[cr-india] why radio sucks

[sajan venniyoor]

Many of the things that suck on American radio, like the ones Koerner writes
about here, are already visible on Indian FM: commercial channels that are
"a desert of robo-DJs and pop pabulum"; the limited number of FM licenses;
the enormous legal cost of getting on the air; watered-down programming;
commercial FM's tendency "to squelch competition from low-powered FM
stations" - you name it, we have it.

Well, it took them 60 years to screw up; it's taken us just 5. *Suck de, *
India.

Sajan

*Why Things Suck: Radio*
By Brendan I. Koerner,
<http://www.wired.com/services/feedback/letterstoeditor>18 Jan 2008,
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/su_radio

*Unless you enjoy* hearing the same insipid Fergie song a dozen times a day,
chances are you loathe mainstream radio. And for good reason: The FM band
between 92.1 and 107.9, where commercial stations reign, is mostly a desert
of robo-DJs and pop pabulum.

The sad decline of conventional radio is an Econ 101 lesson in the
consequences of artificial scarcity — and a B-school case study on the
limits of scientific management. The scarcity is the fault of the Federal
Communications Commission, which decided in the mid-1940s to confine FM
broadcasting to its current frequency range, roughly between 88 and 108 MHz.
The FCC's spectrum-allocation rules, designed to prevent station signals
from interfering with one another, further limited the number of
broadcasting licenses it granted in any one market.

By the '70s, thanks to a fecund period in popular music, a generation of
audacious DJs, and cheap radios, FM had become wildly popular. That made
stations valuable properties — so valuable, in fact, that only large
companies could afford to buy and manage them. "The legal cost alone of
getting on the air is enormous," says Jesse Walker, author of the radio
history Rebels on the Air. The government could have eased this situation by
allocating more spectrum for radio use and increasing the number of
licenses, Walker argues. Instead, Congress chose to relax the rules
regarding the number of stations any one entity could own.

That's where the scientific management comes in. The biggest barriers to
building a radio audience are the polarizing power of music and the plethora
of choices on the dial. So, when corporations like Clear Channel started
buying up stations in the late '90s, they set about building a
lowest-common-denominator product that would be attractive to the most
listeners. "There's this idea of the perfect playlist," Walker says. "Find
it with research and attract the perfect audience." But it turns out that
the most lucrative audience is really just "people who will not change the
channel during the ads." The result: watered-down programming designed
primarily not to offend.

So bored consumers are just tuning out. Listenership among 18- to
24-year-olds is down 20 percent over the past decade. Stations have
responded not with bold programming but by cutting costs. They've also
expended considerable resources to squelch competition from low-powered FM
stations and Internet radio. Not that it has helped — 85 percent of
teenagers now discover new music through sources beyond the FM dial. Even
the biggest radio fans envision a grim future for the medium. One bright
spot: The inevitable shift to digital radio could create more room for more
types of content.
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