Five Things I Learned This Week About Radio and Audio

If you read Ross on Radio on a regular basis, I feel I owe you one provocative idea a week. Sometimes, the best I can do is find you an interesting new station to listen to. But last week I wrote about the debut of Amazon’s new Amp platform, which allows users to create real-time content and draw from Amazon’s music library. Over the last week, Amp has prompted a lot of thinking about what it offers and what broadcast radio offers. In the last few days, I’ve had no shortage of realizations about this new landscape.

People Want to Be on the Radio: AM/FM broadcasters think that there’s no untapped interest in being on the radio now because we don’t have a steady stream of 20-year-olds waiting for their first break, not that a broadcaster would necessarily be able to accommodate them. However valid radio’s claim to “original social network” status is, our current social networks offer plenty of opportunities to be heard–London Hyde Park’s “Speakers Corner” on every corner. And yet, there are still people who want to create radio or be “on the radio.”

Some of those people are the former or aspiring broadcasters creating radio stations through Live 365 or some other provider. They could just post their Spotify playlists (as I do), but they want something that sounds more like classic radio–a more entertaining environment and the ability to schedule music more deliberately. But a different sort of drive to be “on the radio” has also driven podcasters, Clubhouse users, or Amp’s early users. On Wednesday afternoon when I wrote this article, I was offered about 15 shows (based on my selected interests). Most of the hosts were, as best I could tell, not from the broadcast industry or other celebrity content creators.

(Even before Amp, there were other ways to make radio. I know two different people creating tributes to New York’s legendary ‘80s club Danceteria. Quark Records’ Curtis Urbina has been posting Soundcloud mixes from legendary DJ Freddy Bastone. New York radio veteran Rafe Gomez has created the two-hour Danceteria Rewind at 8 p.m. Thursdays on Twitch. And the amount of classic dance online obviously goes far beyond these two recent examples of my acquaintance.)

Some people are looking to capture the excitement of being on the radio without the commitment of a career in broadcasting–a continuation of doing a show on college radio, purely as an extracurricular activity. Radio used to harvest that a little more, whether it was guest DJ shows such as Look, Mom, I’m On KXXX or even just the “I’m Sean from New Jersey and I am KXXX” sweepers. There’s validation for AM/FM broadcasters there, but it’s other platforms that are trying to tap into it.

What Some People Want to Do Is Community Radio: Amp arrived with some broadcast radio veterans (Zach Sang, Kat Corbett, Graham Bunn) and some celebrities (Nicki Minaj, Travis Barker). I’ve seen two different authors announce plans for shows.  Last weekend, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, who is excited about Amp, did two shows that he designed more as narrated audio documentaries than real-time radio.

I have also encountered a lot of hosts on Amp who remind me of my first show on college radio many years ago. That night, I realized that years of hearing people talk on the radio did not immediately translate to being able to do so myself. But I wanted to sound like my heroes. Not everybody does. One e-mail from Amp to its users actually says “with Amp you can go live anytime anywhere. Let your personality come through without any prep work.”

Consultant Fred Jacobs talks about Amp as the potential “democratization of radio.” That’s already happening, I think, on Clubhouse. Over the year, that platform has become the new community broadcaster–the talk shows of a Pacifica Radio without the infamous internal politics (at least to my knowledge). When it comes to access, Clubhouse offers democracy, now. Will Amp do that for music? At this moment, Ron Gerber of community station KFAI Minneapolis could not do his specialty show, “Crap from the Past,” as it currently exists. But not every user needs to talk over intros and play songs that are out of print.

Broadcast Radio Could Still Be the Greatest Showman: In general, broadcast radio’s tech rivals haven’t embraced its brand of radio showmanship. The exception is satellite radio, which came to bury broadcast, but now carries on its traditions. Apple Music’s stations are closer to broadcast radio than Amp, but still relatively low-key and based around shows, not formats. Where radio has been most usurped is by Pandora more efficiently offering “more music, less talk” and by Spotify blurring the distinction between the mixtape and format radio (a process that the iPod had already started). 

One interpretation is that big, bold traditional radio isn’t of interest anymore, and only you and I refuse to see that. I can only point out that in 1981, nothing was cornier than the notion of high-energy Top 40 radio. Yet somehow Mike Joseph’s “Hot Hits” format on WCAU-FM took over Philadelphia with a stylized presentation that sounded like Top 40 in the late ‘50s-through-mid ‘60s. A few years later, Scott Shannon used old-fashioned showmanship at New York’s Z100, and we’re watching a documentary about it now. 

Before anybody writes off the music radio era that comprises two-thirds years of radio’s hundred-year history, consider that the radio drama that preceded music formats has gone through at least three cycles. I listened to the second one as a teenager when I wasn’t listening to music radio. The third cycle is the scripted podcast. As younger consumers fetishize vinyl and prepare to rewind the cassette deck next, of course there is room for big, bold traditional radio. But AM/FM broadcasters aren’t always in a position to deliver on their legacy either.

Radio Needs the Request Line, Too: Over the last decade, we’ve come up with clever ways to augment the request line, then the request line itself withered as usage changed. Futuri’s “Open Mic” has been one of radio apps’ coolest features for the last 10 years. Three weeks ago, iHeart Radio announced its own “Talk Back” feature. Texting provides on-air personalities with a lot of their listener input, which is good because “people don’t call radio stations anymore.” Shazam has replaced the curiosity call many years ago and many times over.

And yet, I still feel the diminishment of the request line itself has been a self-fulfilling prophesy and a loss for radio. As most people have found out over the last two years, some of your five-business-Zooms-a-day would work just fine as e-mail exchanges. Not all would. From programming feedback to our importance to listeners, something is lost by not having somebody to reach out to in real time. I’d be hard-pressed to convince any owner that radio should still be in real time so that somebody can answer the phone. But now consider that Amp, which debuted without a search button or archived audio, cared enough about putting calls on the air to arrive with that functionality at the start.

Sometimes People Do Call Radio Stations: Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about BBC Radio 2 and the Canadian stations now running the “join the conversation” format. This week, consultant Alan Burns announced his intention to market a similar format to the U.S., Social Radio. I don’t know what percentage of listener feedback on Radio 2 or CKNO (Now 102.3) Edmonton, Alberta actually comes from callers (based on what I’ve heard on the air, I would peg it at about 30%). They get those calls in part because they still ask for the order.

This next observation isn’t an epiphany, but something long observed. Broadcast radio’s future depends on its willingness to engage with rivals and to relentlessly critique itself. Watching Pandora usurp “more music less talk” was a years-long process that I watched in slow speed while AM/FM failed to fix the either the quality of its stopsets or the commercial load overall. Clubhouse was an irresistible new toy for a while. Amp might well be that by the 2-3 month mark, similar to when Clubhouse got there. As noted last week, radio hasn’t offered a lot of new toys; (that ability to leave a voice message has been one of a relative few). 

When Amp tells its listeners that there’s no need to prep, it means something slightly different than what broadcasters do. But what happens when broadcasters’ show prep isn’t so compelling, either. Yesterday’s celebrity news, however more professionally presented, is not going to be a difference-maker. And that’s just one aspect of broadcast radio’s product. As long as radio’s tech rivals don’t want to create “boss radio,” broadcast radio has a shot. But I’ve been saying that for a while, too.