Looping Into Oblivion
by Sean Carolan

You, for the sake of argument, are about to purchase a radio station. In your hand is a check, written out in the amount of several million dollars. In front of you is a paper license, which is the sum total of your purchase; everything else necessary to run a radio station is your responsibility.

You hand over the check. You get the license. At that point, everything altruistic you ever believed about radio, about how it can cater to a specific audience whose needs aren't met in any other way, about public service, about the music you might once have considered playing once you owned a radio station ... all of it evaporates, as you focus on the one thing that suddenly matters: How to make the payments on that several million dollar check, and still make payroll.

So you do market research. You find really average people. You find out what, on average, people like to hear - not love, like. You program your station based solely on that. You find out that average listeners, who tend to like music rather than love it, tune out if they hear something unfamiliar. So you whittle away the most unfamiliar songs in your library. Somewhere, more market research arrives at the conclusion that most people know of about five hundred songs, and that they tend not to remember much more than that. So you limit your library to the five hundred most popular songs you can get, which makes your library identical to the other stations that are using the same market research.

So far, you've done everything by the book, and you're guaranteed results. And you get them, for a short while.

There's an axiom in management theory, that you can choose from four possible paths, in terms of the effort you expend and the success you reap. It's a matrix derived from there being right things to do and wrong things to do, and right and wrong ways to do them. Of course, everyone wants to do the right things well; if you're doing the right things wrong, it'll likely become clear there's an error, as with doing the wrong things incorrectly. The real danger is when you do the wrong things right, because you're in danger of having every indicator you have tell you that everything is humming along smoothly, right up to the point where you plot your course flawlessly into the mud.

And radio, right now, is doing the wrong things right.

People learn from radio; it's an educational tool even when it's not trying to be. And right now, it's teaching people that in about two weeks of listening they'll hear everything they'll ever need to hear. That's because radio stations are programming to prevent tune-outs when they should really try to promote tune-ins. To paraphrase Laurence Fishburne in "Searching for Bobby Fischer", they're not playing to win, they're playing to not lose. And they've been led to believe, by every market indicator out there, that they'll keep their least committed listeners most comfortable by playing familiar music, over and over. They've deluded themselves into thinking they've got their listeners corralled in their loop.

Enter the consumer electronics industry, which has learned that you keep your buyers coming back by offering something new. Lately, the "new" things tend to help customers listen to as much music as they want without interruption or repeat. You can fill up a 100-disc CD changer with more music than you can hear on most radio stations now, and that doesn't even count new MP3-playing disc players. Essentially, without much effort, a listener can program their own radio station, just by hitting the "shuffle" button.

Somewhere along the line, these folks will stop listening to the radio for music. They'll evaporate, ratings-wise, into their own collections, and radio will have a hard time getting them back using current methods. Ratings will go down, ad sales will collapse, and radio stations will go bankrupt.

I'll be first in line at the auction.

©2001 Sean Carolan