Fine. I'll just podcast my show. Take that, radio!

From Podcasting News:

It looks like the Adam Carolla Podcast may do to radio what Nine Inch Nails did to the music industry - make it irrelevant.

On Friday, February 20th, Adam Carolla’s radio show left the airwaves, as part of a format switch.

On Monday, Corolla introduced his new podcast.

Within 24 hours, Carolla had a hit:

I’m overwhelmed by your response to the podcast. In less than 24 hours, the first podcast was downloaded over a quarter of a million times, which is awesome.

This means that we’ll be able move along faster in terms of getting this project up into a new gear, and getting a little more production, more guests, and everything you guys deserve. I’m grateful to have such fantastic fans, and honored at this response.

By the end of the first week of the Adam Corolla Podcast, downloads exceeded the 1 million mark.

Last year, Nine Inch Nails turned the music industry on its head by releasing two free albums onto the Internet and then going on to have both a hit record and tour. In doing so, NIN showed that bands could have hit albums and successful tours without the support of the music industry.

With over a million views in the first week, the Adam Carolla Podcast shows that broadcasters can have hit shows without the support of radio.

To subscribe to the Adam Carolla podcast, add the podcast via iTunes, or add this podcast feed URL to your podcast client:
www://carollaradio.com/feed/

via RyanSpoon

Remember When Radio Was Going To Destroy The Record Industry?

It's been making the internet rounds, but it's definitely worth posting (click for larger image):

Merging Isn't Always A Good Thing

Found this post via The Consumerist. Seems satellite is going the direction traditional radio has. Maybe Clear Channel will take it over someday...

Sirius XM Merger Reveals True Face: Fewer Channels And 'Sanitized' Programming

By Chris Walters, 1:55 PM on Fri Nov 14 2008

This week, Sirius XM began consolidating its channels. In reality, this mostly meant jettisoning XM channels wherever there was a tenuous overlap with something Sirius already offered, which is bad news for anyone with a favorite station on XM who woke up Wednesday morning to find it missing. Alex wrote in to tell us that the four Spanish music channels have been condensed to one without regard to genre, and that the uncensored "urban music" station Hot Jamz has been cleaned up, rechristened "The Heat," and now leans toward radio-friendly R&B. The Motley Fool suggests that the new lineup may drive people to downgrade their subscription—it's "an incentive to downgrade to the cheaper plan that costs $6 less a month and lets users cherry-pick 50 stations."

In addition to the latin and urban channels, Alex wants to know why Sirius XM couldn't have better prepared its listeners:

First off, why such secrecy? Millions of subscribers were blindsided yesterday. No announcements of any kind were made over the air to let people know what was going on. To them, everything was fine on Tuesday, but all of a sudden on Wednesday, their favorite channel was deleted or changed fundamentally. This was a breach of trust between the provider and the consumer. We are the subscribers. We are paying for this service. We deserve a voice over what it is we want to hear. More importantly, we deserve input about programming we are willing to pay for.
Second, we the consumers, Congress, and the FCC were assured that allowing the merger would increase diversity and choice. Wednesday's change showed you acted in bad faith. On the XM side, we lost 75% of the Spanish music choice. To clump together the previous 4 genres of music offered by Aguila, Viva, Caricia, and Caliente into one channel shows either cultural ignorance or contempt for diversity. My congressional representatives will be hearing from me about this.
Third, the new censorship. I bought Sirius to free myself from the shackles of FM. Hot Jamz has been neutered into "The Heat," essentially a satellite version of my local R&B station. I simply couldn't listen to it today. The songs were heavily edited and censored. This is the antithesis of what Sirius once stood for, what bringing Howard from FM symbolized. Fact is, urban music is written in the vernacular. What "The Heat" did to Hot Jamz is an insult.
Fourth, continuing on the theme of less choice. Sirus XM acted in bad faith when it shrunk the available choices:

No more electronica from Boombox — now pop2k... isn't there enough pop with 90's on 9, the Pulse, and Alt Nation?

No more Old Skool.

No more Punk.

No more Fine tuning/free form.

No more educational radio via Discovery channel. (I'm still raw over that)

Instead we get less choice and shallower playlists on what used to be Fred, Lucy, and Ethel.
Mel et al., you really should listen to what you customers have to say.

http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/first-impressions-now-with-combined-channels-what-do-you-think.html#comments
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/towerticker/2008/11/xm-radio-sirius.html?cid=138920090#comments
http://www.xmfan.com/viewtopic.php?t=96996 (these are your most ferverent fanatics, and yet their poll shows less that 33% are satisfied)

If you had asked us to begin with, you may have avoided this heartache.
Dual-sub non grata,Alex

As an aside, if you're a Mitsubishi Outlander owner experiencing problems with Sirius updates, Andy has figured out how to fix it:

Sirius recently merged with XM and my radio received an update as part of the merger. It killed the radio in my Mitsubishi Outlander with an "Antenna Error" message. I argued with 4 or 5 CSRs at Sirius that this was not a hardware issue, the timing is too perfect. I ended up pulling the #7 fuse and it reset the radio. Voila, the radio is back up and running. However, every time they send an update I have to pull the fuse. I hope this helps other MMS owners, and I hope Sirius gets this figured out asap. This is a factory installed radio part of the Mitsubishi Multi Messaging System premium radio system.
Here's a link to my forum post: http://www.mitsubishiforum.com/fb.asp?m=240820

"Sirius XM Has Crossed the Line" [The Motley Fool]

Cool Radio Project For Teens

Thought this little piece of audio news from my end of the planet was pretty neat.
~Dani

Radio project lets teens air their ideas, concerns

Tony Ganzer
Special for The Republic
May. 26, 2008 12:00 AM

Editor's note: This article was submitted by Tony Ganzer, Morning Edition producer for KJZZ-FM (91.5). Send your education news to lori.baker@arizonarepublic.com.

In my limited experience, there's an unfortunate truth when it comes to how and when people communicate with teenagers.

You may have seen them in the mall, or maybe they've cleared your table at the local burger joint, but it seems rare to hear a teenager's point of view about issues that matter to them, in their own words.

advertisement

Earlier this month, the Valley's NPR news station, KJZZ-FM (91.5), gave airtime to a few hard-working teens. Along with my duties as KJZZ's morning producer, I also steer the Sonic Roots program. I introduce students to public radio and to the skill of creating a three-minute, sound-rich radio feature. The topic is chosen by the students, and interviews are conducted mostly by the students (with a follow-up question or two from me.) And after the work, the students make it to air. The shows can be heard at kjzz.org/news.

Matt Butson, a student at Coronado High School in Scottsdale, is soon heading to college, and this transition has left him feeling confused, nervous and isolated.

"I'm not sure that I want to be a starving college student," Butson says in the feature.

That's why Butson chose to speak on the air with an educational psychologist about whether his confusion is "normal" and to Arizona State University's dean of admissions about how important choosing a major really is.

Butson offered a candid view of a young adult finding his way.

"Speaking with these professionals helped me focus on my future," Butson says in his story. "Bring it on."

Two students from Dobson High School in Mesa provided a look at Valley transportation issues. Rebecca Bever and Jessica Testa spoke with representatives from the Arizona Department of Transportation, Valley Metro, Metro light rail and their own peers, exploring how teens get around and how the system should change.

"Many teens, in our informal survey, feel that a more fluid mass-transit system is the Valley's answer," Bever and Testa say in their story. "Until better options come along, students are bound to keep doing what they have done."

These students chose to represent their peers' concerns through this project and to show that the younger generation is thinking about larger issues.

And one of my goals for Sonic Roots is to let students know: That's a good thing.



The Sonic Roots project encourages teenage civic engagement by giving them a voice in the media. It was funded by a grant from the Carstens Family Fund and Mike Minor.

Why Radio Sucks

From Wired Magazine:

Unless you enjoy hearing the same insipid Fergie song a dozen times a day, chances are you loathe mainstream radio. And for good reason: The FM band between 92.1 and 107.9, where commercial stations reign, is mostly a desert of robo-DJs and pop pabulum.

The sad decline of conventional radio is an Econ 101 lesson in the consequences of artificial scarcity — and a B-school case study on the limits of scientific management. The scarcity is the fault of the Federal Communications Commission, which decided in the mid-1940s to confine FM broadcasting to its current frequency range, roughly between 88 and 108 MHz. The FCC's spectrum-allocation rules, designed to prevent station signals from interfering with one another, further limited the number of broadcasting licenses it granted in any one market.

By the '70s, thanks to a fecund period in popular music, a generation of audacious DJs, and cheap radios, FM had become wildly popular. That made stations valuable properties — so valuable, in fact, that only large companies could afford to buy and manage them. "The legal cost alone of getting on the air is enormous," says Jesse Walker, author of the radio history Rebels on the Air. The government could have eased this situation by allocating more spectrum for radio use and increasing the number of licenses, Walker argues. Instead, Congress chose to relax the rules regarding the number of stations any one entity could own.

That's where the scientific management comes in. The biggest barriers to building a radio audience are the polarizing power of music and the plethora of choices on the dial. So, when corporations like Clear Channel started buying up stations in the late '90s, they set about building a lowest-common-denominator product that would be attractive to the most listeners. "There's this idea of the perfect playlist," Walker says. "Find it with research and attract the perfect audience." But it turns out that the most lucrative audience is really just "people who will not change the channel during the ads." The result: watered-down programming designed primarily not to offend.

So bored consumers are just tuning out. Listenership among 18- to 24-year-olds is down 20 percent over the past decade. Stations have responded not with bold programming but by cutting costs. They've also expended considerable resources to squelch competition from low-powered FM stations and Internet radio. Not that it has helped — 85 percent of teenagers now discover new music through sources beyond the FM dial. Even the biggest radio fans envision a grim future for the medium. One bright spot: The inevitable shift to digital radio could create more room for more types of content.

--

Definitely makes sense, although there are a few independent stations here and there who keep kicking, and aren't half bad. Getting the range and the listeners are a lot of work, though. Especially listeners, when radio is now also battling the ever-growing podcast.

Check out the link to the article, there are many other things that suck- a list of 33!

Creating Radio for the People

Found this article as I was scouring the political feeds. I'm all for more independent radio! The perfect station for me? Independent news and radio dramas- and maybe a little indy music in the mix. Talk and stories would reign, though. :-)

Guess I had better get back to my world-domination plan...

Creating Radio for the People

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Posted on August 8, 2007, Printed on August 9, 2007

Rupert Murdoch is looking like the cat that ate the canary with his successful takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Media conglomerates like Murdoch's News Corp. are among the most powerful corporations on the planet. His papers beat the drums for war while distracting with gossip and glitz.

Yet people are finding innovative ways to fight back, to demand independent, community-based media. One such effort that you can join is the movement to create new, full-power, noncommercial FM radio stations in the U.S.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Federal Communications Commission will open a one-week window, Oct. 12-19, during which nonprofit community groups in the U.S. can file applications.

Think for a moment what a powerful, noncommercial radio station could do in your community. As the late George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, said, we need a media not run by "corporations that have nothing to tell and everything to sell, that are raising our children today."

Community radio is the antidote to that small circle of pundits featured on all the networks, who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. On community radio, you can hear your neighbors, you can hear people from your community: the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.

Pacifica Radio, the network where I got my start, is the oldest public broadcasting network in the United States, founded in 1949 by conscientious objectors like Lew Hill. He created the concept of "listener-sponsored" radio -- the radical concept that quality programming could be put out over the air that would be so different and so valuable to the audience that the listeners would give money to keep it going, and they have, all over the country.

After Pacifica station KPFT went on the air in Houston in 1970, its transmitter was blown up, twice; it is the only U.S. radio station to have suffered such crimes. The transmitter was destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Because the station allowed people to speak for themselves, and that challenges stereotypes and caricatures, which fuel hate groups like the KKK.

Pacifica Radio is now part of a national coalition, RadioForPeople.org, that is helping groups file for their own radio licenses. You can check out the availability of a license by entering your ZIP code at the website getradio.org.

Independent community radio provided critical coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Cumulus Media was banning the Dixie Chicks for daring to speak out against war, Clear Channel radio stations were sponsoring prowar rallies around the country. Roxanne (Walker) Cordonier, the South Carolina Broadcasters Association's 2002 radio personality of the year, was fired by Clear Channel-owned station WMYI-FM in Greenville, S.C.

"I was fired for being antiwar," she told me. "I was told to shut up. People who retained their employment had the presence of mind to keep quiet." She sued, and Clear Channel settled with her just before trial (for a sum said to be about a year's salary). Four years later, she is back on the air, now buying airtime on a locally owned station. "People forget," she says, "these are the public airwaves, and the public is not getting access to them."

From coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii to Florida to Maine, people are organizing to reclaim a small portion of the public airwaves. The October FCC application window for full-power, noncommercial FM licenses is an opportunity to make a meaningful, long-term contribution to your local media landscape -- to help give a voice to the voiceless, to carry on the fine tradition of Pacifica Radio, to create a beacon for truth under which people can discuss the most important issues of the day: war and peace, life and death. Check out getradio.org. Start your own community radio station, and wipe that smile off Rupert Murdoch's face.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Quote of the Day

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

-- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

Diversity and Radio Ownership

Very interesting study on radio station ownership I wanted to share:

The results of this study reveal a dismally low level of minority and female ownership of radio stations in America that has left two-thirds of the U.S. population with few stations representing their communities or serving their needs. Racial or ethnic minorities own just 7.7 percent of all full-power commercial broadcast radio stations, though they account for 33 percent of the U.S. population.

• Latinos own just 2.9 percent of all U.S. full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.
  
  
• African-Americans own only 3.4 percent of this country's full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.
  
  
• People of Asian descent own less than 1 percent of full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.
  
  

Listen to the press conference announcing the release of the report featuring FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Johnathan Adelstein, Gloria Steinem, and Civil Rights leaders.

Our previous study, Out of the Picture, found that minority ownership of broadcast television stations was similarly anemic -- people of color own just 3.3 percent of stations.

These groups' level of radio station ownership is only slightly higher, despite the fact that the cost of operating a radio station is dramatically lower than a TV station. Moreover, radio station ownership is very low compared to the levels seen in other commercial industry sectors.

---

Minority-Owned Stations Thrive in Less-Concentrated Markets

Our analysis suggests that minority-owned stations thrive in markets that are less concentrated. Markets minority owners have fewer stations per owner on average than markets without them.

• The probability that a particular station will be minority-owned is significantly lower in more concentrated markets.
  
  
• The probability that a particular market will contain minority-owned station is significantly lower in more concentrated markets.
  
  

Allowing further industry consolidation will unquestionably diminish the number of female- and minority-owned stations. The FCC should seriously consider these consequences before enacting any policies that could further concentration.

---

Ownership and Programming Diversity: A Case Study of Talk Radio

Though the focus of this study was on structural ownership, recent controversy surrounding remarks by two prominent talk radio hosts —Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus — spurred an examination talk radio programming on minority- and female-owned stations. We found:

• No minority-owned stations aired "Imus in the Morning" at the time of its cancellation.
  
  
• All minority-owned stations and minority-owned talk and news format stations were significantly less likely to air "The Rush Limbaugh Show."
  
  
• Having a minority-owned station in a market was significantly correlated with a market airing bothconservative and progressive programming.
  
  
• Overall, markets that aired both conservative and progressive hosts were significantly less concentrated that markets that aired just one type of programming.
  
  

These results suggest that diversity in ownership leads to diversity in programming content. This result may seem obvious. But policymakers may have forgotten the reason behind ownership rules and limits on consolidation: Increasing diversity and localism in ownership will produce more diverse speech, more choice for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities.

There are more links to the actual studies and how to defend media diversity at the link below. Good info this audio addict likes to be aware of. :-)

And now a message from the RIAA

Via Christopher Penn via Steve at Wicked Good: An LA Times article today discussed the Recording Industry ASSociation of America's new way to squeeze every single penny possible out of those who love to bring music to listeners. The RIAA is now seeking royalties from broadcast radio stations. From the Times article (requires free registration):

"For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music.

Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists' groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties.

Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.

"After so many years of not being compensated, it would be nice now at this late date to at least start," the 63-year-old Las Vegas resident said in Milwaukee, where she was performing at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. "They've gotten 50-some years of free play. Now maybe it's time to pay up." "

Um... they still have to work to pay their bills.... okay....

Excuse me, Ms. Wilson? If I could have a moment to speak with you, and Lars, and other starving musicians like you? Thanks.

Come closer. OK, are you paying attention, cause I'm going to say this once, and in language I know you will understand.

You're dumb.

OK, go off to your concert now, I know you will most likely have to raise ticket prices if this falls through. After all, you've got bills to pay, right? And I know it completely sucks to have to keep working in order to pay those bills, caught in your dead end job doing something you can't stand.

Oh wait- why is it you are artists again?

Like Chris Penn put in his blog post- go ahead. It can only help podcasting and podsafe musicians.

Who knew the Onion spoke truth?

Canadian radio thriving- quite well, actually

Shamelessly swiped from Tod Maffin's Blog at the CBC:

Canada’s commercial radio stations revenue increased by 5.7% in the last year, going from $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion. Profit margins went up too by 2.7% to 20%.

• Commercial AM radio experienced stronger growth in revenues between 2005 and 2006 than at any other time in the last five years.
• Revenues for commercial FM radio stations in Canada have been steadily increasing over the last five years.
• The Canadian private-radio industry employed 9,763 people in 2006 and paid a total of $577.8 million in salaries.
  

Wow. Maybe I should rethink this whole "moving to Canada for political reasons" thing? At least I know I would have a good chance of finding a job in radio. ;-)