It could be worse. We’ve gone through the radio industry’s problems ad nauseam, and a lot of people have already declared radio dead, so it can seem like keeping the twitching corpse alive is a lost cause, pointless in a world of streaming and an essentially limitless choice of audio options. Is there anything to be gained by keeping the faith and looking for answers?
Maybe not, but it’s not like a dead business has never been successfully revived. Take brick-and-mortar bookstores. Dead, right? Tell that to Barnes & Noble, which not only survived Amazon and e-books, but is now expanding its retail presence and opening several new locations.
I dropped by one of the new locations in Delray Beach, and it was busy with customers and — this is probably the key — a lot smaller than the chain’s older stores. There’s no pseudo-Starbucks. There aren’t a lot of places to sit and read. They do carry all the usual categories and the non-book gift stuff, but less of it than a full-sized store. And it appears to be working.
How about restaurants? Chili’s was a declining brand mostly known for that baby back ribs jingle until the Triple Dipper appetizer combo went viral. A new CEO’s decision to emphasize seafood boils has apparently revived Red Lobster. It doesn’t always take much to change the public perception of your business.
This leaves one question on the table: Does anyone even WANT to revive broadcast radio? And another question: How the hell do you do that?
Reinvention takes a lot of creative thinking; to use a hoary cliché, it takes thinking outside the box. That is not something a business stripped of assets by private equity ownership does well.
If the owners look at the business as something to operate in a bare-bones manner before unloading it on another sucker, there won’t be any innovation. If they’re buying the business for the real estate, it’s over. And if they bought in thinking they could succeed where others had failed, there’s hope, because they wanted to be in the business in the first place.
Here’s one idea: Embrace the audience you have and forget trying to attract those who aren’t interested no matter what you do. Broadcast television has done that, and not just the traditionally senior-centric CBS; Weigel Broadcasting has done quite well with MeTV and its many offshoots, all using programming long discarded by other operators. There’s not a new medication in the formulary that isn’t incessantly advertised on MeTV. You can’t even tell what diseases the drugs are for. You also can’t avoid Medicare Advantage commercials on those channels; even if they’re all per-inquiry, that’s a decent amount of revenue.
It may not be a long-term answer, since once the seniors die off, the younger demos aren’t using radio, but it’ll buy some time. Maybe those dead-in-the-water formats discarded because the demos were too old for agency business have some life in them after all.
Or, oh, I don’t know, national formats — not voice tracking or pretending to be local, but actual same-wherever-you-are networks, like they have in most other countries. Maybe car radios can have DVR capabilities so drivers can rewind and start a show from the beginning — streaming makes this technically feasible already. Maybe offer alternate broadcasts of sporting events on multiple channels, like ESPN does with the Manningcast. Maybe just use the bandwidth for data. Anything is possible.
Maybe all those ideas are lame and wouldn’t work. They probably wouldn’t work. But the collective brain power of the people remaining in the radio business can surely come up with ideas that would catch the public’s attention and make money, right? (Don’t answer that.)
Offer something others don’t, offer something of perceived value, and you might be able to resurrect the medium. In case you haven’t noticed, the patient is heading towards flatlining. The time to start emergency measures is here.
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Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
