Eric F. Richards wrote:
D Peter Maus wrote:

No question. But that was not the point. The point is that Radio is
responding the the age old complaint about commercial load. Radio does
this frequently, btw. Then returns to maximizing profits through load as
soon as the heat is off again.

No surprise there. That's as plain to see as the sunrise. And as
predictable.

Mel Karmazin, current head of Sirius, said in a meeting at CBS when I
was there, that if a station isn't running at least 16 units an hour,
that they're wasting their time. This in the face of recent (at the
time) research presented the Radio division that said that listener
fatigue began to produce drop off after 12 units.

Karmazin's position was then that there is a tipping point of ratings
lost versus revenue gained. And that it makes better business sense to
push the unit count to THAT point, than lose potential revenue by
running minimum effective spot load.

That, sadly, is no surprise either.

What is surprising is that, even after you got out of radio as a
business, that you *endorse* this way of thinking.


No, I don't. But for those, like yourself, who really don't like the
way things are going, I offer an explanation why things are the way they
are. IF you'll recall....I began my foray into this thread by explaining
why, if you're going to complain about IBOC interference, you need to do
so on the basis of LOCAL interference. That interference out of the
market is simply not on the radar.

I don't like it. But then Radio no longer serves me. So I don't use
it as much as I once did.



Not actively, of course, you deplore it in your statements. But you
say that it is the way it is, and that it'll never change.


No it will change. But it won't change the way you like it to. If you
want to change things in a different direction, which gets back to my
original point, you need to make some noise based on the way things
really are. Not the way you perceived them to be long ago in a galaxy
far away.

FCC will only hear complaints based on issues which they can embrace
based on the current mission they have for Radio.




But it will. Like the degraded HD signals, there will always be
another source of material. Podcasts with better fidelity than
digital radio. DVDs with full HDTV capability. Renegades like Marc
Cuban -- did you see his HDTV channel? Stunning! What passes for
HDTV from the major networks is, even now, substandard even compared
to analog NTSC! Europeans must laugh at that!

No, people will go elsewhere. The monopoly on care-free audio
entertainment held by radio is over -- it's now podcasts, satellite,
MP3/OggVorbis and the unkillable Hydra of file sharing.

Radio will go the way of the movie theatre -- a slowly dying
anachronism.

And we, the consumers -- the *customers* -- are poorer for it.


Poorer we will be, yes. But Radio will adapt. It's not likely to go
away. It will adapt as it has for 80 years, to changing markets,
changing competitive forces. We may not recognize it in a new form, but
it will still be there. It will survive.