Screwed?
The new year got me thinking about how radically things have changed in just one decade.
Ten years ago there was no online music business. Broadband was fantasy. Your mobile phone was for calls and (maybe) text. A tv was a big bulkly box and cable gave you a whole 17 stations (wow!).
Today people have nearly a hundred tv stations to choose from. With Sky+ and DVD box sets they choose what to watch and when to watch it. Today people carry around their entire music collections on their mobile phone. The explosion of laptops and 3G broadband gives high-speed broadband almost anywhere.
Here is the bit that scares me. In a decade of great change radio has stood. Entirely. Still.
Physically it is still just a box with a speaker that does what it did ten years ago. It’s advantage as a source of music has been overtaken by mp3 players and streaming services like Spotify. It’s advantage as a cheap mass-market advertising medium has been taken over by the internet. It’s this that scares me more.
Our whole radio industry is built on selling mass audience cheaply to advertisers. The internet beats us hands down at that game. Money previously going to radio is now starting to go online.
We can’t fight it. This is just the way it is. What we need to do is adapt. This is the bit that scares me the most. We’re not adapting.
If we don’t … we’re screwed.
I’ll have a craic at cheering you up a little shall I?
It is true that the “industrial media machine” of the past five decades is starting to grind to a halt. I bought Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ book over Christmas and, in it, he tells us that it used to be you could create a mediocre product, add media spend and voila – you had a money making machine. It was a home run. You couldn’t really go wrong as long as you had the moula to build a breakfast cereal factory.
Now we are in the age of personalisation. I don’t have to sit around and listen to the same thing the 380,028 other people in my demographic listen to. I have choice.
My media choice is now tailored to exactly what I’m interested in. My media is more interesting and even the ads I’m served are less annoying.
So why is this good news if you are working in media? Well – the reason is that there is a need for a tonne more of it. Producing excellent content for a thousand or more people can mean you can make a living. The days of broadcasting to millions may be waning but if you are passionate about what you do and willing to share, its time to wax lyrical.
There was a real star system in play. Media jobs in general start off as low paid or no -paid and thousands scrimp and save to try and get into the ‘big time’. When you are there, the rewards are fantastic but it meant that only a handful could really do well. Now, people’s attention is starting to be spread more evenly allowing more people to make a reasonable living without the need for 10 bazillion dollars in radio station / tv station behind you.
Feel any better?
It’s sad but true. Radio does seem to still cling onto a conservative notion. But is it the only form of media that tries not to be something else? Newspapers are trying to be e-books, tv is trying to be on-demand but Radio seems to be accepted en-masse as plain old radio.
Maybe pushing Radio to evolve into a new beast, is what is stopping it from evolving naturally. While organic evolution has happened in the digitising of radio with Podcasts, a lot of ‘Digital-only’ content from already established listeners will alienate the old-reliable listenership.
The problem on the whole is content. The BAI should be offering a wealth of solely digital licenses to start flooding the digital spectrum with irresistible content. Fully utilising the full digital spectrum, that we keep hearing about. While at the same time trying to reduce the number of analogue licenses, eventually “see-saw”-ing to a digital transition.
Probably not as easy as that but just what I think-
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