Infinity Broadcasting & Corporate Hari Kari
(corrections made)
I will not support your failed business model.
On the days when I drive to work (more often than not now that the sun sets at about 4:30pm, it seems), I like listening to Howard Stern. The humor is often juvenile and mindless, but I find it a somehow relaxing way to start the day. What I find to be far more interesting is the ongoing battle between Howard and Infinity Broadcasting, the FCC and the religious right. Stern is the top money maker for Infinity Broadcasting, yet the company has removed him from markets. Funny, whenever Stern is removed from a market, that station drops from #1 to far behind the competition.
Stern is also leaving terrestrial radio in a highly publicized move to Sirius Satellite.
So, terrestrial radio is pretty broken. The efforts of the FCC and the religious right are at direct odds with the desires of their target marketplace. But there is something even more broken about radio.
Radio stations (conglomerates, really) generate most of their revenue from advertising. That is, they have to break up the programming with advertising just like television. On television, a 1 hour show will actually have 43 minutes of content and 17 minutes of advertising — usually in 3 or 4 commercial blocks.
While driving into work, the local Infinity Broadcasting station played 19 — yes 19 — advertisements back to back. Of those, 4 were repeats. It was something like 15 minutes of solid advertising. Clearly, this drives away customers. It certainly drives me away as I typically hit a different station as soon as the commercial starts (I decided to actually count this time).
That is insane! I don’t understand the logic. Clearly, they are trying to boost revenues by selling more ads. If so, then why is the delivery in a form that is so incredibly easy to avoid simply by hitting a button? You’d think they would break up the content a bit more and interleave it with the advertising or something.
And to think that these idiots wonder why they are losing market share to satellite, internet media, and other delivery mechanisms….
November 11th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
I don’t know why they do it, but it certainly makes it convenient. The commercial breaks for Stern are always 15 minutes long, so you don’t even have to miss much/any of the show if you change stations. (Even more convenient, when it coincides with stopping at the coffee shop half-way through my commute.)
November 11th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
Stern is moving to Sirrius not Clear Channel. Also he is currently employed by Infinity Broadcasting, it was just that in a few markets he was on a CC station
Stern may make stations #1 for a specific demo for a specific time period, but any large urban areas will most likely have a hip-hop or R&B station at the top, and many times will have a news talker near the top. A similar thing happened in the DC area. A local radio team went to do the morning show on a rock statiob from doing the night show on a talk station in an effort to raise the ratings at the rock station. It failed. They greatly outperformed the rest of the station, they were consistantly top 5 in the mornings while the station was consistantly ranked in the low 20 ratings wise, and it switched over to Spanish music format. Another thing not really known is that Stern is typically outpreformed, or competed with, in many markets by local talent.
November 11th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
As far as I know Stern is on zero CC stations and Infinity Broadcasting is under the CBS umbrella.
November 11th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on. They’re acting in desperation to prop up sagging revenues by overselling their ad placements.
-jcr
November 12th, 2005 at 1:47 am
I can’t believe you’ve stooped to Stern - that’s below mindless!
Give me a shout - I can’t believe we’ve not talked in forever…
All because I saw this
http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/buddhabrot/
and thought of you
Ask me about your Zoo halloween pic on the net thanks to C Saum…
November 12th, 2005 at 2:02 am
Oh, and as for what to listen to instead of craptastic HS: the Blues!
Or have you forgotten SRV and Buddy after all that hippie shit!
Can you say BitTorrent to a portable or a CD…so many recent discoveries…there are even new talents to bring pleasure…Los Lonely Boys, Eric Bibb, Johhny A, Jason Ricci,
And if you’d rather have more brain cells ‘On’ at drive time - try Podcasts of NPR or the BBC or how Marx wasn’t that far from some of near future (really odd! and true!) or distance learning subjects, or anything else…
But low-brow ranting about T&A on some 2-bit attention whore in his studio, or if you are ‘lucky’ the perhaps some form of bigotry and ignorance of most anything as a chorus of sycophants fight for pole position behind his asshole?
Well, that is just time you’ve wasted you’ll never benefit from in any manner ever.
November 12th, 2005 at 8:54 am
I’m not sure Infinity has removed him from any markets either. What they have done is anounced his replacements for when he moves to Sirrius. Maybe one or two smaller market stations have removed him, I’m not sure, but the major markets still carry him. Many radio industry “experts” believe Infinity should just drop him now, release him from his contract and start the switch to new talent as soon as possible.
Another thing about Stern and how he messes up radio is how most radio shows do have commercial blocks, usually two 8 minute blocks every hour or something close to that. For the longest time Stern has broken this rule and run his show on his own schedule. It’s gotten so bad in the past that his show, which is scheduled to end at 11am has run nearly an hour over as he has caught up with commercials during Robin’s news.
November 12th, 2005 at 9:01 am
What really turns me off about Stern is how he has sold Sirius during this run on Infinity after he anounced his deal. He claims they have 3 million subscribers, however that is their projected total after the 4th quarter of this year, yet he has claimed this for months, when in reality the official number was less than 2 million. Considering he owns a piece of Sirius I wonder what the FEC would think of this act of overselling the network.
Also, he has never invented anything in radio.
November 13th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
What has happened is that the ownership restrictions have been reduced by the FCC to the point that many stations in the same market are owned by the same company. The vast majority of stations in larger markets are owned by only a couple of companies. So when you change stations you are still listening to radio from the same company. During ratings weeks it does not make any difference which station of a particular company you are listening to. Thus there is really little to no competition.
Back in the day, when I was in the radio business, a company could only own a maximum of one AM and one FM station in a market. Thus in larger markets there was substantial competition. It was not uncommon for a station that had changed ownership or wanted to pick up it’s ratings to advertise: “More music, less talk”. I haven’t heard that in ages.
My personal peeve is the lack of music. At times I hit six station buttons in my car and not one is playing music. No wonder why the iPod is such a success–if only I had an iPod jack on my radio.
November 13th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
I personally prefer more talk and less music. Personalities build listenership more than music itself.
November 15th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
I’ve become a huge fan of listening to audiobooks on those days when I actually have to show up at work. They do cost a fair chunk of change, but the San Mateo County library (and based on your pictures, you’re probably near there if not actually a resident of said county) has (last time I checked) 3000+ fiction titles on CD.