The Infinite Dial

If you read the news today, what else could you think but "Oh boy"? Facebook doubled in size in one year, from 250 million to half a billion users. Netflix reported 42% year over year subscriber growth, climbing to 15 million paying users, all in the US. And Pandora announced it has passed the 60 million registration mark, also all domestic, after passing the 40 million mark only at the end of 2009.

What these three have in common, beyond their incredible growth rates, is that they are all bringing media - content - to users in new ways. Facebook of course is simply a whole new form of entertainment-media for people. Pandora is, at its core, a complete re-think of radio; personalized and now increasingly mobile. And Netflix started out as a better version of the 'video store' and is rapidly morphing into the ultimate on-demand video/movie supplier.

The growth of these new-media powers makes me think of Lowry Mays' famous 2003 quote about Clear Channel: "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," said Mays. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products."

And while I have to mention that Clear Channel has not always lived by this creed and the company has indeed paid attention to the content and at times shown some true innovation, this answer to the 'what business are you really in' question comes to mind all too often when one looks at what passes for innovation in American commercial radio today.

A few months ago my colleague Tom Webster and I sat through a series of presentations at a meeting tagged to "The Future of Radio." What Tom saw faster than I did was that the presentations were almost entirely about sales innovations. Radio companies were setting up new 'verticals' (e.g. www.chattanoogachow.com); or helping local retailers to set up their own Web sites (rather astonishing in 2010, but hey, good for these radio companies); or of course trying to find new versions of the ubiquitous "half-off" deals like the restaurant bargains that are now so common that they're practically an FCC mandate.

Tom correctly pointed out to me that no matter how clever some of these approaches are, they miss the point. They play into the Lowry Mays model of business - we are merely in the business of trying to find new ways to take advertisers' money away from them.

What's missing from discussions of the 'future of radio', especially from American commercial radio companies, is audio innovation. These approaches are almost entirely disconnected from what the real core business is - audio information, entertainment, and service.

Per usual, we have to look at other entities to find content-based innovation, not sales-based innovation. And in most of these cases, content is leading sales. This is the way we always been taught it was supposed to work - create a great media product that people want to consume and then sell advertising around it.

Take for instance, the ever-inventive blokes at Absolute Radio in the UK, a station I have already called "The Most Innovative Radio Station in the World." They are always up to something. To capitalize on the World Cup this summer, they sent a popular comedy duo down to South Africa to create great radio. This would be the equivalent of sending perhaps Mike Myers and Dana Carvey and asking them to send entertaining reports back. Absolute promoted the podcasts with call-ins to their 'breakfast show' and the podcasts were good enough to be played on the air.

How did they do? Well, the somewhat phenomenal results can be found on Absolute's public 'behind the curtain' site. (And by the way - who in American commercial radio allows such public viewing of their business as this blog does?) The campaign essentially dominated the iTunes podcasting charts, and I know from Absolute's management that the project netted an extremely large amount of profits from an extremely satisfied client.

The biggest driver of content-based innovation in America is certainly coming from the public-radio complex. To their credit, NPR has its own blog where they publish research data and one can see the explosive growth of usage from non-broadcast sources (what is it with innovators and their openness? Hmmm.) Public radio has created wildly successful programs that increasingly seem to have disconnected from their broadcasts - to most people "This American Life" (from PRI) and "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" (from NPR) are really just podcasts, not broadcast shows. And note the advertiser 'support' their online and mobile efforts are getting from mainstream advertisers.

And while some commercial broadcasters in the US are indeed involved in excellent Web-based efforts (see, for instance, www.weei.com), most radio station Web sites are still brochure sites that are entirely caked over with ads, few stations are streaming anything but their over-the-air signal, and podcasting, the most natural line extension for every radio entity on the planet, remains entirely under-developed.

Instead, it just takes any kind of tour of the Web sites of American commercial stations to see that these often seldom-updated sites are not exploring hardly any kind of audio-content innovation.  As an example, every commercial broadcaster in Utah and Idaho has always known there is a significant niche for LDS music (and the stations that play it on Sundays get huge numbers, typically), and yet somehow a small start-up called "Your LDS Radio ( www.yldsr.com)" comes up highest on Google and appears to be the leader in the category, not something from a commercial broadcaster, who one would think could easily take the crown and monetize it.

And there are dozens and dozens of potential content-based solutions - involving the kind of audio magic that everyone got involved in radio for in the first place - that are literally sitting out there unproduced because instead American radio stations are barely able to fully program their over-the-air services.

So, again let me remind the industry that we are in the business of creating great radio, and hope never to be forced out of it. . The advertising tail cannot entirely wag the commercial radio dog. Instead, somehow we need to allow a thousand seeds of content-based radio to blossom. If we go back to creating compelling audio entertainment and information first, we won't need all the sales-based innovation that is currently the focus of the American commercial radio industry.