As I was listening to Ken Levine’s keynote address at the conclusion of this year’s final Conclave in Minneapolis a few weeks back, I was quite entranced as I love the machinations of Hollywood from film to television almost as much as I love radio and if you aren’t familiar with him, Ken transitioned from being a premiere top 40 jock in the 70s to a top tier screenwriter working on shows like “Cheers” and “MASH”.
On that same trip, RadioInsight publisher Lance Venta and I had to see the Mary Tyler Moore statue that stands in the spot where the famous hat throw in the show’s opening titles was filmed. There have always been formulas and franchises on the small and silver screen but you think back to the variety of choices we once had and it does make the endless reboots, retcons, legacy sequels, direct sequels, prequels and same old same old particularly at the movies seem rather bland. For every “Obsession” there seems to be 10 “Star Wars” and Marvel entries. It’s easy to feel that we’ve lost the era when these blockbusters were being built and released one after another, defining a cultural moment and now sadly milked for all their worth today. Where is 2026’s “Ghostbusters”? Or “ET?” Or “Die Hard”? Or “Pretty Woman”?
There are avant garde or unique films that soar “Project Hail Mary” early this year was a good example of that and too, many of the endless rehash films flop (“Moana” live anyone?) but many of them are monumental hits from “SpiderMan” to “Toy Story” both sequels taking in well over a billion dollars for their studios.
That brings us to radio’s place in the entertainment echo system and similar to film it is easy to think of Z100 or KROQ in the early 80s, KHJ in the 60s, or way back to the pioneers like Wolfman and Freed and feel radio is not innovating, radio is excessively safe, bland, derivative if not stuck in a past way of doing things that isn’t so much nostalgic as it is dated. The truth is, there is a reason Hollywood keeps churning out alot of same and or familiar, because its a safe bet and it doesn’t generally clear a cinema or go without a Netflix click. Radio may be a bit less experimental particularly in the corporate run brands than it once was, maybe a bit less innovative but there is a reliable expectation of what a radio brand will be and doing something the works well consistently can usually be just as big a win as creating the wheel and selling it to the masses.
That said, being lazy, bland and soulless? The public can sniff that out too, its largely in the creativity and execution of what works that success happens. Calculated risk can pay off, safe bets can fizzle, entertaining people with quality content? Hard to go wrong with that. So while I DO want to see radio break free of some old conventions that have grown stale and meaningless to the listener in my view, and to inject more passion and life into what we do across formats, I also would just like to see more focused well oiled machine’s pumping out exciting audio content on the air. And while I hope Hollywood finds the next Lucas and Coppola and let’s them dazzle us, I’m also very much looking forward to “Top Gun 3″…..
