The World is Round

Radio, Schmadio: Part Two

Business kills everything. Even the hint of business turns the good into the bad and the bad into the ugly. Take the Internet, perhaps the most important technological and sociological development in recent memory (as if you didn't already know). If you've been surfing the net since the beginning, and by that I mean before browsers (yes, Virginia, there was such a time), you remember you paid, say, $20 a month for 20 hours of online time and visited such places as museums in far off lands like England, and navigated through them by typing text commands like the ones that fueled the seminal early computer games from Infocom, like Deadline and the original Zork.

Enter the browser, which added graphics to the mix. Before the Internet exploded, new sites-and there weren't that many of them at the outset-were listed on a central site from which you could link to them. Sites such as one that collected one man's visits to lighthouses all over the world, and another that recounted with words and pictures a couple's trip up and down Route 66, were common and fun, and were central to the Internet's conceit that it was a superhighway for people to exchange information and not a place to promote that latest sugar-filled cereal from Kellogg's.

Enter business, which started to smell opportunity and transformed the place where free exchange of information was the name of the game into yet another marketing tool. Not that I have anything against marketing tools, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that the use of the Internet as such has made the original, you should pardon the expression, business model a fractured beast at best.

Enter radio. When I was writing for the radio trade newspaper Radio World, I got the idea to propose a column about how radio could benefit from a presence on the Internet. One of the first radio trade columns about the 'net, if not the first (hey, it's my horn to blow, you know), it was met with some resistance, but it quickly caught on. Pretty soon, radio stations were contacting me to review their station's sites and spotlight them in my column.

My idea was that radio stations needed the Internet to help market their brands if they were to stay competitive in their local market, and, with the advent of webcasting, local has come to mean the world. Webcasting a station's program stream is a way to extend an audience, to offer more value to advertisers, and, what's more, it's cool, and the cool factor is never a bad thing.

As more stations started webcasting, and more stations had a presence on the 'net, it became clear that the relationship between radio and the 'net was something that was here to stay.

And then the rules changed. Suddenly, stations had to pay licensing fees to webcast music (in the same way that stations pay the music licensing organizations a predetermined amount to play music on the terrestrial air), and for many of them it wasn't going to be worth the trouble (or added cost). There were other problems, too; classical stations that broadcast symphony concerts, for example, were finding resistance from the musicians, who wanted to be paid to be webcast-on top of what they were already being paid to be broadcast.

Bottom line: radio folks agreed that webcasting, and web site presence was important-maybe even imperative-for their stations, but nobody seemed to understand how to make both work. In other words, it's that old bottom line rearing its ugly head; stations may have to spend money to make money, but you need money to operate and there's only so much money a station owner is willing to earmark for webcasting and Internet presence if there isn't going to be an appreciable return on the investment.

If you're an avid listener of radio on the Internet, then you might have found that some of your favorite stations stopped webcasting for a time. Many have returned, but only after they found a way to pay for the privilege. Many people who were running personal stations on sites such as live365.com began freaking out because they could now be held liable for fees going back a ways, prior to the date the new regulations took effect; now, live365 charges for people to operate stations, and the fee covers the licensing organizations.

So, it seems, radio stations, and just plain folk, are learning to make the Internet work for them, even if it's going to cost them money to do it. They really don't have a choice, because terrestrial radio-the over-the-air variety-is, rather sadly, on its way out. Or it will be, unless something drastic-revolutionary, even-is done. But what? And is it worth it?

Of course it is. The (perhaps old fashioned) idea of communication will never die. There still are stations that are not corporate-owned, that broadcast only in the daytime, that have programs like Swap Shops, in which people sell their bric-a-brac and tractor parts, and there are stations that connect with their local communities during crises, such as happened some years ago in a small town in West Virginia, where flooding that came after some particularly heavy snow caused cows from a local farm to float (yes, float) down a street, prompting a listener to call up and say that the cow had just passed his house.

Something has to be done to save terrestrial radio, but while the think tank is swapping ideas, time is a-wasting, and this thing called satellite radio-this thing that is, with the announcement that Howard Stern will be moving to Sirius Satellite Radio in January 2006, suddenly becoming a horse race, is beginning to nip at terrestrial radio's heels.

Will Howard Stern single handedly propel satellite radio to household name status? Tune in here next month, when we will discuss that prospect and talk about the satellite choices currently on offer. It's going to be a wild ride.

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