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.

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.

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.

--
Eric F. Richards

"This book reads like a headache on paper."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/readi...one/index.html