Radio, Schmadio: Part One

About 10 years ago, I was on a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I think the topic at hand was new radio technologies, and, probably, I was promoting the at-the-time most gee-whizbang fledgling radio technology there was, known as the Radio Data System, or simply RDS. RDS was a hot button for the Electronic Industries Association's Consumer Electronics Group, where I was a communications guy. RDS was one of my technologies, meaning I was assigned to promote it to consumers through my dealings with the press.

In consumer electronics years, 10 years is a long couple of times ago. RDS seems like a backroom project now, given what is competing for consumer dollars these days, i.e. satellite radio and hooking an MP3 player up to a car's sound system for unparalleled depth of play while traveling to Granny's house. If you had an RDS radio, you had a radio with a little screen on which a multitude of information could appear, such as song titles, artist names, weather and contest info, and who knows what else. Some stations took advantage of RDS, but it seems to have always been doomed. Now, if you subscribe to satellite radio, you can see artist names and song titles on your display, and, as a bonus, you get CD-quality sound! Such a deal.

No really, it is a deal-a really good deal. RDS, had it taken hold in the marketplace, would have been a slave to terrestrial radio sound quality. There was talk about some RDS radios spitting out coupons, which probably wouldn't have been a good idea in the long run for anyone sitting in the passenger seat. I can see the headline now: Killer Coupon Slices Octogenarian Six Ways to Sunday on Ride to Dry Cleaner.

But I digress. There I was, at the panel's end, and it was time for every basically-unprepared speaker's favorite showcase, the Q&A session. The questions asked were way beyond my technical scope, so I was able to dodge the embarrassment bullet until the very last question was asked by a small-sized woman who owned a small AM station in a small town somewhere in the mid-west (it might have been the mid-east, but you get the idea).

The woman was pissed. "Our station is getting creamed by the bigger stations in our market," she said, "and we're losing money and we're getting creamed and what are you going to do about it, you guy from the consumer electronics industry?" She was going to get an answer, and she was going to get it from me. Why she asked me this question, I don't know. Maybe she liked my suit. I think she thought the other panelists were too technical, and she thought asking a basically non-technical guy like me was the way to go.

Now, I had, and still have, plenty of opinions on the topic of small stations getting creamed by bigger ones, but I was representing the consumer electronics industry-manufacturers-and I couldn't tell the woman what I thought. Totally inappropriate. So I blurted out something that seemed to get her off my back and I left the room feeling beaten and, at the same time, sorry I couldn't say what I really thought. Until, that is, I went up to her outside of the room and had a frank discussion, off the record, about her topic of choice.

Yes, on a personal level, I'm sensitive to your situation, I told her, but let me ask you a question: How are you programming your station? How are you reaching out to your community? Well, she said, she was running a lot of programming from local schools that didn't cost her a cent; lots of public service programming, also free; and any music that the record companies would send her. In other words, she didn't have much money to spend. You work with what you have, but you can't always make what you have work for you. I told her that, in order to compete with the bigger fish in her pond, she would have to come up with programming and an overall strategy that met her competition head on. None of this was news to her; I think she just wanted to speak to someone who understood what she was going through and would wish her good luck.

There aren't many stations like this anymore. The conglomerate purchasing frenzy that resulted in the exorable situation radio finds itself in today is the reason. Tiny, community minded stations can't compete against the Clear Channels of the world. So they get snapped up by the conglomerates, resulting in less market competition. Unless, that is, they change communities. More on this to come.

I really felt crappy after that NAB panel. It was a Saturday, and I had nothing else to do the rest of the day (my flight was on Sunday), so I went back to my four-star hotel (associations, at least back then, had money to burn, or at least seemed to) and changed into my jeans and a t-shirt. I was going sightseeing!

I took a trolley-first and only time-to Fisherman's Wharf, which was fun. I went into a t-shirt shop that had a lot of B. Kliban cat tees in the window. Turns out the guy who ran the shop knew Kliban and somehow snagged a license to print the only authorized tees with Kliban cats on them. He told me some funny stories about the great cartoonist, and some sad ones, too. The conversation was the high point of my trip, until I happened upon a booth selling tickets to Alcatraz, which I thought would be fun.

It was. I took the self-guided tour and learned that blunt objects of any kind were never on the menu in the mess. I also learned that the cells, narrow and tall and dark, were no place to soak up any measure of solace. I discovered that prisoners, on New Years Eve, would look out the windows to see rich people shooting fireworks off their boats, getting their only taste of humanity during what were most likely very long years for most of them.

After returning to the city, I took a train into Berkeley, land of retired and refurbished VW Beetles from the 1960s. Berkeley is, or at least 10 years ago or so, was a living, breathing Twilight Zone episode. It was a blast. I visited a few record stores, got some ice cream, probably, and headed back to the hotel, where I wore the wear-it-in-the-room-for-free white bathrobe which I could purchase for $75 if I really liked it; I did, but I didn't. (I did, on another trip, have to buy a $75 dress shirt to wear at an evening function because I didn't bring enough clean shirts with me; I managed to do that shirt in shortly thereafter by ripping a hole in its expensive breast pocket.)

By the time I got back to the hotel room, my tourist jones having been savored and satisfied, I had forgotten all about my experience at the NAB convention. I was reminded of it, however, soon after when I flipped on the clock radio in the room and dialed in a half-dozen or so stations, every one sounding the same: boring, dull, inconsequential.

You know what happens when boring, dull and inconsequential compete for air time? They cancel each other out, sending ears to CD and MP3 players, or to real live human beings for good, old-fashioned conversation.

Nothing has changed about radio. Today, it's much more of the same, sadly. Just this past week, the oldies station here in the Washington, D.C. market fired five people, including the only jock who actually sounded like he was having a good time. Actually, I'll bet Goldy was having a great time.

Why did the station purge bodies? Well, oldies is a tough format. Your listeners get older and drop off into other formats. Your playlist, small and too samey-samey for its own good, just gets a little too distant for its listeners' ears.

I love radio, and I think it's worth saving. I long for the days when radio wasn't so much of a business, but I'm realistic enough to understand that isn't going to ever be the case again. At least not in the terrestrial sense. That's what satellite and the Internet is for, and that is what I will talk about next month.

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