Children of The Universe: I Bought and Sold Radio and I Know it's Dying

I was living on the Navajo Reservation (Navajo Nation) in 1998 and decided to resign an advertising account that I had had in California for eight years.

They were a good account and I had seen them go through explosive growth during the time that I handled it. There were thirty something stores and after about five years of my handling their advertising for the first time individual stores started breaking the million dollar barrier.

I remember when FCC ownership regulations were going to change and I knew that a few big players were going to strangle radio just as sure as a noose around some poor souls neck as the trap door beneath him flips open.

What I couldn't see then, was that that trap door was the Internet.

I wrote and produced the commercials. I bought the air time. The air time was the big thing. Their biggest and most dangerous competitor was a national brand with huge ad budgets. We had to outperform them in our market. And we did.

From the inside, as a buyer, whether or not I liked a radio station's format meant nothing. The important thing is the numbers. Who is listening and when. It's still the same today. If you're buying air time, you buy the numbers, not the format.

There were interesting moments.

I bought air time a quarter at a time – meaning that sometime in late November I bought January, February and March. Sometime in late February I bought Apri, May and June and on and on through each year. This way I could get the best deals for my client.

The year the O. J. Simpson trial concluded I bought time on the big talk radio station that covered the trial. What I didn't know until the end, was that I bought time on that station that aired exactly the week that the verdict came down from the jury. When it became apparent that the jury was out the station began selling more time because everyone was listening to them waiting for the verdict. I got a call offering me air time at about 10 times what I was already paying for it. Of course, I declined. I already had our tickets for that flight, even though it was a far bigger flight than anyone could have known when I bought it several months beforehand.

Another time I was in a large office paying a bill. This was one of those offices that has a zillion desks and no dividers between them. Just a bunch of folks doing their work in one big space. I was standing at the counter waiting for the person waiting on me to come back when I heard one of my spots on the radio that was playing in the background. No one said anything about it, neither did I. A few minutes later, as the person came back to finish taking care of my transaction, someone in the office said out loud, "where do you wanna eat lunch today?" Someone else said, "let's go to ___________ ." Since my client served a particular kind of fast food, I would run their spots before lunch with this exact scenario in mind. Just imagine how I felt to actually see it in action.

But it's all dying now. I can see it. Everyone in the business who isn't in denial can see it.

Chris Anderson over at the Long Tail blog just wrote about “Jack FM,” the “fastest growing new format in radio today.” How often have I heard about the “fastest growing format in radio?” but Chris sums the most important part of it up this way,”

"My response: Jack does seem to be a nod in the Long Tail direction, but I can't imagine it will do more than slow the decline of music radio...

Compared to personalized playlists (iPods), a choice of hundreds of narrow-targeted playlists (satellite) ... In an era of infinite choice and narrowcasting, such mass-market broadcast distribution--the ultimate one-size-fits-all model--just can't compete."

How can it? And not just in music. People are putting what they want to hear and see on their personal players and listening to exactly what they want to hear. Not what some radio station says they want to hear. In the arena of books and spoken works Audible is jumping in with the same service. Everything is being digitized so it can be transported and stored wherever the listener or watcher wants it – so it can be enjoyed when they want to enjoy it.

Here's the most important question for you as a creative person who has a book or song or video. Where is your work set up so that a “trailer of it” can be viewed or listened too and then paid for and downloaded to that personal player? Unfortunately, the big players don't want to talk to you. They've still got one foot in the old model that relies on big labels and Publishers to determine what they will carry.

You shouldn't be unhappy at all about the death of radio as we know it. You probably weren't getting any benefit out of that anyway. They weren't playing your stuff – it's a tiny little club that few are priveleged admittance to.

But this next wave should worry you if you're not set up so your work can be paid for and downloaded. This is the power of DRM for the average person who is creating work and would like to test and see if it will sell. We're not talking about the absurd restrictions that are put on content by some of the big players in the field – we're talking about the ability to protect the work until it's paid for then being able to have it downloaded and delivered immediately – without the cost of physical reproduction and shipping, not to mention the impossible task of physical distribution and being carried in brick and morter retail establishments, which, by the way, are going the way of radio.

Aren't you glad it's over? Aren't you glad that you know enough to be glad?