What Would Unity in the Radio Community Look Like?
Radio broadcasters should indeed stick together. Certainly on a national basis. Perhaps, as U.K.-based "radio futurist" James Cridland has observed, radio needs to show its power on a worldwide level.
In 2012, the broadcast group then known as Clear Channel — now iHeartMedia, though for chronological purposes we’ll refer to the company under its previous name — came to the fall NAB/RAB Radio Show in Dallas on the heels of a deal it had made a few months earlier with Big Machine Label Group. The deal gave BMLG a groundbreaking performance royalty for broadcast airplay, in exchange for more favorable online terms. It left some broadcasters grumbling that Clear Channel had broken ranks, using its size and influence in the broadcast sphere to negotiate a favorable deal, even as other broadcasters and the National Association of Broadcasters was opposing a performance royalty.
In 2013, Clear Channel was not prominently represented at the Radio Show in Orlando. Its annual iHeartRadio Music Festival was approaching. In the days that followed, I had various broadcasters remark to me that they felt Clear Channel was more “in the iHeart business” and the concert business than the broadcast radio business,somewhat prophetic in light of today’s name change to iHeartMedia. Others saw them as one of three different radio businesses — the other two being Cumulus Media and “everybody else.”
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Last Thursday, at the 2014 Radio Show in Indianapolis, there was at least a gesture in the other direction. Clear Channel chairman/CEO Bob Pittman, appearing at a session with CBS Radio President Dan Mason called on broadcasters to follow the unified lead of other sectors of the media. “The broadcast TV guys stick together,” he said. “The Internet guys stick together.”
Radio broadcasters should indeed stick together. Certainly on a national basis. Perhaps, as U.K.-based “radio futurist” James Cridland has observed, radio needs to show its power on a worldwide level. With broadcasters at the station and group level consumed by the day-to-day challenges of doing more with less, the best chance of a holistic “audio” strategy relies on both cooperation and delegation among broadcasters.
It is easy to be cynical about anything said from the dais at the Radio Show. Over the last decade, group heads have used similar panels to bemoan the failure of stations to maintain rate integrity among advertisers, rather than undercutting each other with bargain-priced spots. I could only feel bad that so many of their general managers at the market level had obviously gone rogue. But at Friday’s “Radio in an Audio World” session, panelists were largely optimistic about Pittman’s call for unity and willing to take it at face value.
So what will unity among broadcasters look like?
- It will begin with rate integrity.
- There will be an immediate end to negative selling against rival stations.
- There will be an immediate national effort to make broadcast radio’s spotload competitive, especially when heard on other platforms where listeners no longer expect 12-16 minutes of commercials an hour.
- There will be a once-and-for-all across-the-board effort to fix the advertising royalty issues — the replacement of on-air advertising with Webcast filler — that make listening to broadcast radio on the Web still an often-unbearable experience.
- The burgeoning “wild west” use of low-power FM translators will end. Translators have allowed the creation of unique services that couldn’t otherwise exist. They have also allowed large operators to exceed their intended FM limit with very mainstream offerings that are largely meant to inconvenience other broadcasters.
- There will be a cohesive plan for the creation of “more radio” than what can be offered at the local AM/FM level. Broadcasters spent just enough on HD sub-channels to waste money, but not enough to create a viable digital tier of full-fledged radio stations. But the success of satellite radio proves listener demand for formats that aren’t sustainable on a local level.
- There will be a cohesive plan for the creation of “more audio,” whether its functionality is radio or music library replacement. The reason broadcasters have been most reluctant to treat all types of radio as one fast-growing, much-loved category is because they don’t create many of them.
- There will be a unified front and greater participation in the future of the connected car. With radio having expanded its offerings, there will be an inclusive, well-organized and irresistible offering to auto manufacturers.
- There will be across-the-board representation of all major broadcasters at Radio Show 2015. I’m not in the business of selling seminar registrations, but with the need to chunk out all the major jobs above, what Radio Show should be is probably not panels but subcommittee meetings.
I’m aware of my tendency toward the utopian here. That’s okay. We’ve spent a decade verging on the dystopian.
I’m also aware of the heroism needed for any one of these things to be accomplished. Radio Show 2013 saw the first meaningful public admission by broadcasters that spotload was a problem at all. A year later, we have a handful of individual station initiatives in that direction. And not every broadcaster is rooting for them, because not every broadcaster is ready to give up on 12-16 minutes an hour.
It is nice to come out of the Radio Show with a sense that broadcasters know what has to be done – even that is a major step forward in recent years. It would be nice to walk into the next one in unison.