generations.

Consider this article:

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080327/152312670.shtml

This is absolutely happening in my generation, among those of us who adopted the Internet early on. (Gen X) We do this regularly, and it carries significant weight.

Kids do it almost by nature, sharing and linking to this and that. It's a form of personal expression and advocacy really. Why spend the time to detail one's ideas and thoughts when there is content out there that can do this for us?

A deeper implication here is why should I value some larger organization in these things, over that of my close circle of trusted and respected people?

[damn good question, IMHO]

The radio tie-in lies in both producing the kinds of content that people will consider linking and sharing with in the first place. Some of it's there in the form of downloadable goodies. Good move, and likely only to increase.

The other tie-in is the fostering of community. This is happening too. Websites with social networking tools and such are growing hot points of attention.

Attention equals dollars. Always has always will.

Now, the rub:

People follow the free. In this day where moving content around, communication and authoring content is essentially free anyway, why would anybody leverage sources where dollars and other strings are attached?

I don't have an answer for that one. In my personal life, I simply avoid doing this unless there is no other way.

I suspect a very large percentage of the up and coming people are going to behave in a similar fashion, meaning artificial constraints on things to focus attention may well not continue to be effective, given relatively unconstrained alternatives continue to exist.

[which is probably why the aggressive legal battles rage on...]

Really, I wanted to tie this in to the ownership and diversity discussions happening. I'm not so sure the two are related to the radio problems cited here and elsewhere.

I do think failure to embrace growing trends enabled by technology is linked, and this is just one of the ways how.

Food for thought, if anything else.

The problem is one of credibility. News contains as much hyperbole, distortion and prejudice as it does facts. The lack of selectivity in sharing entire "stories" is its downfall. Without the action of editing, everything becomes bombastic. Sharing news and information becomes uninspiring without the same post production effort that a piece of music carries. However, given that, overproduction can diminish the impact through the elimination of facts in favor of the window dressing that attracts consumers ... the essential goal if you are trying to sell something ... ads ... or sway opinions.

Radio and television evolve out of necessity. The internet has become the biggest challenge to traditional broadcasters ever. It's not going to get any easier as mobile access to this volume of information and entertainment matures. Ever since the government commoditized broadcast licenses. quality of programming has suffered. Old people like me gave up on the notion that radio can provide listenable entertainment and information and young people plug in to the net, their iPod, etc.
It only makes sense that with every radio signal able to deliver multiple programming, every TV signal as well, that the pool of rich valuable media is currently spread too thin. Corporate sponsorship of media development is no longer the preferred route for media artists. This, too, bodes poorly for broadcasters.
Soon, traditional delivery of information will have no advantage over new age methods. Look at the differences in the industry compared to say 35 or 40 years ago. Now take that paradigm and apply it forward 35 or 40 years.

Pretty soon all music will be a free download. Apple's already reported to be toying with the idea of opening the entire iTunes library to the public. The intermediate step will be inexpensive subscriptions for unlimited access. Nobody is going to listen to traditional radio for music. I tend to think few people do that today anyway considering the tight playlists and corporate agendas that now rules the airwaves. There was a time in my life when I listened to the radio all the time every day. Now I don't listen at all. I'm not the only one like that, either. I pick up on music, news and other information from other sources that have a more diverse presentation.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080319/tc_nf/58882

> Kids do it almost by nature, sharing and linking
> to this and that. It's a form of personal
> expression and advocacy really. Why spend the time
> to detail one's ideas and thoughts when there is
> content out there that can do this for us?

I've been finding that people who just post links on message boards without explaining the relevancy of the linked story or at least demonstrating that they have thought about what is in the story often end up not being considered valuable contributors. Largely, I learned this lesson from observing Digitaldextor on the other side of this board. After he did this a few times, people started to challenge him, saying things such as, "Hey, Digitaldextor, can you actually make points that we can discuss here, instead of just posting links and saying, 'Here, refute this...'" I think that Digitaldextor honestly never considered that he was a poor spokesperson for the ideological viewpoints that he tried to champion. I think that he really believed that people were using him as a convenient punching bag.

I haven't yet given up on radio because there are still some talented people on the air. They are the exception, but the good ones are good enough that they keep me listening. I was also about to give up on music, especially contemporary music, until I discovered that there are still people out there who know how to write lyrics that tell a good story. Overall, though, it is sad that our modern world makes the cheap commodity crap so easy to churn out that it drowns out the stuff that has real craftsmanship behind it.

That dynamic, "land 'o crap" (and we know Randy loves crap!), might play out just fine. There are somewhat sophisticated people, who tend to hang together and will self-select more refined content to meet their needs. There are lots of niches like this.

Instead of choosing to identify with some produced scene, like we used to, they will self-identify and self-aggragate, forming little pools of people. In these pools there will be participants, who are just members of the pool, pollinators (yeah, like bees) who are members of several pools, and deal in passing along "cool", and producers, who are seriously invested personally and do the research and filtering necessary for a pool to start around them --if they happen to know a pollinator, that is.

That's been my growing life experience anyway. The more the Internet has penetrated people, mostly by become accessable enough for them to play with it, the more these kinds of dynamics seem to manifest from that.

IMHO, that suggests that radio could play a part with some greater level of research and accessibility. The research would be all about the kinds of pools of people that might like similar program presentations. The accessability really empowers the research as in people who drive radio actually participating in the pools themselves.

Clearly there are common tunes, signatures for the pools of people. Some more common than others and I don't think that research is any different than what has to be done right now to establish good lists for markets.

Context presents as probably the biggest potential for relevancy.

The little daily narratives that play out in these pools of people are something they will identify strongly with and will do so on a regular basis.

We really, really, like stories and conversations, generally speaking. This is a core human thing there is no getting around. It hasn't changed all that much over time either. How we do it and when we do it changes often. Other things don't change much at all. The elements of story have not changed, for example. Drama is drama. There are other constants too.

Too bad we don't have an anthropologist in the group.

Here's one way to look at it. Before the Internet, the capacity for broadcast people to have friends and incorporate was limited by technology and cost. There are only so many people that one can interact with in a day (technology), and only so many people that can be associated with the broadcast. (cost)

Pre-Internet dynamics like this then were big word of mouth things, leveraging the common broadcast for story fodder --drama. Who's new, what do they like, where are they today, who pissed them off, what does this tune mean for them and me and who would be interested in that?

Now that all is moving online. Word of mouth does not go away, but it's now got less mindshare.

Some broadcasters have responded with forums, mailing lists, IM, web cams, etc...

Here's a cool thing. Go check out Twitter. It's a microblogging too intended to let others know what somebody is doing right now. This is a connectedness thing, I find very, very interesting.

Of your good friends, do you know what they are doing right this instant? Most of us think they do, and the closer that is to reality, the better connected we then are, right?

Well, with a tool like Twitter, people can text in their activities:

"headed to work, traffic is a bitch"

"getting food at that cool sushi place"

"meeting bob"

"bio break"

etc...

Those wanting to be so connected then, subscribe to other peoples feeds and get a stream --the story of the other peoples lives. The net value gain is that real-time conversation then does not require so much catch-up to get connected, then share. Only the vital sharing then occurs!

Result is far more people connected better than they were before, which means bigger pools can hang together.

This is a lot like a broadcast, with only the human elements being relevant! To me, it presents as all the elements, but the music or other program material, that people use to identify with that broadcast.

So, there are tunes, and there is context. Hope I didn't make too much of a mess of that, trying to explain what I'm seeing...

Daily relevance is basically the story, whatever that is. IMHO, this is why people like morning shows. They like stories! And they really like stories about other people they identify well with! --Cool people.

Again, IMHO, radio could expand on this, making more and better stories a part of things to get daily relevance. That, in turn, is a kind of content that does not have the "land 'o crap" problem associated with it either, and is the kind that tends to be good material for sharing in the pools of people.

New research then might mean, finding and quantifying the pollinators in the hopes of leveraging them to reach the pools for mindshare.

I don't think you can tell a pollinator what to do. That's like asking somebody to be cool. Doesn't work because it's a contrived thing and everybody knows it. False, fake, not real.

I do think it's possible to ask pollinators to share stuff. And that might be simply empowering them to do so, or it might be with some incentive for doing so, though that one might run afoul of fake again...

One end result could be two stations playing exactly the same tunes. Which one would perform better, assuming ad budgets and such are identical?

I propose the one that more people identify with will do better. And that imprinting happens through context --the stuff that tunes ride on. IMHO, given rather easy and instant availability of music anywhere, any time on any device by anybody, just playing good music is dropping in value.

Some might say, well it's the mix stupid!

And I think I would agree. However, I think "the mix" is just less valuable overall because of technology changes.

The usual mode is then adapt or die, right?

So, a greater focus on context --stories and meaning is that evolution, IMHO. Live and local might not literally be somebody blabbing on a mic all day long.

Think of this:

We've got a VT station, tunes picked by the tune picker, shuffled by the tune shuffler, both of which could be people or computers, and core station identity produced by the identity producer.

All of those efforts get "the sound", and can be highly automated, VT, whatever right?

The sound has been deemed appealing by the researcher, and that gets tweaks over time, mostly because researchers are gonna research!

Where are the differentiators then? Seems to me, without much context being a part of it, those differentiators are very small. Small like the "Zee" hiss that just appeared on Z100 recently. It's catchy, somebody talks about it and they get mind share out of it.

Why do it otherwise right?

That's a tiny, small step toward differentiation on things other than just tunes and quality, number of spots / hour and other very coarse things, easily duplicated everywhere.

So it's trying to be different without really being all that much different. Not a bad thing, so be clear that's not a slam. I like the blips, frankly. Always have.

Story and context present as pretty huge differentiators --and they are kind of sticky too. One attribute is whoever does it first, kind of gets to plant the flag and get some attention. If the story is good, should that be the device used, well people are gonna follow the story then.

That raises the bar for others, who may duplicate, but not capture.

This is very different than the blip. One blip is cool, a couple of them is a trend, and blips everywhere are just noise.

One story is cool, given one identifies with it, a couple of them is really cool, and more than that devalues all of them. If a person has some investment in a story, well, they might hold onto that, rather than risk it all being noise. The story is lost in that case, and that's where the sticky part lives.

Way different dynamic, and worth some digging as to the means and methods that make sense.

Getting back then to the scenario above, context comes from people telling their stories and providing meaning to all the other broadcast elements.

Could be online tools, could be imaging elements that hint at character and theme, could be lots of things, all of which add value above and beyond the rapidly diminishing value of "the mix" and "the format" the mix is presented in.

Say one of those stations spends it's budget on a lot of gimmicks. Blips, cool elements, etc...

Say the other one invests in a solid set of these, but is not aggressive about it. Instead, they take their dollars and tell a story with them.

If it's a good story, it will compete with just cool sounds.

Who would do better then? Don't know, but I do know it's not really being tried just yet and that there are a LOT of new tools for it to happen.