A couple of interesting articles today, seemingly unrelated but with a common thread.
The first is from the always thought-provoking Mark Ramsey about the dearth of content on radio station websites.
http://www.markramseymedia.com/2011/01/when-radio-has-no-idea-what-to-put-on-its-websites/
He’s spot-on with everything he says in this article, but the truth is that radio’s content problem runs deeper than the station website. Hold that thought for a second.
Switching gears, we’ve got this article:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/06/fly-or-die-flipboard-tryx-windows-phone/
There are a few products reviewed, but the one I’m focusing on here is Flipboard – an iPad content app that allows the user to pull together content from all kinds of places (RSS feeds and social media both) and display them in a fairly elegant magazine-style layout. It’s an aggregator, meaning that the “product” is really a combination of content from other sources presented in a seamless fashion. The original source is less important to the user than the overall experience.
Aggregating content is exactly what radio used to do. It still does with music, but most of the other elements have been removed.
A radio station in the 80′s and 90′s certainly played plenty of tunes, but people tuned in for more than that. Dominant stations had a personality all their own, with the air talent, promotions, news, imaging and relevant info all forming an intricate patchwork right along with the songs. Over the years, a lot of those other elements have been stripped away from far too many stations, leaving really just the music to carry everything, and it can’t.
It was possible to be successful as a “more music” station before internet radio, satellite, iPods, etc., but in most cases even back then such stations played second fiddle to the personality driven powerhouses.
Nowadays, if you just want to hear music there are far better options than an FM radio station. There are still stations and shows doing it right on the air, but I can only think of a few stations and shows that have successfully incorporated online into what they do, and most of those are syndicated and not about the stations they’re on at all.
I brought up Flipboard because of the irony that yet another “hot new thing” is actually something radio used to do well back in the day. Sure Flipboard is visual and radio is aural, but the concepts behind them were once exactly the same, back before Radio got addicted to the heroin that is music.
Yes, I just compared music to heroin where radio is concerned. Why? It’s an easy thing to put on the air and helps get ratings that makes the execs feel good while their business goes down the toilet, and when things get worse the only solution most stations see is to do more of it. I think the comparison is apt.
Sure, radio stations can hire bloggers… but to blog about what? (Hint: NOT MUSIC.) There’s got to be more happening on the air than does on most music stations now if bloggers are going to have anything interesting to write about. If there’s nothing on which to build a community of listeners, why wouldn’t a blogger just go to Tumblr, or WordPress, or Blogger, or one of the other dozen or so blog platforms out there that let them do whatever they want? It’s got to go beyond music, and right now most stations just don’t.
A great radio host builds a community of listeners who identify with the themes of the show. Even outside of the traditional talk show format it’s possible to create a bond with the audience, but it’s happening less and less as radio companies tighten up playlists and push “formatics” designed to get ratings vs. connect with listeners. (Don’t start me on Arbitron, this is supposed to be a short post and that one won’t be.)
If radio can get over its music habit and starts approaching product from the standpoint of providing something people in their market might want to listen to, the problems with web content will be gone before they know it.
