The State of Radio…? (Part 2)

Back to the beach…

In my last post, I had mentioned about the serious weather we had faced while on a camping vacation in Myrtle Beach, and how NO local radio stations saw fit to break in on their evening programming to announce a warning (or even provide a local weather forecast).

As it turned out, I happened to meet an older gentleman who ran a miniature golf business in the area. While my kids tried to strike multi-colored plastic golf balls through windmills and other obstacles, I stayed in the air-conditioned club house and decided to check in with the office.

The golf course owner overheard my conversations and mentioned that he was in radio sales for over 30 years until his retirement a few years back.

He bemoaned the fact that indeed local radio had lost its edge with its listener base. In the 70’s and 80’s, he mentioned that radio stations had commanded large shares of listeners and that the medium heavily relied upon the younger age groups to bring in these shares. Once the wave of consolidation hit in the 90’s, he felt that radio stations became homogenized – with formats like “Mix”, “Kiss”, “Froggy”, and “Jack, Bob, Chuck, or Dave” the norm in almost every market.

While it may save radio stations in the long run to create formats that are cut and paste in almost any city, what is ultimately the sacrifice in listener base? Is saving a quarter today worth the loss of a dollar tomorrow, or is it too late, and the once vaunted youthful audience now lost forever to their iPods and smartphones?

Technology is ever-changing… Did radio die out when television began in the late-forties? Of course not! It reinvented itself from airing long-form programs to airing music-based formats, and virtually moving from targeting middle-aged families to targeting younger audiences. Rock-and-roll was born on the radio… The medium is certainly in trouble, but it is far from dead…

The question of the hour – is there money to be made in radio? If younger audiences are tuning out in favor of the mp3, what about the 40+ audience who aren’t yet walking around with earbuds? What about other formats? If “Bob”, and “Jack” formats aren’t working, why not produce truly niche formats that will once engage an interested, yet underserved audience?

Of course, this all takes a little ingenuity, a little courage, and a lot of money all of which seems to be in limited supply these days. Change is necessary. The question is how much longer can radio as a medium survive without change?