Shaking Things Up

12 things that would help radio

A few things that would help radio:

  • Giving listeners a way to vote on your web site for songs they love and want to hear more, like JELLI — but not as disruptive to your formatics.
  • Allowing listeners to “meet” other listeners on your web site who love the same songs they do, and to “chat” with each other in real time, building a true social community.
  • Creating a product listeners will talk about, every daypart, every day. Hint: this won’t happen playing researched music with voice-tracked liners.
  • Offering listeners who like discovering new artists and songs a way to hear them on your station web site before you have to commit to giving them air time.
  • Building a permission based email club of individuals built around themes that you can personalize and super-serve, like book clubs, cooking, parenting, or new music discovery.
  • Completely redesigning your web site for users, not for banner ads and company clutter, and funding it so it features great, fresh video content every day.
  • Discussing the harm that over-commercialization and clutter have caused to listening with the same sense of urgency that PPM has brought to jock talk and personality shows.
  • Learning to be happy with 10% returns, a profit margin almost every other industry would be giddy about, and investing all the rest in creating stronger content.
  • Hiring one PD for each station in every Top 100 market.
  • Firing your VPs of Programming, Marketing, and Operations who inevitably do far more harm than good. Use the money saved to fully staff your stations.
  • Restoring real control to every local market GM and PD. If they can’t run their stations successfully, replace them, but first give them a chance without corporate meddling and politics.
  • Firing the robber barons who have bankrupted our biggest radio companies, fired our most valuable talent, and distinguished themselves only for their greed and inability to generate one creative thought on improving the product we want listeners to consume more often.

I’m sure you have more, and I can’t wait to read them. Just use the Comments section below. I’ll send the final list of ideas to the NAB (not that THAT will do any good).