Broadcast Future's Peter Fuermetz interviews radio programming consultant Dan O'Day.
O'DAY: I believe the commercial radio industry is at the moment of truth. This is when we decide whether we are going to progress and grow and survive or whether we are going to sit here and watch the world pass us by...and watch our industry disappear.
I actually have heard some people at radio conferences get up and say, "There's no problem. It's all in our head. Radio is stronger than ever." I don't see the truth in that.
There are so many more choices that listeners -- and don't think of them as listeners; think of them as people, as consumers, as human beings, as the people who live next door, the people eating next to you at the restaurant -- so many choices that people have in their lives that they did not have during most of radio's life.
For most of radio's life -- until very recently -- if you wanted to hear hit songs, there was only radio. Well, that's not the case any more.
But the magic of radio always has been that we do things, on a daily basis, that our listeners cannot do for themselves. That used to be playing great music, but now they can play great music.
It might be the way we cover news or sports, interviewing celebrities, being relevant to the listeners' lives.
But the more they do it themselves, if we continue to do it the less magical radio becomes.
For radio to survive and thrive we need to become more relevant. The fact is, to a growing number of people in the world radio is irrelevant in their lives. Until we regain that relevance, we will not regain that audience.
During my lifetime, radio has done very little innovation. What innovation there has been has been in formats, in tweaking and refining formats.
Radio people tend to wait for someone else to invent something. For someone else to solve their problem. For someone else to come up with a solution.
Right now one of the buzz words is "New Media" or "Web 2.0." Radio stations around the world are trying to decide, "Which New Media solution should we buy? Which company that is offering to do it all for us should we work with -- especially if they're offering to do it for us without charging us anything?"
But very few radio companies are actually innovating. Other industries have a Research & Development department. Radio stations do not. Radio stations are reactive. Something happens in the marketplace and they scurry about, trying to figure out how to deal with it.
If something good happens, great; that's a bonus for them. If it's something bad, they scurry around, trying to find a way to react to it, trying to find someone to save them.
But why? We have some of the most creative, brightest minds in the world working in radio.
At their core, real radio people are creative. Why are WE not innovating, rather than waiting for someone else to come up with something new?
When it comes to the Internet, if you can imagine it, somebody can write it. And that's the key to New Media, to Web 2.0 -- to understand that neither you nor I has a big enough imagination to imagine something that cannot be done on the Internet.
So the challenge is not, "How can we do this?" The challenge is, "What should we be doing right now to use new technologies to embrace our listeners? To remain current and relevant to their lives? To make it so they cannot do without us?"
