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June 17th, 2014, 09:10 AM
#1
If I Owned a Radio Station Right Now
By Jerry Del Colliano
Inside Music Media
Publisher
SCOTTSDALE, AZ — This is a question I get all the time especially because I have devoted my career to generational media.
When 95 million millennials are rejecting radio, music, network television and disrupting everything they can, operating a radio station for profit seems like a bad business.
One thing I can tell you upfront.
I wouldn’t run my station the way the biggest majors run theirs.
Nor would I go brain dead not knowing whether to go or grow.
I sure wouldn’t be wasting my time streaming the station’s signal or hollering for an FM chip in a cellphone that would never ever become today’s version of a Walkman anyway.
Or doing deals with record labels.
Give me a break.* This is my station, remember.
You might ask yourself, what would you do if you had to run a station today and wanted to make money?
Would I cut the commercial load like I always advise others to do?
And how would I handle competing in a digital world where advertisers are already making their move toward digital.
Here goes.
- Triple the sales staff.* Mel Karmazin said this when he spoke at one of my conferences.* Hire more people to sell.* Not fire them.* You can’t increase sales by cutting salespeople no matter what you’re smoking.
- Give generous commissions.* As sellers make me more money, they should make more money.* The owner still makes the majority of the income and everyone is happy.
- But I must have something unique, compelling and addictive to sell.* So I’ll start with a morning team but I wouldn’t do the usual morning show loaded with crap like traffic and weather when there isn’t any traffic and weather other than to allow a station to run spots. Mornings should return 50-60% of the revenue to your bottom line.
- I’d stop and start as much as possible.* No big music sweeps.* Today’s attention deficit audiences like the disruption not the smooth flow of non-stop music sweeps.
- No record would be played all the way through – that’s right, watch me stick to this one.* If you look at audiences under 35, they never listen to songs on their iPods, music streams or anything all the way through.* You’d hear variable length versions of songs in a mix-type environment including lots of short snippets of new music that is not heard on my competitors.* Don’t tell my competitor because they don’t have the guts to do this and I want to do it while they tremble in fear.
- Live jocks who are having fun so I guess I couldn’t threatened to fire them all the time or take away their health care benefits.
- Contests all over the place but not the dorky contests radio wound up doing before they stopped entirely.* This is a generation of gamers and I think I can offer some fun that would engage audiences in ways radio stations used to engage them in earlier generations without being so retro.
- No voice tracking.* This one is easy.* No one likes voice tracking except greedy owners looking to save a few pennies more.
- News.* You heard me.* News!* If radio was made for anything, it is news.* But here is the key.* I won’t make the mistake of doing news the audience already knows and believe me, they’re connected.* Hell, a Twitter feed does a better job of keeping you informed than any radio station.* Just as with what I do in my Inside Music Media column every day, it would be things that are unique, compelling and addictive that you can’t get anywhere else.
- Thought I was going to sidestep the issue of eight-minute stop sets?* **Not I.* You wouldn’t hear them.* Eight spots max per hour and they will not be run in one eight-minute stop set.* I don’t care what the length.* It doesn’t matter.* Wake up!* Listeners are not running a stop watch.* They know when it is too much and it is too much when you run more than two.
- I like to disrupt so I would set a standard for local commercials.* I’d hire someone damn good to run write and produce them and I’d test the commercials before they ran.
- I would double the rates on day one.* Radio is too inexpensive.* Price it like you expect success not like you expect another recession.
- Find a great manager and let her come up with great ideas.
- Oh, bet you thought I was going to forget digital.* Well I am in a way. Forget how radio does digital today because it is a joke.* No streaming. No podcasting.* No stealing the content of others.
- Watch how I would run a separate digital business based on short form video involving paid subscriptions and advertising models.* And don’t be surprised if my music station has nothing to do with what my video business looks like.* All the revenue comes to me after expenses and that means it does to my wife.
- Then I’d sell to Lew Dickey.
- Just kidding.* I wouldn’t do that.* That’s no fun.* Radio is a fun business unless you’re having your balls cut off by present corporate conditions.* Jerry Lee is rolling in dough and all he has ever done is run one radio station for over 60 years.* If I had any problems, I’d call Jerry Lee before I’d call the consolidators.
So there.
Radio is dying not just because 95 million Millennials have changed but because radio is a cottage industry for a bunch of venture capitalists who don’t care about it.
One more thing.
I love NPR but I’m getting the feeling they are becoming an imitation of themselves.* I’d be careful.
Hope this helps and you found it worthwhile because – I really mean every word.
Adopt one of these strategies and you are ahead of your competitors.
Jerry Del Colliano is publisher of Inside Music Media.* He can be phoned at 480-998-9898 or emailed at jerry@insidemusicmedia.com.* Meet Jerry Del Colliano at Talkers New York 2014 on Friday, June 20.
*
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June 22nd, 2014, 02:51 AM
#2
I understand his comments about not doing retro radio, but it seems like his comments about song fragments point back to the 50s and early 60s, where songs under 2 minutes were common, and occassionally under 1:40. That's what I liked about Elvis Costello in his early days: Rare was the song that ran more than 3:00, more generally under 2:30.
Might this portend a change in popular music where the mega-long mixes will be reserved for the dance floor and radio edits will clock in under 3:00?
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