It has been gratifying over the last year to see broadcasters truly grasp the importance of personality to broadcast radio’s survival. It has been less so to listen to station-after-station and hear the on-air hosts doing very little, or to still hear no hosting at all. The need for content and companionship was front-and-center on the radio panels at last month’s NAB New York conference.
Music programming has been the epicenter of Ross on Radio, and I’m still not ready for radio to throw its hands up on the music franchise. But it has been gratifying that readers have responded so well to some recent meditations about on-air personality. Two mid-October columns, what I would do “If I Had Six Breaks an Hour,” and last week’s “Are You a DJ or a Personality?” drew some of the heaviest response of any Ross on Radio columns this year.
Through radio’s travails of the last two years, I have always understood that broadcasters were doing the best they could with their remaining resources. But the gap between the radio that we want to offer people and what was actually coming out of the speakers remains frustrating. Some of my urgency was prompted by the launch of Amp in March. Amazon’s new service offered anybody the chance to host a radio show. (More about that below.)
Because you’ve responded so well to the personality essays recently, and because not everybody sees every column, here’s what I’ve had to say over the last year, and what I think now about the state of radio personality. It’s all in one place to share with colleagues and bosses now. Much, but not all, of what I ‘ve written deals with what happens after the morning show—a neglected area.
Listeners Still Respond to Personality Radio When They Hear It: In February, I returned to the story of CKNO (Now 102.3) Edmonton, the wildly successful station modeled on BBC Radio 2 where listeners continued to enthusiastically engage with the radio station on topics like “worst roommate” or “pineapple on pizza.” Now 102.3 is a 15-year success story that, like Bob- and Jack-FM, won’t be taken seriously enough until it has a cohort in America, although KSTP-FM (KS95) Minneapolis serves similar needs. But it does have more U.S. attention now. It has spawned the successful CKCE (101.5 Today Radio) Calgary and other large-market Canadian outlets.
Great Personality is Still Local and Vital: In September, I listened to a big-name national morning show and was surprised to hear how canned it sounded. In general, a lot of what I’ve heard sounds generic and out-of-time. I’ve been hearing “content blocks,” full of yesterday’s celebrity news and “researchers in Norway”-type stories. The industry mocks anybody who actually does an airshift in real time, but out of economic necessity, not because being in the moment isn’t actually important. UK radio had years of dry runs for the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In America, the responsive stations were those that broke into the voice tracking in under an hour.
Do we want DJs or Personalities? Yes. It was understandable that the group programmers at NAB NY declared themselves to be in search of personalities, not jocks. As an industry, we’ve reduced the notion of “jocking” to merely hitting the post. But the best personalities blur that distinction, like recent Hall of Fame inductee Bill Lee, who hits the post and has thousands of people watching him do it on Instagram.
It’s also not fair to blame air talent for homogenizing radio over the last 15 years. That was something programmers did, in response to PPM ratings measurement, at the exact wrong time. We have a lot of air personalities already in our employee who are being told to be jocks. They just need to be redirected. But they’re going to have a problem being personalities when they’re voice-tracking seven stations at a time. That said, we need new talent, and fortunately there are young people who want to do radio.
Less Could Be More, If… In April, just ahead of the NAB Las Vegas show, I suggested that one solution for cash-strapped local radio would be to create regional networks, combining stations so that four stations with one or two local hosts could suddenly be live and fully staffed. My inspiration, in part, was Sirius XM where hosts talk about coming from multiple markets over the course of the day. I also see this as a solution for all my friends who are operating online-only radio stations with only one local shift.
More Could Be More, If… Recently, I polled readers, the largest number of whom told me that I would hear four breaks an hour or less if I listened to their stations. That inspired me to talk about what I could do “If I Had Six Breaks an Hour.” I’d ask jocks to talk about the music more—but not “coming up, music from…” I’d limit station business to two breaks an hour and not spend them on “download our app.” At least one break would have to involve a listener—whether on-air or just a shoutout. And at least one would have to be about “life in our market.”
Entertainment Matters: Personality isn’t the only thing that separates radio from an un-hosted playlist. It certainly isn’t the only thing that separates us from services like Amp or Amazon’s The Get-Up that are looking to combine streaming and personality. Radio’s competitors either discount the need for entertainment and stationality or just haven’t learned how to do it yet. That’s why I was “In Search of Show-Biz Radio.”
The show-biz radio column was actually one of three prompted by the Amp launch. In the first weeks of the venture I tried to be diplomatic about a brand new service, and take the same 15-year-view that paid off for the mid-‘00s proponents of the then-nascent podcasting field. But it was hard hearing even veteran broadcasters like Zach Sang talking to an audience of dozens and doing the best they could with surprisingly limited functionality (no ability to talk over music or segue songs, no archived audio, no ability to even play music without an audience already tuned in).
But I knew Amp was in beta at the time, and that Amazon certainly had the ability to come back with a better stage two. There were also a number of ROR readers truly intrigued by Amp, including former KROQ Los Angeles morning co-host Gene “Bean” Baxter, who finally did his own hour-long show on Oct. 10, joined by his podcast co-host Allie Mac Kay. Toward the end, he put KMKF (K-Rock) Manhattan, Kan., PD/p.m. driver Sloan on the air. Sloan was the DJ already using Amp who Bean had asked for advice—he had done three shows already. At the end of the hour, Bean was at 365 listeners—at least eight times what I’d seen for anybody else.
Since then, three key things have happened:
- Amp has launched a “Creator Fund” to encourage participation;
- The app has been updated. A chat function has been added. What’s missing now, as best I could tell, was the number of people listening, although you can still see how many followers a content creator has. At 10 p.m. ET last night, there were nearly 40 shows on the air, about twice what I’ve encountered before. The most-followed show, Baseball Today’s World Series Livestream, had 1,500 followers. The majority of shows were at less than 100 followers, sometimes much less. Offerings ranged from Hip-Hop You’ve Probably Never Heard Before to one called Sushi ASMR to one playing vintage radio drama, and, to be clear, those are great ideas if they eventually find their people. (There are also marquee names such as Halsey and Hunter Hayes at other times during the week, as well as shows like Music is Therapy that sounded intriguing.)
- On Oct. 31, Billboard reported that Amp had laid off 150 employees and consolidated several of its teams, amidst an overall hiring slowdown. While I don’t think that portends an outright shutdown like Spotify’s add-your-own-morning-show The Get Up, it doesn’t necessarily suggest a 15-year-view either. It’s also hard for a radio person to hear about any service that could even launch with 150 employees, much less lay off that many and have enough left to operate.
The most encouraging radio news of recent months happened with little fanfare (outside this column) in August when Nielsen inadvertently released ratings for KRTY San Jose, the successful Country station that moved to online only when its frequency was purchased by religious broadcaster K-Love. KRTY was a double-digit radio station over-the-air but was still able to post nearly a five-share in its one measured month of online listening. KRTY, as it happens, was also hosted, a big difference from other exiled stations asking listeners to follow them to an HD-2 or online station. Personality will make the difference but we need to figure out how to facilitate it to make radio more fulsome, not more faceless.
