and only concern itself with the bottom line. Wasn't radio originally created with the idea to entertain and inform it's listener's? I am quite content for now with my station of choice, a heritage station, but in sampling other's I find a genuine lack of spunk in them. Dry and lifeless, boring repetitive music, and butt loads of advertisements! It seems like what is most important is the advertisers. Well if you win the listeners first the advertisers will follow. Would it not make sense to invest in programs that will attract listeners and advertisers with them? Call me silly but I know what I like and can tell the difference between crap and quality radio! It really is true that sometimes you need to spend money to make money and when you invest wisely you will see a return on it! So IMHO do not try and shove some half-assed program down my throat and think i'll take it. NEWS FLASH.....way to many other options out there man. Hell I could just pack around my laptop with aircard and pump internet radio into my car through the MP3 port! You can do that with an I-phone or PDA-phone so long as you have the unlimited plan....could get pricy if not!

Anyway.......you want to make any station and/or program a hit.....remember that you are there for the listeners and the listeners are why you are there!

BTW....yesterday's top 40 may not be representative of today's taste's. I find myself more drawn towards hit's just slightly beyond the standard top 40 but not so obscure that they are completely foreign. Great tunes and sadly under-played. And to be honest the top 40 I grew up with often loses my interest due to the repetative playing of them. Mix up the play list, be creative, make it fun and entertaining again! FUN and ENTERTAINING.....you get that and you got it made! You can take that to the BANK!

IMHO

It began with consolidation after the FCC trashed the ownership rules. Radio is now run by Wall Street and the MBAs.

...with expected results... Radio is no different than other industries raped by wall street. Merge-cut-maximize-sell. Eventually you get to an average or substandard product that is overvalued... As an example outside radio one only needs to look to retailer MERVYNS... Hot growth in the 70s and 80s spread from a California retailer to cover 35 states, great place to work, bought out for too much money, quality cut to improve margins, staffing cut, started to under perform, farther flung and lower volume stores closed, chain spun off for WAY too much money, bigger nut to crack, no more cuts to make and now the chain shrinks further. Wash and oregon stores all closing....

Yet Kohls and Mervyns are the same type of retailer, Kohls is taking that segment and expanding while Mervyns loses what it had and dies. Imagine Kohls will go the same route eventually. All about the money, how much and how fast. Thats what kills an industry. Yet you will always hear the term, CHANGING CONSUMER TASTES. No, the tastes change because the company no longer delivers the product that the consumer wants. It might look the same, but look to the underlying changes.

A viable live local station that sells for too much needs the protection of the cluster to absorb some of the cost, sales sells six stations rather than one, talent cut to save a few bucks, PD runs 3 or 4 rather than one. They might play the same stuff, but it's not the same station. Now the next buyer comes along, ownership makes a tidy sum on the whole cluster, and the new owner has an even bigger nut to crack. available ad revenue doesn't provide the hoped for return, so the new owners cut and trim and seek other rev producing sources, and the radio product itself is diluted even further, and that makes OTHER sources such as sat rad, i-pods, internet radio more attractive. The product from the other sources is not better, but offer a feature that radio doesn't provide whether it be no commercials, own choices, new cutting edge, or just stuff aimed at the techno geek. Radio tries to get those customers back with gimmickry like JACK or HD, or streaming on the web, but their real strenghth is doing what they did best.

Unfortunately, it todays greed driven world, Wall street radio is not willing to take a smaller return on investment to improve the quality of their product. Couple that with the fact that there are too many stations chasing increasingly fragmented advertising options, and you will only continue to see a decline. CC selling to an investment group would only have benefitted CC owners. It would not have meant a return to great radio. The cost was too high and you would have seen a lousier product still, as the new group would have mande further cost saving cuts.

The only real solution is a moritorium on NEW stations,and a reinstitution of some form of ownership limits which would force some of the stations off the air.

The painful part is that it would be current ownership that takes the financial hit. Somebody will at some point. Either current owners through decreasing revenue from a weaker product and increased competition from other sources, or future owners who have overvalued properties, no more cuts to make, and not enough revenue to support the return needed.

We are just about to the top of the pyramid. Now the real question is when does the shakeout begin?

The shakeout has begun on a small scale. Clear Channel recently sold a cluster they paid something like $20 to $30 million for. They sold it for $12 million. This is only the beginning.

I only hope there is a bigger bloodbath to come. It serves those right who destroyed the business I loved being a part of for 40 years.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/02/19/clear_channel_deregulation/in dex.html

These quotes from programming great Buzz Bennett are so cool!

Q: A general manager in New York said to me, "Radio is strictly business, not an art form."

Buzz: He was wrong. Radio is a business and an art form—if you're good at it. If you're not good, it will certainly sound like a business. It's art because it's a form of entertainment, and that requires creativity. Unfortunately, the big radio groups are looking for guys who go through the motions of being a PD but just dots the I's and crosses the T's. Downsizing is a good business move for momentary assistance to your bottom line, but when you get rid of good creative minds in the process, that trade-off will be very costly in the long run.

Q: What makes a creative radio station?

Buzz: A cause that requires a team of talented people to blend into a focused unit. Synergy. Everybody in the radio station must believe in the cause with their hearts and souls. The spirit produced by [this cause] is so strong that the listeners can feel it. They want to be a part of something like that.

I listen to stations today and the jocks sound like computers. They don't have a cause; there is no heart involved in it, no passion flying through the airwaves. I have a hard time listening to radio today. I don't hear that spark of creative people who believe in what they're doing. A great jock projects from inside, to get inside the listener. That's when you'll hit a responsive chord with the audience.

The objective is to create an original radio station full of excitement, enthusiasm, and charisma. If the listeners feel that positive, good-time vibe, they are going to want to share that; they'll stay tuned longer and they won't even know why. It’s contagious. People always want to be around upbeat, positive people. If your station is up, positive, and smoking, everybody wants to listen to it. If your station is bland, vanilla, and mediocre, nobody wants to listen to it.

Q: Do you see any positive side of deregulation?

Buzz: The only positive I see is what they tell you in any 12-step program: You have to completely bottom out before you can come back. I think we're almost there. What we need is a creative revolution.

Q: You say stations are lacking causes, energy, and synergy, but isn't that the responsibility of the program director?

Buzz: Yeah, but who is the program director today? There are some qualified program directors, but a lot of people have been put in that position and they shouldn't be there. They have to program by committee, and the tendency is to say no to new ideas. That cuts off creativity.

For creativity to take place in radio, you need a leader who expresses the vision of what needs to go on the air. Everybody in the station must believe in that vision, must vibe on it—only then will the audience pick up on the vibe. That's what's missing today with programming-by-committee and cash flow consciousness.

Q: Where do you see the industry moving?

Buzz: The industry reminds me of the Chicago Bulls management that refused to resign Phil Jackson, who coached them to six championships. That arrogance caused the greatest basketball player in the history of the sport to retire. Then they eliminated all the rest of their top players. But what they took away was the heart and soul of their team. [it left] the upper management in better shape financially, but the spirit of the team was dead and gone. Radio has done the same thing. It's gotten rid of experienced players to save money and basically it's as devoid of talent and spirit as the [post-Jordan] 1999 Chicago Bulls.

Q: Some people are saying that we creative types should grow up and face the fact that this is the way the radio world is now. Big business, no emotion.

Buzz: They would like us to go quietly into the night, but the point is not to take the world the way it is, but to take the way the world is and change it for the better. Creative people need to step up to the plate and change things. It’s sad to watch this industry becoming less than what it was. It was supposed to become better than it was.

the communications act of 1996 trashed broadcasting as we knew it....thank bubba clinton and his administration for their payback to an industry that $upported him

no longer required to operate in the public interest, we are now left with whatever it takes to fill up the traffic log...........thats why the airwaves sound like unmitigated garbage..........thats why two helicopters are crashing in to each other chasing a "news story"......(in my opinion the tv stations should be charged with reckless endangerment and negiligence..at least no one on the ground was killed by their stupidity and desperation for revenue)

"retired" creative person.

I would never say that corporate operators are good for radio.

But I think you have a cute little mythology going about how widespread good radio was back in the day.

I remember plenty of money-grubbing, greedy mom n' pop owners.

And I remember plenty of bad radio, too.

What we did have then ... before consolidation ... were jobs. Is that what we all miss?

>>What we did have then ... before consolidation ... were jobs. Is that what we all miss?<<

Precisely. But one also needs to look at what caused the number of jobs to decline. That without exception was Telecom '96.

Technology (i.e. automation) only gave stations the way to cut the jobs - it didn't cut the jobs on its own.

i don't object to whatever goes on behind the mike, corporate greed or whatever, as long as the product is listenable, which today it is not and yesterday it was..........the bottom line is the bottom line, but in broadcasting CONTENT is the bottom line

To answer the original question:
February 8, 1996

The telecom act definitely was what caused all those gigs to go away.

But I was in radio for more than a dozen years before the telecom act. There was a lot of bad radio being done back then, too.

That's all I'm saying. Things changed, and that sucks. But don't romanticize an entire era.

I knew some real old-timers who were in radio before TV came along. They thought the sort of radio we grew up with was one-dimensional and shallow. So it goes.

I'd rather hear stories about specific stations or jocks we thought were great instead of saying that that whole time was more creative and entertaining. I think if you could go back and hear everything on the dial it would be obvious that mediocrity has never not found a home on the radio dial.

what we lost was localism. Many communities had their own lousy but profitable station(s) staffed with old locals and up and comers.... with dereg came the big station move where the big city market grew from 12 stations to 25 and countless small towns lost their hometown station which went from local, and many cases live, to cluster jukebox....

In 1985 KENU was billing 35,000 a month now it's a non comm.... KTAC and KBRD were in Tacoma, as was KLAY and a couple others... what's there now?

The town I'm in had a profitable AM/FM that Cumulus bought and moved out. My last station was profitable live and local. Now it's moved out of state to be a simulcast Pittsburgh rimshot. It was more than jobs lost. Hey, pay too much for the local peashooter and you can't make it fly without the cuts and support of the big city cluster,
So now, the majors have too many stations chasing too little revenue, and and some communities now have nothing except the occasional sales rep trying to pick up a fringe sale.......... In a town where Alan Freed grew up, there is no radio station. When I came here there were four in the county, now there is none.

For sure the past was not all "great radio." I bet some of the long time Portland radio people on this board could tell us which stations were known for being bad places to work. Every market had stations like that, back in the day.

In fact I think you hear less really bad radio today, but you also hear almost no really great radio. It has all been switched to the "medium-low" setting! Most radio is now, as they say in broadcasting, mediocre.

there was a big event here in town last month called The Super Nats hundreds of classic cars crusing town and showing at the nearby drag strip the main event held at the strip then moves in to town at night. a four day event Cumulus had two station booth at the track, Didn't broadcast more than the usual call in live action broadcast, and CC which has the OLDIES JUKEBOX had no presence at all and barely mentioned the event. A prime promotion LOST.

When I talked with the Cluster manager about them being a no show, he said they weren't invited and made no effort to be a part of it. Too passive. I suggested that maybe they were understaffed and not able or willing to "compete" He passed it off to the promoters wanting to move in a "different direction" (an overused radio term)and in a follow up email sent this.....

"understaffed is an understatement, Competition... there's a novel concept that certainly would help."

So local management sees a problem and can do nothing to change. Obviously someone farther up the corporate ladder is happy with mediocrity. At least in this case it shows lack of interest is a corporate decision rather than locally.

Egor sums it up nicely...."I think you hear less really bad radio today, but you also hear almost no really great radio. It has all been switched to the "medium-low" setting! Most radio is now, as they say in broadcasting, mediocre."

1996

party like it's 1996. Yet I hear many voices say Corporate doesn't interfere at the LOCAL LEVEL....
Billshirt.

For all the talk about communities losing their stations to larger markets, what about all the local signals now floundering in their smaller markets? The year 1996 certainly wasn't a good one for air talent, but Docket 80-90 didn't do many favors either. All these new FMs burst on the dial, assigned to "cities" like Banks, Bandon, Myrtle Point, Castle Rock, Eatonville. In the FCCs rush to get these FMs on the air was there any thought given as to what to do with all the 1000 watt former heritage Top 40, Country or Full Service stations in all these small markets. The only option was low-wage or no-wage programming. Without it, how could a market like Coos Bay ever support as many stations as they have (12? 13?). Jeez, Longview has seven between two companies, Some are local but with some tracking and others are live but via satellite. One FM doesn't have any jocks, live or tracked (unfortunately for DJs, THATS the one getting most of the buzz).

Before Docket 80-90, of course there were many bad stations. But almost all of them had an airstaff and news department. My first full-time job was at a radio station so bad it was a laughing stock throughout much of Washington. It was so bad that, one day, when a fellow staffer (Bend radio legend R.L. Garrigus) got so frustrated, he wanted to quit radio, I had to remind him he wasn't even IN radio yet! This station still had far better numbers than they do today, partly because of all the people making 500 dollars a month, that showed up everyday, trying to put out the best local product we could, amid the broken-down twenty year-old equipment.

But we have more listening "choice" today.

YOU SAID IT ALL TOO MANY STATIONS include repeaters in that mix as well... sure brought in some additional revenue in fees to the guv'mint. LIKE pizza, if your town of 600 has 15 pizza places, It probably isn't a good place to open a new pizza place. Nope, Coos Bay doesn't need that many and can't support that many which is why you have to limit ownership within a market.. spin some of them off and see if they can be financially viable on their own, if not, then you know you had too many.

The only laughingstock I knew of in WA was KDFL. (which I tried to buy from the Bankrupt Don Shorter) Chris wound up with it and turned it into one of the Z-twins.....

Hey Ron,

If you are standing in the middle of Coos Bay, here is what you can pick up on your radio;

KDCQ, KHSN AM, KWRO AM, KBBR AM, KMHS AM, KACW, KOOS, KBDN, KSHR, KJMX, KYTT, KDUK, JPR, KDUN, KCST, KFLY and KYTE.

radio has never cared abotu listeeners they care about advertisers.