Author: John McDermott @mcdradio

I can’t wait to ask the college class I teach about this one.  Last night I mentioned I bought a song on iTunes and one student laughed out loud.  Seems he likes to go the Youtube ripping website route for his music.

The likely consequence of building in an ad-free subscription service, however, is a higher ad load on the free service. In other words, just enough extra intrusive ads to tempt you into paying to remove them.

via YouTube: Susan Wojciki Confirms Google Exploring Ad-Free Subscriptions – Business Insider.

Good stuff, especially this one.

Spending five minutes to go through “what’s coming up on the show” doesn’t entice me to listen longer, it just leaves me frustrated for the time I just spent listening.

via Takeaways from a day in LA | Larry Gifford Media Blog.

I saw the Beach Boys last night with my daughter, which reminded me of a Mike Love story from a few years back.

At the time I was overseeing (among a zillion other things) The Wiseguy Show. This was at the height of Sopranos-mania, and Steven Van Zandt had the idea to create a show with the vibe of hanging out at the Bada Bing. Vinny Pastore was the star and we surrounded him with character actors and one bona-fide awesome radio guy (Joe Causi) to hold it together.

On this night the guests are Mike Love and Bruce Johnston and we’re hanging out in the control room and I am lightly talking with Mike (without being a starf***er) and he asks if they are really wiseguys.

You know how sometimes you say the right thing in the right way, well I said back in a totally reverential non-jerky way, “It’s kinda like being a real surfer” (meaning, it’s show-biz).  Mike totally got it and I saw the twinkle in his eye that he appreciated where I was coming from and not being a douche.  Nice moment.

I got to spend another few minutes with Mike a few years later during the 2012 anniversary tour, and I also got to spend some time with Al Jardine separately – his son Matt was a big fan of the comedy channels and wanted a tour.  I got a call from Steve Leeds asking if I would mind giving Al Jardine a tour.  Um…sure!!!!!

I can’t find my pics of Mike and I this morning but here’s me with Al.

Anyways….the show was great last night and man Mike looks so damned happy singing songs about cars.  Good times, nice night and nice memories.  Enjoy the weekend!

A quick post to congratulate the Carlin Family on the dedication of George Carlin Way yesterday.  It was great to see Kelly Carlin (daughter), Patrick Carlin (brother) and Jerry Hamza (George’s long-time business partner, he always reminds me to squeeze the word business in there).

There was a nice showing of comedians around including Dave Attell, Robert Klein, Gilbert Gottfried, Judah Friedlander and I’ll cross-promote Costaki Economopolous whose show Quick Snaps runs on my Alt Sports Talk Radio.  (Hey, the purpose of this blog is to promote myself).

I was honored that Kelly invited me.  It meant a lot to me because when we put together Carlin’s Corner radio (shout-out to Chris Colbert) we really wanted to get it right and capture George’s spirit.

One of the tips I got from Jerry was to construct the station the way George constructed his set.  Whereas the other SXM comedy channels were mostly short clips (five minutes or so), our agreement with the Carlins allowed us to step outside DMCA and do some neat things.

The station flowed the way George’s set would.  A quick joke to open, rat-a-tat-tat (if we were in the room right now I would quote a Carlin joke about abortion, but me writing it won’t do it justice).  Then, as Jerry explained, slow it down and go into a long monologue…so the middle of an hour on Carlin’s Corner would have a long-flowing piece from somewhere in George’s collection.  Then finish up fast and quick again. (all with non-hacky, era appropriate production by Sal D’Aleo).

And who better to illustrate this than George himself.  Congrats Carlins.  Enjoy…

Nice insightful read here.

“Dashboard technology moves slowly, because people don’t change their cars often. But once they do change cars, their technology is changed for several years. If someone buys a CarPlay car, or an Android dashboard, or a Ford Sync car, that means that is their listening platform for the average length of car ownership in the U.K., which is seven years. My car is five years old, and I can’t listen to the digital stations that I listen to at home. So I feel that drag. When I get into the car I have a radio landscape that doesn’t suit me anymore.”

via Connected cars and the future of U.K. radio: Interview with Michael Hill of Radioplayer – RAIN News.

My newest car is a 2006.  I hear many of you have a fancy way to connect your iPhones to your dash.  Not me.  I have a cassette adapter.

So this is a good point here that if I go out today and buy a 2015 whatever I am likely to use that car’s “radio” for ten years – so in my universe it doesn’t matter that your fancy new App is on a 2017 BMW, I won’t be driving one.

On the other hand, if the content is good enough people will seek it out.  Folks did all kinds of crazy things to get Howard Stern back in 2006, and I have no problem connecting my phone to my cassette adapter.  We live in interesting times.

Wow this really surprised me, not because of the quality of either con, but just the sheer size of the San Diego site as oopses to the Javits Center.  I have no dog in this fight as I have worked with both CCI (at SDCC and WonderCon) and Reed Pop (NYCC and Star Wars Celebration) many times each.  Both are great organizations, pros, and great at what they do.

Anyway, nice job folks at ReedPop NYCC, congrats…and may the con scene continue to grow!

That pic above is from a few years back when we had most of the cast of The Walking Dead on our coverage of NYCC 2012.  Just off to the right is the Governor, and I have a great story from that day about escorting Andrew Lincoln to the men’s room on the main floor.

And since the point of this website is to promote myself – here’s a portfolio of some of the work from both SDCC and NYCC.

The recently wrapped New York Comic-Con has just dethroned the San Diego Comic-Con as the biggest comic convention in America, with over 150,000 attendees this past weekend — as compared to San Diego’s perennial max of 130,000.

via Holy Crap, New York Comic-Con Is Bigger Than San Diego Comic-Con.

Good read here about what Fox is doing building their sports radio brand.

RadioInsight — Fox Sports Radio Bringing A Blueprint For A Revamped Talk Format.

It’s interesting that since everyone retreated from “Guy Talk” following the various Opie & Anthony/Free FM post-Howard disasters that nobody has figured out a way to do talk radio that isn’t Rush/Hannity and isn’t Shock Jocks 3.0

I live metro NYC and am not aware of any way to easily check out the Fox lineup (yes I am savvy enough to figure it out via online) but I wish them well in their endeavors.  I also (non-sarcastically) hope they can figure out how to do spoken word without 22 minutes of commercials.

The bottom line: if consumers have a digital dashboard system, there’s a good chance they’re listening to something other than broadcast radio at least some of the time.

Nielsen’s survey found 36% reported using it every time they’re in the vehicle.

via Inside Radio, The Most Trusted News in Radio.

Good read.

From New York to San Francisco, radio’s monolithic news brands were largely built before the widespread availability of news on the web and smartphones.  It’s something officials at Radio One acknowledged after making the painful decision to pull the plug on “News 92.”  “People are getting their news via mobile devices that they travel with,” VP Yashima AziLove says.

via Inside Radio, The Most Trusted News in Radio.

This looks pretty cool.  I’d love to have easy access to all my songs on the dash like that (not that it’s that hard to use my trusty cassette adapter connected to my phone).

For those of us in the industry, you’re going to want one of those buttons.  Spotify has some premium real estate in this demo (even if the Spotify experience didn’t work so well).  And where is the button that says FM?  Uh-oh!!!!!

Check it out – the “radio” part is about three minutes in.