The Infinite Dial

Earlier this year, the music business watched hopefully as Kid Rock's year-old "Rock 'N' Roll Jesus" album returned to the upper reaches of the Billboard 200 chart, propelled by "All Summer Long," the hit single that he would not make available on iTunes, or as a standalone download. A few months later, Kid Rock's label tried a similar experiment by pulling Estelle's then-hit "American Boy," which was selling single downloads but not albums. The effect on albums sales was minimal; (a sound-alike single quickly moved in to fill the void). A few weeks later, the Estelle song was available as a download again.

Yesterday, news broke that NBC was planning a nightly 10-11 p.m. strip for Jay Leno after he turns over the reins of The Tonight Show to Conan O'Brien. The news stories have touched on the relative savings in putting even a big money talent in place of five hours of scripted programming, and on the difficulty of getting traction with any new show in a 10 p.m. hour that consumers have increasingly given over to their time-shifted programming.

Now consider Kid Rock, whose original stardom came at the relative dawn of downloading. Those listeners who came in on the cusp of the "music should be free" era, or at least the "only pay for the one good song" paradigm, remember him as somebody whose full albums they actually owned. To be fair, "All Summer Long" was a bigger hit than "American Boy"; also, "Rock 'N' Roll Jesus" was a year old and some consumers were familiar with previous singles, so paying for a whole album wasn't a complete leap of faith.

The commonality here is that even in an era of changing consumption, people can default to some of their old habits. But it's easier with grandfathered content. Leno, unlike a new series, must be perceived as still having the ability to compel appointment viewing, although it's still a leap to change that appointment from 11:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Kid Rock is somebody who listeners knew they'd want a whole album from -- even if they couldn't just download it from iTunes Music Store.

NBC had the unusual situation of too many superstars and a situation where even a major talent could be deployed to save money., That's hard to extrapolate to the local radio station forced to swap heritage talent for syndicated (or jockless) programming. But with even more evidence that old habits transcend new usage, while new ones are harder to create, there are chilling implications for radio here, unless the same sort of mold-breaking that could bring Leno to 10 p.m. can create some similarly creative solutions for radio's existing assets.