As part of cutbacks last week, Paramount Global deleted the digital archives of MTV News, CMT, Comedy Central and many other cable networks.
Gone are over two and half decades of news stories about artists, clips of historical significance from The Daily Show and Colbert Report, and even things like lists of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time. The archives include years or decades of work of writers and hosts that are now mostly gone (Archive.org has archived over 460,000 stories from MTV News at least).
When a host or show are let go from a radio station, the first thing most do is delete their entire existence from their digital platforms. Blog posts, podcasts, anything that shows the content they created for the station. And the same goes for internal archives. When a format changes, there goes everything that existed on the frequency previously. How many stations still have any audio recorded on analog devices that have to be digitized or even have archives of any sort for their station’s legacy? And that doesn’t include how many assets of a station have been lost in studio moves and downsizing.
Now what happens when the guy who hosted weekend shifts in college becomes the next Ryan Seacrest and you have nothing to show for it? Or when the local kid who sang on your morning show becomes a #1 artist a decade later? Who will have the archives? How many on-air talents are allowed to take their content archives with them when they get caught in a layoff? We can’t rely on just Art Vuolo or one of the few remaining vocal aircheck collectors out there to provide any content forever.
A couple of years ago I was visiting a station and noticed a computer with a bumper sticker for a defunct brand in the engineering room. The engineer goes, “Oh this is all that remains of that. Last week we cleaned out our storage area and threw out all remaining materials for it”. Not even six weeks later that brand was resurrected. While it may be hard to consider at the time, I bet there were super-fans of the defunct brand who would’ve loved to have come by to get some mementos from their station, or if the leftovers were put up for sale on eBay to raise money for charity?
There are stations that do consider how much their brand assets matter. And because of that their brand legacies are enhanced. Some like Ryman Hospitality’s WSM Nashville have decades of success behind it. As WSM prepares its move into their new studio location at the Acuff House later this month, Chief Engineer Jason Cooper recently spotlighted the almost completed construction with a station museum in the lobby.
During a recent trip to St. Louis, we visited Gateway Creative Broadcasting’s “99.1 Joy-FM” KLJY and “Boost Radio“. Despite not existing until after the turn of the century, the organization has built such a loyal following that the lobby of their studios features a massive retail store and occasional pop-ups across the market.
The brand equity in having archived content and materials is not something that will make a real impact to a station’s bottom-line, but fanaticism for a brand is the difference between a station that has a few core listeners and one that your audience will dedicate their dollars to support. “99X” Atlanta and “Live 105” San Francisco were able to return and become even bigger ratings successes because they were stations that had personality archives and legacy to build off of.
Back in the 90’s, there was a store in the Arden Fair Mall that sold Sacramento radio station T.shirts, hats, key chains, water bottles, etc… I always thought it would be great idea for a station like KROQ/LA to have a store or even in the lobby (if big enough) selling their brand which is as popular as In-n-Out.
I feel like with 99X being at 100.5, B 94 could easily be at 100.7 Pittsburgh. It has brand equity, it will never happen, but if they actually wanted to hit top four with it, even with the new Kensington signal, I feel they could do that. I bring this up because there’s another station that really doesn’t have a lot of archive material, it’s the station that really made me want to get into radio in the first place. Wow, reading the first few sentences of this article made my stomach drop, unbelievable. I’m obsessed with archiving!
See, this is why God created aircheck collectors! How much history, all the way back to the 1950s, otherwise would have been lost?