About a month ago, I emailed Dale Connolly because I kept hearing Current playlist tracks at the end of the Morning Show and he confirmed that they’d been told to bridge the gap between their show and the Current’s. They want Current listeners to listen to the Morning Show after 9 and vice versa.

I thought that was a bad idea all around. It’s like telling the shows on KFAI to bleed into each other (more Hmong News Hour with my surf music please!) Besides no one’s listening to marble mouth Abney in the first place.

Form what I hear MPR doesn’t respond to praise – only criticism, so if you’re mad enough, send Steve Nelson, program director, an email: snelson@mpr.org.

1. Lucia spouting off about her fucking cat, bowels, skin problems, cramps, or basically whenever she speaks. Or breathes.

-and-

2. Lucia and Bob Collins “doing” the “news.” God that fucking patter – the same kind of lame shtick they do on the local “news” shows is like fingernails on a chalk board to me. I think it’s because I would expect these two to be smarter than that.

Bob, if you read this, please STOP. It’s just not funny. Or cute. It really isn’t. It makes me feel embarrassed for you.

Thanks!

(just needed closure on that Caddyshack riff.)

Last night I asked Danny Sigeleman how much freedom he had to choose songs on his late-night DJ shift after the policy change. Answer: Zero.

Bob, I think you forget that commercial radio (and public radio, to a great degree) is a business. As such, it depends on revenue that is derived, for the most part, locally. It’s one thing to stream 24/7 around the world; it’s another thing entirely to be able to leverage that listenership in such a way that appeals to advertisers (and underwriters). Denny Hecker doesn’t want to sell cars to someone living in Maine or Austria. Cub Foods knows that a listener in California won’t come shopping to one of their Twin Cities stores. Claiming a worldwide listener is great for the individual ego but does nothing at all to a local radio station’s bottom line.

The amount of national advertising dollars is limited, too. Advertisers do not buy 12+ numbers; they buy targeted demographics. So a station like KQRS does very well in attracting ad dollars targeting Men 18-34 but Women 25-54 not quite as well as a station like WLTE. The typical agency buy is spread between the top 3 stations in any one target demo, with the #1 station getting the lion’s share of the buy. If you’re #3, #4 or #5 in a demo, you’re much more dependent on direct, local buys. If you’re #6, you’d better be really, really good at knocking on doors. And this doesn’t even begin to address the challenges facing out-state, non-metro market stations around the country.

Yes, terrestrial commercial radio has created its own problems. I’ve addressed that before, and it’s sad to think that the paradigm shift will result in many talented people losing their jobs as the megamediacorporaglomerates are forced by their bean counters to reduce expensives because advertisers are shifting their attentions to new media. Corporate Darwinism is not a fun thing to watch or, worse, be directly affected by. Public radio is now entering that competitive arena, too, by the way, as corporate underwriters will address the same concerns of “reach” that commercial broadcasters have always dealt with.

The fact is a great majority of people do not yet have access to streaming media while on the move. Heck, half the Internet population in the US doesn’t even subscribe to broadband; most people still only have broadband access at work but how much radio-via-Internet listening goes on in the workplace? Not much. The portability of terrestrial and satellite radio is still a big selling point to advertisers. IMHO, commercial broadcasters are wasting time promoting HD radio instead of promoting radio’s portability. Plus, splintering the wavelengths into smaller and smaller niche formats, i.e. “narrow-casting,” is doing nothing more than splintering the revenue potential of any one broadcaster.

About a decade ago, the big buzz words in radio were “super-serving the listener.” Consultants twisted that around to mean that focus groups of P1 listeners (the most loyal to a particular station within its very narrow target demo, e.g. Woman 31-44) would ultimately determine a station’s playlist. Rather than throwing out a wide net, radio broadcasters started causing their own demise by casting with a single bait to attract listeners. I’m sure I’m not the only one who enjoys a more varied diet when I eat; the same goes for the music I consume, too.

There’s no easy solution now. The Clear Channels of this country misread the tea leaves a decade ago. So, too, have traditional music distributors. It is an established fact that commercial radio has lost an entire generation of listeners … the 12-24 year old audience that would grow into the next 25-54 demo generation advertisers want to reach. Blame it on limited playlists; blame it on the iPod and music portability. Both share the blame.

One thing I still do believe, though, is that those 12-24 listeners could be enticed back to terrestrial radio if given a reason to listen. The Current, at least, attempts to communicate with its listeners and presents to them an intelligent product. How well they manage the backlash sure to ensue (as evidenced here already) will determine how successful they become in growing their listenership.