Take Off the Blindfold and Try This!

Driving blindfolded. That is what a lot of us seem to be doing in the radio broadcast industry these days. Due to the tough economic times and stagnant sales, perceptual research has in most cases, been dropped from the budget ledger. It’s a real Catch 22. With so many media platforms and media choices out there for today’s fractured listening audience, on top of new forms of measurement like PPM, now more than ever radio needs to dust off those perceptual research plans and start that conversation with their listeners again on a regular basis. But how are radio stations suppose to pay for that valuable Intel? The last two years my partners and I have been trying to find a way to bring perceptual research back to the table for a lot of radio stations that is efficient, accurate and cost efficient. We believe we have found a great solution in our new product called Radio DOPLR.

Internet Radio in the Car

The other day while driving my son to school- I turned on my favorite local radio station and heard a song I didn’t like (note to self: call the station to see if they would like to do a music test). Like any button puncher would do, I went to my second favorite – the classic rock station only to hear a deep track that was …let’s just say pretty deep. So rather than go three deep on the local dial….I decided to take the extra step now available to us in the year 2010. I opted for my iPhone which I plug into my satellite radio line in.. I tapped my radio app on my iPhone and in mere seconds my son and I where dashboard jamming to a great track on Icecast's M2 Analog 80’s Channel. For the ride home I did a quick in car monitor of a BOB client 2,000 miles away. My phone is on the 3G network- so the quality of the stream is amazingly good. Better sounding in fact than FM. Internet radio in the car isn’t something that coming- it’s already here.

Five Things I Would Like to Hear More of on the Radio in the Year 2010.

1. Content that’s interesting, entertaining and useful along with my music-I don’t care who provides it either. Could be the jock, could be an audio clip from a pod cast, could be a clip from a newscast. If it’s timely and interesting and it could relate to me, I would like to hear it.

2. Great production and imaging between the songs that has a lot of thought behind it. That’s what keeps radio from being just another faceless audio stream that’s already available the Internet.

3. More information and background on the music I am hearing. If I am listening to your station because of the music you play- Throw me a bone once in a while. You mean Bon Jovi has a new single out?

4. More originality in breakfast-Trivia Contests, Name that song, What’s that Sound?.. Battle of the Sexes…c’mon people we can do better. Google has pretty much relegated the Trivia Contest to the junk pile anyway.

5. Better management of inventory around the music. Two songs followed by two minutes of spots, followed by another two songs followed by another two minutes of songs really means that you are now giving me five chances and hour to leave your station instead of two or three.

Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks

In an age of hyper fragmentation of everything music, how can a super group or mega artist stay super? Guess we’ll find out. Bon Jovi has just become NBC’s first “artist in residence” for the next two months. The modus operandi here is to promote their new album “The Circle”. Add that to U2’s week long residency on David Letterman last March to promote their new album "No Line on the Horizon" and their “recently streamed for free around the world” concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena Ca. on You Tube, all points to more big changes in the way artists are delivering their music to their audience. Bon Jovi will be utilizing NBC’s programming schedule for live appearances- that will include everything from Saturday Night Live to the NBC Nightly news. It will be interesting to see who the next artist is residence is going to be after Bon Jovi as something tells me this isn’t just a one off thing. It makes too much sense.

Turning Back the Clock to Artist Patronage

A few years ago Robert Hunter-lyricist for the Grateful Dead- suggested that maybe it was time to turn back the clock a few hundred years and look at artist patronage again. His reasoning was that with the music industry's revenue model on life support –a new model of financial remuneration for the artist was needed and perhaps it was time to dust off the old practice that dates back to the Renassance. To date there are a few sites on the Internet that are employing the 21st century version of the patronage approach to raise funds for recording projects. Public Enemy is teaming up with www.sellaband.com for a project in which they hope to raise $250,000.00 for their next project. Its a great idea that has the potential of creating an incredibly strong bond between the artist and their "investing" audience. Shareholders meetings could be real interesting.

When Good Enuff is Great

Great article in the most recent edition of Wired magazine. It talks about how lo-fi high tech is taking over and poised to rule the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in how people consume music. I mean how many of you know anyone who stores songs on their iPod’s in .wav form or file sizes bigger than 3 or 4 megs?? For someone wanting the “best” audio, 320k is the limit and judging by how most people build there digital libraries these days- even 128k will do. The ease of downloading songs thanks to their small file size has trumped over quality. I asked my 17 year old son the other day, who is also a musician (and a picky one at when it comes to sound), what his choice of bit rate for his digital library is ,and he said, " 320k because they sound better on my car stereo". In the recent Wired article it talks about how Jonathan Berger a Stanford University professor, recently completed a six year study of his students in which every year he asked his newest students to listen to some different songs played in a variety of different digital formats. The formats included everything from standard mp3 files to uncompressed wav files. Berger says that over the years, students actually preferred the standard mp3 files to anything else. He says they have grown accustomed to the distortion found in the compressed files. To them- that is what music is supposed to sound like. Hmmm….does this mean the days of clocking long hours in the recording studio and agonizing over getting that “perfect mix” are over? I mean why worry about adding that extra 16k of “air sparkle” to your mix when the only person that is going to hear it is you…through the studio monitors.

The bottom line in all of this is that low price, flexibility and convenience have trumped power and fidelity, and it’s not just in the way we access music. Kindle, You-Tube and those cheap notebooks are even further proof.

The Name of the Game...

For years the research has been telling us that listeners want to hear the name of the artist and title of the song they just heard on the radio. For years we have been ignoring this simple request. From a station’s point of view, not dispensing the artist and song title is a way to clean up the clutter and reduce the chatter. From a listeners perspective it’s a point of frustration when they want to know the name of a new song they really like, or maybe its one they haven’t heard in years- and forgot the name of it. For music stations it’s ironic that we avoid talking about the one thing we are most famous for. Rather than helping our listeners delve deeper into our product, we shut the door on them. Some stations have addressed this concern with RDS software that scrolls the song and title and artist on the car radio, and some stations post the last ten songs played on their website. RDS is great if you are listening in the car, but unfortunately it falls short of the advantage radio has in the first place and that is immediacy. The odd station does a great job of it such as B-101 in Philadelphia. They run an unobtrusive song tag after each song that gives the title of the song and artist. No doubt it takes a lot of work and detail to set this up- but it’s proven to be a great addition to their toolkit and another reason why listeners love the station, and have made it a ratings success. This little public service that makes so much sense ( and can bring in big rewards) has been left to slide for most of us. It appears however that someone has taken notice. Music related new media outlets are making sure the music experience for their listeners is a complete one. Hey shouldn’t we be doing this too? Check out a few of these sites. Maybe they will inspire you to reevaluate a new way to incorporate this simple request into your programming mix.