Down goes radio

[Undertoad]

This is looking several moves ahead. But the trends have been starting for the last few years: broadcast radio's revenues started going into free fall.

For as long as I can remember, people I know have discussed some of the personalities on radio as if they were either friends, family or part of their circle of contacts.

I agree. But under the old way, you had to be listening when they were broadcasting, and you had to be in range of the broadcast, or you just plain missed it. Doesn't that suck? You have a friend or family member that you care about, and you have to make sure you're in your car in the morning, listening to that one thing, or you don't get your time with them.

This is what Mr Stern said on Thursday:

The future of media is going to change drastically in the next five years. You're gonna see, the Internet's gonna be available in your cars, everything is gonna be available. It's gonna be who has the best content is gonna win. And then you're gonna see there'll be guys like me, or, guys who have huge followings say basically "fuck it" to everyone, they start their own like what Kenny Chesney is doing, that Kenny Chesney app. Imagine if you had an app, where you just go on, you've got your portable device, you can listen to the show any time. And then you get all of our archives and everything right on the Howard -- It's not called Sirius XM, it's not called terrestrial radio, it's called "Howard Stern". And then I program it and I run the whole shebang. I don't have to answer to anybody, and I can just provide you with programming for a few dollars a week. Or a few dollars a month, rather.

We have this situation where, in order for there to be a Howard Stern brand there had to be other brands: radio station brands, satellite radio brands, etc. because massive infrastructure had to be in place in order to broadcast to a large audience.

Think about it: for radio, you have tall towers, beaming out massive amounts of RF energy. Or you have to launch several satellites into space and hook up a complicated satellite receiver to cars. That's a lot of heavy lifting.

So, in order to get Mr Stern's show, you had to buy $150 of radio with a special antenna and special installation, or deals had to be cut with auto manufacturers to build it all in, and then you had to pay $14.95 a month. And if you were out of satellite range, say in EU or AUS, you couldn't get it at all. (except via piracy)

The infrastructure to get audio on the internet is tiny in comparison, even if you have a massive audience.

Anyone with a smartphone or audio player and an aux input jack already has everything they need. Notice that the first people to leave radio are the tech-heads and spendy people with smartphones, leaving premium advertisers with less audience. The second people to leave will be people with late-model cars. Pretty soon only poor people and old people will listen to terrestrial radio. Like AM before it, in ten years US FM will mostly be Spanish stations and Rush Limbaugh clones.