![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Radio radi.... oh....
Apr. 2nd, 2013 08:28 pmThe typewriter. The cassette tape. DOS. The chock-full newspaper delivered to your door each morning. All of them, casualties in the endless march of technology towards faster, smaller, smarter. Whole industries have been decimated by it in under half of my lifetime, but now we'll see if politics can somehow prevent the next logical corpse.
Terrestrial radio is about to suffer a killing blow to its profitability and influence, and while nobody's talking on the record (see what I did there?), the handwriting is plainly on the dashboard:
Cars don’t have radios, they have “infotainment systems,” with satellite services, online music and Web-enabled navigation and graphics. I can access 95,000 of my uploaded songs through the Amazon Cloud Player. I can use Spotify to stream just about any new album I want. HD Radio? No problem.
Somewhere on all the cars out today, is plain old AM and FM, but is it being overshadowed by popular cell-based services like Pandora? So say the auto audio moguls at the recent Radio Ink Convergence conference. Eric Rhoads, a publisher and longtime radio guy, got the word from a panel that included an unidentified General Motors source, a Gartner Research auto expert, as well as other industry professionals.
Rhoads heard this: “AM and FM are being eliminated from the dash of two car companies within two years and will be eliminated from the dash of all cars within five years.” Wow, really? There goes half my audience. It’s not exactly welcome news for NPR, which counts on a big commuter audience for Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
I suspect it's even worse news for the birthernutterbagger population of this country, who rely on their stations' free government licenses to broadcast their hate as close to 24/7 as they can get away with. Conventional radio ratings have been dropping like stones in recent years, with major players like Clear Channel consolidating markets and firing long-time local hosts in favor of more and more syndicated programming. No doubt they will see the end of factory-installed free radio receivers as being part of the Big Gummint Conspiracy to take their inspirational talk show hosts away from them, just like they're convinced that Obama is taking away their assault weapons.
For me, the transition has only just begun. Slowly, I'm learning to use my smartphone to take stations of my choosing with me beyond their terrestrial borders- whether it's unique music like the University of Rochester's WRUR or the sports talk blah-blah of Buffalo'sWGR or The FAN from New York. That latter one, 660 on your AM dial, has been my one consistent car pre-set for over 30 years; from its days as WNBC where it brought in Imus (back when he was funny) to the past 25 years of WFAN after it assumed the frequency in 1988, I've kept that preset in every car I've ever owned or driven, even though it's rarely useful before sundown and often no good even after that.
Sports packages are part of the Digitial Rights Division of the airwaves. I had to go out and buy a portable AM radio this past fall to listen to the local broadcasts of Bills games at the gym, since none of their flagship AM station's streaming options are allowed to carry NFL contests unless you buy the league's radio package. Likewise, the Mets- if the FAN isn't coming in over the air, I can't just stream The FAN to hear them. Sabres games, so far, can be heard on the feed of their flagship, but who knows how long that will last?
My next car, I suspect, will have a hole in the dash where I'm used to the radio being, with a plugin in its place for the phone/tablet/whatever to charge it, amplify it and maybe even make it easier and more legal to control. Yet I also suspect that will come with more limits on how often I can make changes, and with more cost once the stations realize they have to replace that advertising revenue from it just coming in free through an antenna.
Somehow, it won't be the same as that thrill that came with my first-ever car ownership- that I, now, got to decide where the buttons on the dashboard would go. And even though that range went from only five AM stations in my first-ever car to over 18 digital choices now, the infinity of the Internet will likely only make choices harder.
Terrestrial radio is about to suffer a killing blow to its profitability and influence, and while nobody's talking on the record (see what I did there?), the handwriting is plainly on the dashboard:
Cars don’t have radios, they have “infotainment systems,” with satellite services, online music and Web-enabled navigation and graphics. I can access 95,000 of my uploaded songs through the Amazon Cloud Player. I can use Spotify to stream just about any new album I want. HD Radio? No problem.
Somewhere on all the cars out today, is plain old AM and FM, but is it being overshadowed by popular cell-based services like Pandora? So say the auto audio moguls at the recent Radio Ink Convergence conference. Eric Rhoads, a publisher and longtime radio guy, got the word from a panel that included an unidentified General Motors source, a Gartner Research auto expert, as well as other industry professionals.
Rhoads heard this: “AM and FM are being eliminated from the dash of two car companies within two years and will be eliminated from the dash of all cars within five years.” Wow, really? There goes half my audience. It’s not exactly welcome news for NPR, which counts on a big commuter audience for Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
I suspect it's even worse news for the birthernutterbagger population of this country, who rely on their stations' free government licenses to broadcast their hate as close to 24/7 as they can get away with. Conventional radio ratings have been dropping like stones in recent years, with major players like Clear Channel consolidating markets and firing long-time local hosts in favor of more and more syndicated programming. No doubt they will see the end of factory-installed free radio receivers as being part of the Big Gummint Conspiracy to take their inspirational talk show hosts away from them, just like they're convinced that Obama is taking away their assault weapons.
For me, the transition has only just begun. Slowly, I'm learning to use my smartphone to take stations of my choosing with me beyond their terrestrial borders- whether it's unique music like the University of Rochester's WRUR or the sports talk blah-blah of Buffalo'sWGR or The FAN from New York. That latter one, 660 on your AM dial, has been my one consistent car pre-set for over 30 years; from its days as WNBC where it brought in Imus (back when he was funny) to the past 25 years of WFAN after it assumed the frequency in 1988, I've kept that preset in every car I've ever owned or driven, even though it's rarely useful before sundown and often no good even after that.
Sports packages are part of the Digitial Rights Division of the airwaves. I had to go out and buy a portable AM radio this past fall to listen to the local broadcasts of Bills games at the gym, since none of their flagship AM station's streaming options are allowed to carry NFL contests unless you buy the league's radio package. Likewise, the Mets- if the FAN isn't coming in over the air, I can't just stream The FAN to hear them. Sabres games, so far, can be heard on the feed of their flagship, but who knows how long that will last?
My next car, I suspect, will have a hole in the dash where I'm used to the radio being, with a plugin in its place for the phone/tablet/whatever to charge it, amplify it and maybe even make it easier and more legal to control. Yet I also suspect that will come with more limits on how often I can make changes, and with more cost once the stations realize they have to replace that advertising revenue from it just coming in free through an antenna.
Somehow, it won't be the same as that thrill that came with my first-ever car ownership- that I, now, got to decide where the buttons on the dashboard would go. And even though that range went from only five AM stations in my first-ever car to over 18 digital choices now, the infinity of the Internet will likely only make choices harder.