorly-performing signals by donating them to non-profit organizations for a tax writeoff, would the market be better served? Are there non-profits today, such as schools, that would make good use of non-prime real estate on the dial?

The question would be could the new owners keep the license compliant?

Maybe Broadway. Who knows?

Should it come to pass, there would be a ready pool of help to hire!

Alfredo, I think maybe, if the new entries were highly differentiated from the existing ones. The identity cross-polination we currenty have is marginalizing things significantly.

If the clarity of the offerings were increased, then the dynamic I wrote about would be diminished, and ideally shares / niche or genre would rise.

Then again, if it's all just a bunch of crap, probably the dial gets devalued. I suspect that's the trouble brewing for a lot of Spanish radio, for those that don't speak Spanish.

" Posting Under the Influence of Intoxicants."

I would count myself successful if I could resolve not to do that anymore. It's the one thing I wake up guilt-ridden about. I don't play video poker anymore, I don't drive while drunk, I play better music sets at my station thing, I don't try and kiss some girl, I don't pee my pants, hardly ever puke ( there has to be the right set of drinks and in a certain order to get that way for me anymore - if I skip ONE of the set, I'm in the clear ) I don't become an angry drunk...oh no.

I come here and babble and ramble and think I am SO sure of something.

So now you know; I've made ONE resolution for 2009. No PUIIs.

Now if I could just get my anti-asshole pills refilled, I'd be an absolute pleasure to be around. Until then, I WILL continue taking my Ambien. Sure, it's less coherent rambling when I type under that influence. But I blame the unicorn on one shoulder that whispers in my ear to " DO IT! SAY IT! He's an ASShole. You, Sean, are perfect and you know it! " and on the other shoulder is Jeff Clarke, out-witting my every taunt and forcing me to come up with something more original.

MissingKSKD is usually located in my pants during my Ambien highs. He's got his hands full.

All that said and all those excuses noted, I have particularly high hopes for quality music programming in the very near future. I'm banking on it.

" YOU SUCK CJ! "

Sorry. That was MC74. You don't want to know what dark hole in which he's stationed.

I need a bath.

LOL @ CJ!!

Tough gig sleeping huh? Yeah, I get there too. Coffee and tobacco usually is my problem.

The question is "Why did I post it?"

Posted it because I thought of it, and I thought of it, because I was listening to the radio, and FM in particular after a long stay away, and I bothered to listen, because I like radio, have always liked radio, and the people that do radio are special to me, are being treated like shit, and deserve better.

That's why.

Radio is still a great technology. It's got some strengths that remain winners, despite all the options available today.

And Kudos to the crew that wrote the little radio App, to feed the pods. Nicely done, and BTW, not to brag, but go search and you will find that written here about a year or so before it hit.

Why?

Because I enjoy radio, am interested in radio and CARE about radio, when thoughts about radio appear to exhibit some potential for adding value to radio, I actually take the time to post them, just because.

I could not do that...

I will adopt the resolution about not posting under the influence. However:

"MissingKSKD is usually located in my pants during my Ambien highs. He's got his hands full."

C.J., are you sure that you're staying true to your New Year's resolution??

Ask me in the morning.

I don't see anything changing in the short term with regards to terrestrial radio. Yes licenses are granted to stations and can be pulled in the public interest but why would I as a company want to lose what I have already and not spend a ton to fight any opposition?

Companies like Entercom, CC and CBS are in the business to make money. Sure I hate how they treat talent but I can't fault them for wanting to return value to their shareholders. Any process you create to try and tighten up a market will be unfair and seem arbitrary to one party...

De-regulation can be good in some instances but swinging the pendulum the other way is much more difficult. How would you guys advocate closing up the market?

You couldn't do it on ratings because the very stations you'd want to protect that have local ownership would be the first to go.

You couldn't do it based on sales because again higher ratings leads to higher sales.

So how?

I posted over on Oregon Media Insiders tonight because I see the exact opposite happening with television. Where ratings can improve with less stations in radio, television needs more.

Local TV and Over the Air TV Corporations don't get it in my opinion... They don't band together as an industry and their ratings continue to erode due to pay tv. In my opinion they would benefit more by further de-regulation, more licenses and the addition of more targeted subchannels. The major networks have vested interest in all of the cable holdings out there and so while they need broadcast tv to survive, they have back up sources of revenue. Companies like Fisher don't. If we don't see some eventual migration back to Broadcast TV I'm afraid news departments will begin to drop like flies and our options will be much more limiting.

So yay for the idea, but unless you know someone at the FCC who will make the tough decisions, I'm sure we will be stuck with more lame duck commissioners for eons to come.

Oh, and I wanted to add on to Television that these local stations need to find a way to share costs over a greater portion of stations. It's time to get creative...

For instance, these digital subchannels that are being created. All newscasts on the primary channel should be also duplicated on the secondary network. Then you don't get migration to another station looking for the news. This wouldn't cost you a dime and would allow you to advertise the fact that sales clients get their message duplicated on two channels.

Secondly, synergies should be looked for throughout the cable lineup. For instance, Fisher should be in talks with Disney to create a local SportsCenter on ESPN. You are paying your sports department and they are often a money loser, so look for some ways to pay that staff and do a more sports oriented newscast while still providing the other news people want at 8 or 9pm.

Meredith is taking advantage of the fact that they have to pay their news staff for remotes and anchor time, and why not put them on the air for their full shift? The KPDX primetime news, while it probably does not garner good ratings uses the staff and keeps KPDX from paying for additional syndication.

The subchannels also present this option for other stations... but if they can't market it correctly it would be a money loser. Turn your .2 subchannel into a primetime news at 8pm.

//rant

Use a lottery.

Everybody into the hat, pull a few of each class of signal, and scale that by market.

Winners stay on, losers get compensated.

However, that's not the only path. The implications of this thread do suggest some alternatives. I've got a few in mind. Curious to see what others come up with.

TV works differently, given the cable / sat redistribution deals. Also, high saturation of national "super station" type channels is high enough to have reset the TV is local expectation.

Locals are differentiated in this way still, but it doesn't matter much.

Radio has none of these things going for it, unless... (and that's some of the alternatives I was wondering would come up)

No radio doesn't and that's why it should shrink.

But are you telling me that a government already strapped to the hilt is going to compensate corporations for shutting down a frequency? In the governments eye its not losing money for the frequencies it has so why adjust the revenue stream? Unless you are advocating that the other companies in the market pitch in a share based on the number of properties they own for compensation?

The latter would be tough in my mind to grasp if you have fringe stations or translators in this market but it could be done.

On a side note, the government is as strapped as it's wealth creation makes it. (I'm reluctant to say GDP, because it's not quite the right metric) Hard work coming up. This wouldn't significantly change that.

There is one of the alternatives! Companies pitching in a share. Well, frankly that's as likely as Uncle Sam! ---unless there is a aolid ROI for it.

There are others. C'mon people! Let's hear 'em?

Dr Chaps, there is also a pretty strong case for them NOT making money; therefore, not delivering value to the shareholders.

Over saturation makes that case nicely, as does the regular lopping off of heads! Healthy industries don't do this kind of thing. And frankly, the heads being lopped off are not the heads that need to go!

(ask around, I'm quite sure there is some significant consensus on that score)

You asked why as a company.

Well, one good answer would be to recover value invested, bank that and go invest it somewhere else. Not a bad option given how brutal it is right now.

I would consider it very seriously. I can't imagine some on the ropes thinking an easy cheezy exit strategy like that not being appealing on some levels.

In my industry this more or less happened! Lots of people gone. Lots of people on the street, myself included! (self-employed for a time, and would have remained so, if it were not for the health care mess)

Anyway, what happened was the few that remained, or that stepped in to pick up the pieces came up with new business models. People were hired again, and now it's all running very nicely, compared to how it ended the first time.

Honestly, I don't think this is the bad thing that everybody is inclined to think it is! Resetting expectations is a POWERFUL thing!

My post was honestly a case for it, and some thoughts about why it is so, not some slam, or anything.

Been through an exercise like that. Was horrible at the time, but looking back, I wish it had happened a bit sooner.

I think its greatly appealing to start tightening the market here locally if not nationwide for a lot of these owners. Tonight's flip is the greatest example... Entercom has a station where they won't do any original programming now at 910am. They don't want it nor need it, but they will hold onto it until it sells.

I just think that this current downturn isn't loud enough to close down some stations for some. Clear Channel is trading with CBS to get more synergy locally and probably feels they are better off now than before they made the switch. Entercom and CBS are probably willing to look at things, but then you have others who I think would want to enter the market.

I was thinking about something... What if some foreign languages started popping up on the fm and am dials. We don't have anywhere near the market to support it, but do you think ratings would be stronger across the entire board if we had 2 or 3 fm spanish language formats? Or would that just be trading apples for oranges? The same goes for talk... If we were to have more talk stations on the fm dial would we see better talent returning to the heritage stations in the market...

It's all quite intriguing to me and something I wish were studied a bit more by the stations to see how they would perform financially.

I absolutely believe that's true. The posts above were kind of wordy, and I think that got lost.

Basically, let's say three Spanish FM's show up.

For everybody that does not speak Spanish, those are equal to turned off stations. Only down side is the perception that radio is failing or marginalized or just diminished due to the "junk" programming, but I think that's minor, given where we are today.

So then, that's a significant tightning of the dial for the remaining english music FM's. Betcha all of them see a nice bump as a result.

Additionally, the Spanish listeners may or may not have been listeners, meaning that's a net gain overall.

Mix in a few talk FM's, and the same effect is realized, which is one of the alternatives I was hoping would be seen on this thread.

Edit: The implication is that we have too many people DOING THE SAME THING, as much as we have just TOO MANY PEOPLE IN THE BUSINESS.

...if it were me:

one Spanish pop / modern

one Spanish ethnic

one Spanish news talk.

That way, the three are not diluting themselves, offer valid choices and do not duplicate content.

Two FM talkers, in addition to those Spanish stations, and we are then within striking range of the "divide by two" without just shutting down the stations, "nobody wants to talk about that" guerrilla style.

...and those together shrink the current FM space nicely, meaning there then is a reason to put a greater focus on the remaining "ordinary" FM's, with less shared content and more differentiation, thus lowering real, physical choice, to be more in line with expectations already set at this time.

Better match on expectations, means less confusion, means buy-in / loyalty is more highly likely, equals a higher share per stick!!

And from the sales stand-point, a real segmentation of the listener pools into meaningful groups. So then we get the actual targeted listeners a higher percentage of the time, which should set the expectation for better or at least more consistent buys and rates.

(all of that using the choice model outlined at the beginning of this rather ugly thread)

Reading all this brings to mind just four words:

a la carte cable

or is that two words?

Hell, just shut 'em all down and put up one huge 1,000,000,000,000-whatever-watt FM flamethrower of NPR!

There. One big station for everybody. Problem solved! ;o)

What? They were doing it like that for years in the UK with the BBC, so I'm told...........

LOL!!

I don't know if it's 4 or two, but if they permit a la carte cable, then that industry will suffer from a similar problem, as it will lose the economy of scale that makes the current channel structure work.

Right now, a channel that may see a following good enough to justify carrying it won't, if it's value is broken down to an atomic, channels either make money, or don't model.

Sat radio works basically the same way, which makes me wonder how come they nixed the nice little niche channels with the merge! Lost a fair number of subscribers over that, when they really didn't have to.

At a basic level, ordinary radio is local, meaning it's NEVER going to have the economies of scale to make those models work. The expectations are just different. (local expectations long set, are very hard to unset)

It's entirely possible to network the whole darn FM dial, use things like RDS to follow program streams and HD to bump up the channels, right?

What do you get?

Satellite lite! Why even bother. Just go for the full on Satellite radio and call it good.

The local is the key differentiator. That is what there is to SELL, and the sales make the money, and overlapping content, poor differentiation and saturation = lousy sales.

With obvious results today.

> Satellite lite! Why even bother.

In a lot of countries, terrestrial radio is done this way. In some places, such as South America, the people who got in on getting FM licenses in the major communities when they were still available and then combining these signals into a network ended up beating out the existing local community stations, as the 1990s wore on. By going national in this way, they were able to create a higher-budget product that could not be sustained on the ad revenue that could be made by any one standalone station.

Although the move to national stations is bad in that it possibly means that a forum for community announcements and emergency information is lost*, I think that a group owner would be foolish not to exploit these economies of scale.

*It would be possible to have automation drop-in local weather, announcements, etc, customized for the area served by each transmitter. I don't know whether the South American FM networks are required to do this.

Do they have satellite radio there?

I don't know....

I am sure that some of you know more about industry economics than I do, but there are some economic fundamentals here that I have studied quite a bit. As competition increases, and competing media types proliferate, the mistake is for everybody to do what they and everyone else has always done. Two things are likely to happen, the value/cost of stations is likely to come down, and the winners will find new formulas to differentiate themselves. While a lot of choice clearly makes it harder for each station to compete, choice is good for the consumer, but only if it is choice with a difference. What local air has over national networks -- as others have said -- is local highly differentiated content. A real good book that some of you might enjoy: "The Substance of Style," relates to the market desire for very personalized content. At some point, as markets get mature and saturated and it gets hard to differentiate, some creative competitors create entirely new areas of differentiation. The book gives many examples of competitors in different kinds of markets that managed to break out into entirely new categories with an understanding of this. In the end, you create new markets with very strong personal loyalty. Ideally, you pull market share from other media, rather than just from each other, because the new category is more personally valuable to the consumer. Just occurred to me that this seems to relate. Maybe worth a thought.