RadioBanter - Niche HD formats won't work

If HD radio survies you're probaly hoping more format choices.. But don't
hold your breath!

FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio by Richard Neer Villard Books

The sad truth about modern radio is that it's not--repeat not--about playing
music or talk that listeners like to hear. Radio is about promising discrete
audiences to advertisers--it's an advertising-delivery vehicle. The truth is
that most radio listeners don't want to hear songs they don't recognize or
that haven't been sufficiently hyped. Only what researchers call
"sophisticated" listeners are into music experimentation--and they don't
comprise a big enough demographic to merit many radio stations of their own.
(One example is the Adult Album Alternative (AAA) format that plays "safe"
music skewed at tasteful adults--Billy Bragg, Son Volt, and David
Gray--radio for folks who grew up on Elvis Costello.) In fact, when radio
researchers perform what they refer to as "call-outs," they play
seconds-long snippets of songs and simply ask listeners if they recognize
them. Sometimes they don't even solicit a value judgment.

The more things change the more they remain the same.. This information goes
back to 11/01

For hardcore rockers who believe that someone out there may still find a new
way to combine three chords, or for those who just miss the old days, good
news is on the horizon: satellite radio. By December, a company called XM
will blanket the country with its subscription radio service. For the price
of a $400 radio to receive the signal and a $10 per-month fee, XM will beam
100 channels of music, news, and entertainment to your car through a tiny
satellite antenna affixed to the roof. Instead of one classic rock station,
you'll get four, broken out by decade and genre. You'll get a channel of
unsigned bands and others for classic country, '40s Big Band, bluegrass and
folk, disco, trance, hard rock, and acoustic. XM and rival Sirius (which
debuts next year) ape the hyper-successful business model of cable
television, believing that people will pay for "free TV" if it gives them
the narrowcasting they desire.

To maintain their listeners, regular radio stations are spending millions to
convert their analog signals to digital in hopes of improving sound quality.
Their pitch is that AM will sound like FM, and FM like CDs. I've tried this
technology on FM stations and the difference is palpable. All of this could,
of course, lead to the ultimate irony. If AM ends up sounding as good as FM,
it could herald the return of music to the AM bandwidth. After all, lots of
today's AMs are just like yesterday's FMs--undervalued, low-budget places
where a station owner just may give a creative deejay and program director
license to experiment. We can dream, can't we?

FRANK AHRENS covered the radio industry for three years for The Washington
Post's Style section. He now covers the business of media, entertainment,
and advertising for the Post's Business section.