What’s Happening with Radio?

09/13/2005

What’s Happening with Radio?
Paul Munnis

Most radio is listened to from a car radio or as quiet background music for reading or for at-home activities. Thus when the listener flips on the radio, he or she is looking for music to either stimulate or quiet the nervous system. The listener wants music of a particular genre. They seek Country / Western, Rock, Easy Listening, Golden Oldies, Spanish or Latino, etc. The listener tends to be pretty determined about what they want to hear and it often includes weather forecasts and news roundups as well as music. The listener seeks a narrowcast that plays to thier wants..

It’s not so easy for the radio station. They seek to broadcast not to narrowcast. So from the very beginning the listener and the radio station are in immediate conflict.

The radio station needs to pay for its services and so they sell advertising. But the listener doesn’t want to hear advertising since they tuned in to listen to music, weather, or news and not to listen to ads. That accounts for the popularity of FM, less ads more music, or at least it used to be that way. The ads are chasing the audience share and have migrated from AM to FM.

With so much tension between listener and provider, there is a lot of redialing going on. The situation is frustrating for listeners and so they turn to alternatives consisting of tapes, CD’s, IPOD’s, Digital TV Music, and now Satellite Radio. The Internet has been selling specific music and people download it and they cut their own CD’s, mixing the music as they want it to be. The consumer is winning the battle by deserting broadcast radio and in very large numbers.

Radio’s market share of the broadcast spectrum is thus dying in favor of narrow-casting. Electronic engineers feel the radio broadcasters should give the frequency spectrum back to the FCC for reallocation for and for richer new applications that cannot be brought to market because of the lack of radio frequency availability.

Democrats tend to agree with the engineers, give back the low listener use frequencies and reuse them in the public interest. The radio moguls such as Clear Channel certainly disagree and seek the protections of the GOP and the FCC. They seek their personal interest to be dominant. So far, they have been getting their way but they can see that the handwriting is on the wall.

Enter the Broadcaster Fix: Shock Radio and Rush Limbaugh. Something dramatic was needed to goose up the ratings.

After the initial rush (pun intended) listeners are now sick of is listening to Rush Limbaugh according to Arbitron. His market share is on a steady decline although he is posturing it to be otherwise. The Arbitron release lists ratings info for five cities — Austin, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Memphis — for Spring 2005 (March 31 to June 22). In two of those cities, New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the stations that Rush claims he “defeated” didn’t switch to the progressive talk format until July 2005 — after the ratings period in question ended.

Two of the other comparisons are also misleading. Rush claims to have won the ratings battle in Austin — but the progressive alternative is a low-watt station that broadcasts not out of Austin, but 20 miles away in bustling Pflugersville, Texas. The same is true of Rush’s performance in San Antonio, where the weaker progressive talk station is actually based in suburban Devine, Texas.

In other words, of the 591 stations on which Limbaugh broadcasts, he chose to highlight four where his “victories” are at best misleading, at worst plain dishonest.

Station owners are naturally inclined to claim greater market share than is apparent because they do not want to lose their licenses and hence their livelihood.

Progressive talk radio claims to be on the rise. Ratings for progressive radio talk shows are booming. In Denver, Air America’s ratings are up 500% from one year ago. “Seattle’s newly talk-formatted KPTK, doubled in the winter [ratings] book, Portland’s KPOJ-AM grew 1000% in audience share. In conservative San Diego, KLSD-AM went up 73%. … Other markets with similar success include: Boston, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Sacramento and Columbus.” Rush is even on the verge of being overtaken in his own home state. Progressive radio personalities like Al Franken and Ed Schultz are hot after Rush’s market share.

An even more interesting comparison is found when looking at stations with integrated lineups that carry both Rush and a progressive host. In that apples-to-apples comparison, we see that Rush Limbaugh and Ed Schultz are actually very competitive for example.

Yet, it is music, weather, and news that people want (in that order) and Conservative Rush and Progressive Radio are both blocking the desires of the radio listening audience. Those who need a dose of political cheap-shot to go with the daily caffeine intake are in the shrinking minority. Engineers are after the radio frequency spectrum that they are hogging. They will soon get it because at the root of the engineers quest is job creation, something that America cannot ignore for very much longer. New frequencies mean new products and new products mean new jobs. The Broadcasters are trying to stay one step ahead of the FCC.

Is anybody listening?