Here’s an interesting read: Matt Sammon Sez — HD Radio Can Be Saved, If Someone Cares to Try.
My take: no company is going to provide a staff for the HD-2 (etc…). So it becomes the thing nobody pays attention to it. And if you pay attention to it and the “HD-1” ratings go down you open yourself off to a whole lot of criticism.
It’s dead. Nobody cares. Just stream. Next.
Now SoundCloud has decided it is time to grow up. On Thursday, as part of a new licensing deal with entertainment companies, SoundCloud will begin incorporating advertising and for the first time let artists and record labels collect royalties. Eventually, it plans to introduce a paid subscription that will let listeners skip those ads, as they can with Spotify and other licensed services.
via Popular and Free, SoundCloud Is Now Ready for Ads – NYTimes.com.
Spotify is adding a Tastemakers tab. Say you like the concept of listening to country music but don’t know what to look for…
The challenge for Spotify (and other music streaming platforms) is that, while there are millions of songs to listen to, most people don’t have a specific idea of what they want to hear.
via Spotify Pushes Popular Playlists With A New Tastemaker Tab | TechCrunch.
That’s one thing that radio (however you wish to define radio in 2014) has done well. I think of a station like Little Steven’s Underground Garage which sounds great, but you try to duplicate that on your own! At Raw Dog (Comedy) we played a mix of hits and “discovery” – with comedy it’s super important to mix in new artists. I bet least week you couldn’t get enough Robin Williams. How about today?
Anyway, smart move by Spotify.
This is a good read despite the alarmist headline. I personally don’t mind a few extra tweets mixed in as long as they are relevant to my interests.
What caught my eye is what the author said below…
How do you grow really, really big — big enough to keep the shareholders happy? By running a celebrity-packed bandwagon right down the middle of the road of course. Too bad you’re going to annoy the hell out of long-time users who found value in a service exactly because it took a different path. A small hardcore of loyal users don’t please shareholders.
Yep. I have brought this up a few times recently. To do mass media you have to reach the masses and the masses want to talk about the Kardashians for some reason.
The example I use with my college students goes like this: We’re going to start a show that analyzes the Isis situation in Iraq. We could hire Colin Powell who would be have authority and be knowledgable, or we could hire The Situation. You know which show will actually get media attention (aka free advertising) and eyeballs (which can be monetized)? yep, The Situation’s Iraq.
Maybe we could call it The Situation Room. Ha. You can have that idea for free CNN. Sorry Wolf Blitzer.
Good read on Quartz…
Discovery’s shift away from fact-based programming is part of the much larger trend of American cable channels losing their identities. For a while, it seemed like Discovery was holding onto its identity longer than most other cable channels, but the mounting backlash to recent Shark Weeks from the scientific community has made it clear—the channel’s devolution has really been happening for years right before our eyes. It’s unfortunate, but it’s understandable from a business perspective. Fake documentaries about fake mafias are the kinds of shows that Americans like to watch these days. Last year, Discovery delivered its best ratings since 2001.
Which leads us to John’s Law Of Cable Networks. Every cable channel eventually strays from the core and rebrands.
Here’s how it goes. You and I start The Furniture Channel. All Furniture All the Time. Hardcore furniture shows for furniture fans.
Sometime in year three we find our breakout star. He’s an over the top personality who hosts Extreme Furniture on TFC. Notice we’ve started working “TFC” into the branding.
Somewhere along the way we buy the rights to Battlestar Galactica and start mixing that in at 11pm. (Why, I don’t know, but there’s seems to be one of those on every channel – like BBCA showing Star Trek TNG because I guess Patrick Stewart is British playing a Frenchman.)
And what do you know, Galactica starts doing better than the furniture shows. So TFC adds reruns of the X-Files.
And that does well. So let’s show two X-Files back to back. Maybe on Tuesday we should just run three episodes of Galactica in prime time.
Eventually TFC drops all the furniture shows and starts developing an original science-fiction series.
Does it make cable people bad/stupid/evil? Nope. The name of the game is to get viewers. I just laugh because it keeps happening over and over from The Nashville Network to Court TV to the current version of History (I personally watch H2 often), and even CNN gets an eyebrow out of me these days.
American Movie Classics has done pretty well for itself, no?
I think I’m going to call some guys I know in LA and pitch The Furniture Channel.
The other day a sports blog called Sports On Earth laid off much of its staff as part of a Gannett restructure. The link below makes some good points about the dumbing down of what works. I have seen it in radio and I sure as hell have seen it on the internet (which is why I love Clickhole mocking the whole “10 reasons” style of ‘net.)
Anyway I don’t want to be the grumpy old man telling you how stupid TV has gotten (surf around daytime TV sometime) but if you click through the below there are some good observations about how nobody clicks on the “smart” – that’s why I posted a picture of Matt Harvey with his shirt off over at Mets Police. I hate myself.
Again, I have no idea if a lack of near-visible nipples is what doomed Sports on Earth. And maybe I’m just admitting my own place in the Internet’s screwed up relationship with journalism — i.e., sacrificing smart takes for dumb sex, valuing hits over quality, reporting gossip and tabloid fodder instead of, you know things worth reporting. But the reality is that advertisers and sales run everything on the Internet, and not satisfying them has been the downfall of many an online venture.
via Why Sports On Earth Was Downsized? | Jerry Jones, Paulina Gretzky | SportsGrid.
Interesting take on the cellular carriers offering some services as not counting against your data cap.
I have taught a college class for two years, and that data cap (and a general unwillingness to pay for anything) is foremost in the minds of the students. They LOVE Pandora, but once they hit their limit they just go without it for the rest of the month rather than pay for data.
The link below walks you through why it is possible that this model of something not counting against a data cap may not be good for everyone long-term even though that seems counter-intuitive.
Under the Sprint deal, you get the Facebook channel, the Twitter channel, and so on. To get the full-on open internet—which we used to simply call the internet—you must pay more.
via Free Mobile Data Plans Are Going to Crush the Startup Economy | Business | WIRED.
I was explaining my Alternative Sports Talk radio station to someone on Monday and as I riffed I said that there are a lot of people who saw Guardians of the Galaxy who also watched Sunday Night Football.
Somewhere along the way everything became niche, became specialized. That’s not a bad thing – if you like the NFL then NFL radio is pretty damned impressive, and I sure as hell tried to do a permanent Star Wars Radio enough times.
But what about The Other? What about the guy who saw the biggest movie this weekend, who also watched the football game. The guy who likes football but doesn’t give a hoot about the Ravens tight-end depth chart?
Can’t we like pop culture AND sports?
So that’s one of the things we’re trying to do at Alt Sports Talk (give us a follow on TuneIn), I call it “Sports and…”
Yesterday we debuted Comedy Food Sports. I like all those things. I’m glad there is a show that covers all that. I have been running a promo to see if anyone hosts “Soccer and Star Wars.” I’d love for that show to exist.
I thing there is room to Do The Other Thing. When I had the comedy channels at SiriusXM we would attend bug time sporting events like the All Star Game. What does that have to do with comedy? Not much. But I think people who liked uncensored comedy were also likely to enjoy light baseball talk with the biggest stars. So we aired Derek Jeter talking between comedy clips. It was cool.
So NFLRadio can talk NFL and Food Network can have shows about Food. We’re gong to surf The Other.
I’m willing to bet you’re interested in more than one thing and I don’t have to stress about the PPM Game to find out.
This is where the battle will be won unless one of the streamers is going to somehow tie up record labels into exclusive deals. Otherwise, the price war will even out and the differentiators will become talk.
In the article Herring mentions how SXM benefitted from NFL and Howard Stern (I can tell you first-hand that Howard stopped people from calling the place where I worked “Cyrus”). With Apple dipping its toes in the water this is all very interesting.
“Musics an important piece of radio listening in the car, but if theres a place where spoken word is also equally, and more important really, its in the car,” Pandora Chief Financial Officer Michael Herring said. He said its too early to specify the content or timing.
via Pandora Weighs Talk Radio as It Targets Listeners in Cars | Media – Advertising Age.
Interesting….
The end of syndication distribution of the 24/7 Comedy network by Clear Channel has led to multiple format changes across the country.
via RadioInsight — End Of 24/7 Comedy Leads To Flips Across The Country.
…so with 10 years of head of comedy for SiriusXM I always thought it would be a challenge for the terrestrial folks to execute this format, since my pay-radio version could say Fuck and theirs couldn’t.
However…the solution is very simple. But that friends I cannot give you for free. Answers over lunch. Call me 917-833-5983.