One writer who can see the future

YOUTH REDEFINE RADIO CULTURE
By MARK McGUIRE c.2005 Albany Times Union

ALBANY, N.Y. — Michael Harrison had some free time on a recent business trip, so he made a detour to the Jersey Shore.

It was a hot, beautiful Saturday, a perfect July beach day. Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, the most prominent trade magazine covering talk radio, listened to the surf, the gulls, the chatter of the sunbathers who packed the oceanfront.
After a while, he hit upon a stunning truth:

Harrison didn't hear a single radio.

Even a decade ago, the beach was the place to hear a cacophony of music, pouring out of everything from tiny transistor radios to suitcase-sized boomboxes. A stroll in the sand could tell you more about youth culture than most marketing studies.

But Harrison was looking at a sea of headphones, almost all of them connected to iPods and other MP3 players. "When young people no longer see radio as the center of their culture ... when young people stop doing something and it ceases to be an icon, an institution in their lives, it doesn't bode well for the future," Harrison said.

Let's be clear: Beach visions aside, traditional radio isn't yet as dead-and-buried as the eight-track.

Like the old peasant in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," radio is wailing, "I'm not dead yet." Harrison agrees. But he emphasizes the word yet.

"Radio faces an uncertain future, but doom is not around the corner," he said. "It's just over the horizon." Increasingly, the favorite local radio frequencies of many local music fans is 107.9 FM or 88.1 FM. You don't recognize those stations? The frequencies are dead air. People use them to play iPods over the car stereos.

When listeners turn away from terrestrial radio, it's because of distressingly similar complaints. Commercial radio is suffering from a palpable loss of vitality and relevance, they lament. Music stations overplay the same hits endlessly.

Talk shows, especially of the political variety, are numbingly repetitive forums — Democrats evil, Republicans good; reverse for Air America — in which canned vitriol is passed off as edge.

Radio's sorry state comes into focus when you look at all of radio's audio competitors, from the home computer to portable MP3 players and even podcasts (although listenership to these homegrown shows has been slow to grow). Satellite companies Sirius and XM are offering hundreds of talk and music stations tailored to specific genres and topics.

Most worrisome is that this isn't merely the whining of old guys out of the target demo. Listen to the young adults — the lifeblood and advertising objective of broadcast outlets.

"They play songs over and over again," said Dave Rust, a 20-year-old State University of New York at Albany student. "They play songs to death." "Who wants to sit there and hit all the stations until you find what you like?" said Marisa Basle, 20, of Latham, N.Y.

Teens and young adults are listening to less radio this year compared to last, according to a recent study of 15- to 24-year-olds by Bridges Ratings, an audience measurement service. Meanwhile, almost seven out of 10 respondents to the Bridges study said they're spending more time listening to their MP3 player than they were six months ago; only a shade more than one in 10 said they're listening to more radio these days.

There's concern traditional radio isn't adapting to the challenges posed by the digital age and the demands of the on-demand era.

"Half of (the dilemma) has been caused by technological advancements and affordable portable technology," Harrison said, "and the other half has been the corporatization of radio. It has taken away from the excitement of diversity, that every market was so different." Deregulation led to the conglomerization and homogenization of the medium. Large companies like Clear Channel and Viacom bought up local outlets. Airwaves became filled with syndicated hosts. Playlists are short and codified across cities, so that a station in Albany, Abilene, Tampa or Tacoma all sound similar. (OK, the weather report may be different.) It seems to be an industry run by dittoheads, and not necessarily Rush Limbaugh fans.

In the past, Harrison said, "there was much more of a connection between the radio and the culture. (Now) there is a disconnect between the medium and the street." To survive, he and many others say, radio must be distinct and local, and carry the possibility of surprise.

Buzz Brindle is a radio veteran who also did a stint at MTV. He acknowledges that commercial radio has made mistakes: "It used to play it safe a lot more, and at one time it worked," he said. "It doesn't anymore." Radio still has younger fans: "I like the DJs ... (and) I like variety," said 25-year-old Jen Bilodeau of East Greenbush, N.Y. "I like to hear what's next." But Breanne Brown said she can rely on iTunes and other Web sites and services — as well as word of mouth — to keep her up to date. "I know what bands I like, and I go from there," the 20-year-old from Albany said. Radio, she said, is slowly being tuned out.

"It's too many commercials, and you don't get to hear what you want to," It's become fashionable for pundits to announce the death of any number of old-school media and formats, from the sitcom and the summer blockbuster to, um, newspapers.
Of course, media formats get "killed off" with each new technology.

Radio was going to kill newspapers, television was going to kill radio, the Internet was going to kill everything else. It doesn't happen.

Different mediums get downsized, maybe even de-emphasized, but they survive by adapting.

Radio, some fear, isn't adapting. There's still time, but the future is just over the horizon. And it promises to be anything but a walk on the beach.