off the leash

Future of Radio: Radio 2.0

Posted on July 8, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Throughout this series of posts about the future of radio, I’ve made a point of how surprisingly well traditional terrestrial radio has hung on and how it has maintained its audience despite a plethora of digital alternatives. But ultimately few question the inevitability of the internet replacing the technology that was derived from Marconi in the early 20^th century. One country, Norway, has already announced a date for the full replacement of FM transmissions with new digital audio broadcasting technologies.

Digital can free up radio in a number of ways:

There can be an unlimited number of stations.
On the internet there are no geographical limitations as to where a station can be heard
Broadcasts need not be live, and the audience can have the ability to listen when and where they choose.
Government regulation and fees go away as their control over bandwidth loses relevance.
It is far less likely that a few large corporations can monopolize whole markets as they currently do on AM and FM.
Radio can be available on an even broader set of devices than terrestrial radio already is and importantly, it can be available on the devices most commonly used by younger generations.
It makes broadcasting available to everyone, much as the internet potentially made everyone a publisher.

Traditional radio, despite having proved more entrenched than some other traditional media, nonetheless will face the same sort of digital transformation that other media have faced in the last couple decades. As the internet and the web became more and more popular and as the number of people with broadband proliferated, print and television in particular were often slow and awkward in making the transitions. The print media initially responded by taking what they published in print and posting it online. Only after they started to see their audience drift away to online information services, whether it be Google or Facebook, or even the Huffington Post, they began to realize that a digital information service required a different approach than a once a day print newspaper.

Radio’s first response to the digital world was similar. Put up the live stream of the radio programs that currently existed on the station. What came to be called Web 2.0 emphasized interactivity, personalization and on demand information. Digital audio services have delivered some of these same qualities. Pandora lets you program your own radio station. Podcasting lets you subscribe only to the programs you want to receive and to listen to them at your leisure. You can even ask a digital assistant like Siri or Alexa to play only the song you want to hear at that moment. Are we perhaps on the verge of seeing Radio 2.0?

But we should also keep in mind that terrestrial radio has not hung onto its audience because anyone thinks the century old technology is better. It’s because of the programming and specifically the local programming that is led by people who are part of the community. It has local news and traffic and weather, community service announcements and even local advertisements. Radio builds communities and it’s not just geographic but can be ethnic or age group or lifestyle communities. That’s all something that algorithms aren’t very good at. It’s a blind spot for digital news and digital video and it is likely to continue to be for digital audio as well.

Can radio 2.0 leverage the capabilities that digital offers while maintaining the characteristics that make radio unique? Here are a few possibilities:

As a community builder, radio is a perfect partner for social media. Not just as a way of promoting radio, social media itself could be a broadcast vehicle, or it could offer a kind of conference call environment that talk radio currently lacks.
Advertisers salivate over the potential for GPS to bring very targeted, perhaps even hyperlocal ads, to your smartphone. Can GPS be a kind of program selector for radio, offering one type of programming for someone in the car, another for someone on a hike in the woods and maybe some chill-out programming for people waiting on line at the DMV?
Many of the successful early web-based information services relied heavily on curation. Can radio be a curator of audio? Take podcasts, for example. As they continue to proliferate they become harder and harder to find and organize. Radio could fulfill that function and could broadcast podcasts on demand. It would even be a way of providing ‘stations” for niche audiences that want things like poetry or short stories.
As we approach a time of sensor equipped wearables, can your wrist band tell your smartphone delivered radio to play something with a beat when you’re exercising or maybe something dreamy when you’re sitting in the park?

But more than anything else, what I look forward to with digital radio is hundreds of stations, localized maybe even to the point of a neighborhood or a building, managed by local talent who are part of the community the stations serve. A little bit like the way radio got started.

Posted in Radio, Uncategorized | Tagged broadcasting, digital, internet, media, Radio | 3 Comments

Faces of the Fourth

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Ken Dowell

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Fourth of July Parade, Montclair, N.J.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Happy Fourth!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Fourth of July, holiday, Montclair, New Jersey, parade | 3 Comments

Once Every Couple of Years at the Whitney

Posted on June 27, 2017 by Ken Dowell

The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, Samara Golden

Cauleen Smith

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

The 78^th Whitney Biennial was held this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Biennial is a kind of state of the art exhibit of contemporary work. The emphasis is on young and emerging artists. All the pieces shown here were done between 2015 and 2017. The Biennial dates back to 1932 when it was established as an annual event. It went biennial in 1973. Art critics look to the Biennial to identify new trends in contemporary art. Not sure I could identify any of those trends. But I can show you some brilliant works that were part of the exhibit.

Veterans Day,Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Jessi Reaves

La Talaverita, Sunday Morning New York Times, Aliza Nisenbaum

November Edit, Jack Riepenhofff with Peter Barrickman

Painting

Split Ends, Shara Hughe

Black Sun, Tala Madani

In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stairs), Jo Baer

Belle Isle, Carrie Moyer

It’s a Sports Bar That Used to Be a Gay Bar

Photography

November 10, Workers, Venice, Louisiana, An-My Le

Part of the Silent General project, photos by An-My Le

Sculpture

Heart Atrium, Kaari Upson

Local police find fruit with spells, GCC

One Thousand Museum, Zaha Hadid Architects

Man’s best friends Raul de Nieves

Posted in Art | Tagged art, contemporary art, museums, New York, painting, phtotgraphy, sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art | 6 Comments

Future of Radio: Will We Still Call It Radio?

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Back in 2009, when the Pew Research Center released its annual state of the media report, it had this to say about radio: “Radio is well on its way to becoming something altogether new – a medium called audio.” It added: “Audio’s future, unlike print or television’s, seems less a crisis and more an intriguing fragmentation.”

(Image by Averie Woodard)

Radio as audio means it is not just the AM and FM stations on your traditional radio dials. It’s streaming services like Spotify, Pandora or iHeart Radio. It’s Internet only radio stations, its satellite radio and it’s the music channels on your cable TV system It’s podcasts, in fact you might even add Audible. Another word to describe it is listening.

Defined like this, radio will surely never die. Pew’s 2009 projection was spot on. Almost all of the alternative forms of radio/audio mentioned above have grown since that time and terrestrial radio itself, however destined it seems to be replaced by a digital only version, has hung on smartly. In an earlier post I described it as the last stand of the analog world.

Here are a few stats that back this up:

eMarketer.com estimated the number of internet radio listeners in the U.S. in 2016 at 176 million, almost double the number from 2010.
In 2009 Pandora had 7 million active users. In 2016, it has 81 million.
While the shine may be off SiriusXM, it is in fact still growing with 30 million subscribers in 2016, an 8 percent increase over prior year.
All this however, does not seem to be taking away from traditional radio’s audience as a 2015 Nielsen survey showed that within a one-week period, 92% of Americans age 12 and over listened to AM or FM radio

I don’t see any future time in which we are not listening to radio as a set or type of audio programming. What we might not listen to, however, is the radio device. At a recent conference Roger LaMay, the GM of WXPN, a public radio station in Philadelphia, provided some statistics that show the different device preferences of different aged listeners. The numbers pretty clearly show the listeners to radio in its traditional forms are older and the new options are first embraced by younger listeners.

“Across NPR member stations, the average age of over-the-air listeners is 58… On tablets, it’s 53. On smartphones via the NPR News app, it’s 49. On Facebook, it’s 42. For NPR Music and NPR Twitter, it’s 39. On NPR’s website, it’s 38. For NPR podcasts, it’s 33. And for NPR on social media, it’s below 30.”

One of radio’s greatest assets as a medium in the number of places where it has been embedded. Most stereo systems and several generations of music players included a radio, your bedside alarm clock may well have included a radio and even some TV’s. Perhaps most importantly, pretty much every car has a radio.

Now there is a whole new set of devices to access a whole new set of audio options, including classic radio. There’s the desktop, the tablet, likely some wearables. But above all else there’s the smartphone. How many other devices has this palm of hand computer replaced? Firstly the telephone, but then the camera and the alarm clock. For me it has meant retiring my watches, a whole drawer full of maps and a vehicle installed GPS system. No more rolodex, no more calendars or personal diaries, no more phone books and no more printed newspaper.

And likely no more free-standing radios. The smartphone not only has apps that deliver streaming music services but it also gives you access to online apps of radio stations, breaking the geographic access barriers of terrestrial radio. And while it doesn’t seem to be widely known, most phones include FM chips that allow you to listen to over-the-air radio.

As with other forms of entertainment and information, the future of radio, or if you prefer, audio, is likely to be device agnostic. And the type of delivery, streaming, over-the-air, archived or on-demand is also likely to be of far less significance than the content itself. We will choose among them in the same way we have traditionally chosen from among different radio stations, maybe the touch of an icon instead of the push of a button or turn of the dial. And we might have to go to a museum to see a free-standing radio.

Posted in Radio | Tagged audio, broadcasting, devices, future, media, Radio, smartphone | 3 Comments

Family Life

Posted on June 17, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Taking the twins for a swim

Mom and dad’s watchful eye

Snacks!

Baby portrait

Edgemont Memorial Park, Montclair, N.J.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animals, baby geese, goose, gosling | 3 Comments

The Future of Radio: Is It the End for Big Corporate Radio?

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In the 1990’s the FCC relaxed its restrictions of radio station ownership and set the stage for large corporate consolidation of radio stations. Before long, two or three giant operators gobbled up a majority of the nation’s radio stations in most of the major markets.

Chief among those consolidators was Clear Channel Communications, which was later sold in a private equity transaction to Bain Capital and Thomas Lee Partners. It was renamed iHeart Media. iHeart owns 858 radio stations in more than 150 markets.

The ClearChannel/iHeart stations are the epitome of big corporate radio. They are divided into narrowly defined formats. Their playlists are computer generated based on ratings. They are intentionally and unashamedly predictable and repetitive. I don’t think that puts them in a very competitive position.If that’s what you want to hear, there are plenty of places to find it without having to listen to all the ads on commercial radio.

So how’s it working out for them.? Well, according to a financial statement by iHeart earlier this year, ““We incurred net losses and had negative cash flows from operations for the years ended December 31, 2016, and 2015, as well as for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.”

The leveraged buyout of ClearChannel in 2008 saddled the new entity with $20 billion in debt And they can’t pay it off. In a recent SEC filing iHeart acknowledged that they might not in fact make it through the year.

Then there’s the number two player, Cumulus Media. They own 454 stations in 90 markets. Seems as though they aren’t doing much better. In a filing at the end of last year they warned, “we may be required to seek protection from our creditors through a bankruptcy filing.” Their stock, which was worth about $30 a share a couple years ago, is now worth about 50 cents per. And in the first quarter they lost $7 million.

The financial troubles of these behemoths has meant there are even fewer local DJs, less local staff, less local programming, less local news. Instead we’re subjected to packages of data driven and computer generated programming that comes out of headquarters and is broadcast nationally. Robo-radio.

So if you want to consider what is a threat to the existence of radio, it may not be about Pandora or YouTube or Spotfiy. Instead the biggest threat is radio stripped of its local interest and built for the ad sales department rather than the audience.

Viewed in this light, the pending collapse of these large corporate consolidators can hardly be considered bad news. There’s the potential for more than 1,000 FM and AM stations to be put in play as these corporate entities collapse. Will one corporate owner replace another, accumulating the same sort of suffocating debt and delivering the same non-descript programming.

I’d like to think this could be the opportunity for a renaissance for radio. Maybe dozens, if not hundreds, of these stations could fall into the hands of independent local owners. In that case, radio can go back to its roots with local talent building communities of listeners with local programming tailored to their interests.

Posted in Radio | Tagged broadcasting, ClearChannel, Cumulous Media, future, iHeart, media, Radio | 1 Comment

Future of Radio: Is It the End for Terrestrial Radio?

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In my series of posts on the history of radio, one was titled “Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star After All.” It was about the time when television became popular, the late 40’s and early 50’s, and the networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, virtually abandoned radio. Many, including the guys who ran those networks which supplied the most popular of radio programming, were ready to write the medium off.

But instead of fading away, radio had a revival. Transistors, car radios, teenagers, DJ’s, rhythm and blues and rock and roll all combined to make radio more popular than ever with both more listeners and more influence on a few successive generations of Americans.

Fifty years later, many are again questioning the future of radio. With streaming services, Spotify and Pandora, with satellite radio, podcasts and internet radio, with smartphones that allow you to carry your whole music collection in your pocket, what happens to all the those AM and FM radio stations?

Maybe nothing.

The Pew Research Center’s 2016 State of the News Media annual report didn’t have a lot of good news when it came to traditional media. That is, except for radio. “The American public’s consumption of audio content, which includes radio news and talk shows in addition to music, sports and other programming, continues to increase. Advances in consumer technologies allow increasing numbers of Americans to choose to listen to radio on a variety of newer platforms, while at the same time, terrestrial radio continues to reach the overwhelming majority of the public.”

The Pew report continues: “Traditional AM/FM terrestrial radio still retains its undiminished appeal for listeners – 91% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to this form of radio in the week before they were surveyed in 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research.”

The radio industry trade publication Radio Ink concurs. “Still as strong as ever, radio continues to confound competitive naysayers by expanding its connection to analog listeners despite the proliferation of pureplay alternatives like Pandora and commercial-free experiences like satellite radio. In fact, radio was the only analog medium to show growth year-over-year in Nielsen’s analysis (+1% in time spent listening) and it is the only medium to command a consistent share of daily media activity (17%), no matter the demographic.”

So why is radio the medium with nine lives? Turns out that simple old AM/FM radio has a lot of things going for it.

Radio is free. There’s no monthly subscription required. It’s not bundled into some expensive package by your cable operator or broadband provider. It’s in the air. Turn it on and you’re good to go.
Radio has a business plan. It has nearly a century of history being supported by advertising. While traditional on-air spot advertising has shown a small but steady decrease in recent years, it is still by far the largest stream of radio revenue (75% according to Pew). Wil Pandora ever make money? (For the first quarter of this year Pandora reported more revenue, more subscribers, more advertising. And a loss of $132 million. Even higher than the loss of $115 million in last year’s Q1.) Why is there only one satellite radio provider? And who’s making money on podcasts?
Media advertising itself is in a state of flux. You can block ads on your phone or computer. You can record and fast forward past them on TV. But radio ads are pretty much unstoppable. And while display ads have been widely discredited in terms of effectiveness, radio has been practicing the newly-popular “native advertising” approach since the 1920’s. Just have your favorite DJ describe the great dinner he or she had last night at a local restaurant and you’ve got the kind of meaningful endorsement advertisers struggle to replicate on other mediums.
Some newer cars today come equipped with satellite radio. Some have wifi. Some have wireless connections to your smartphone. But ALL of them, old or new, cheap or expensive, have radio. And you don’t have to set it up or figure out how to work it. Here’s the numbers from Pew: “…traditional AM/FM radio is – and by a large margin – the most common form of in-car listening. Just 8% of listeners in the car named online radio as the source they used most often and 12% named satellite radio, compared with 63% who named AM/FM radio as the audio source they turned to most often. That is up only slightly from 60% in 2015.” That’s right it went up!
The whole world doesn’t have broadband. The whole country doesn’t have broadband. Last year the FCC said there were 34 million Americans without broadband. There are still rural areas with little or no good internet options. There are people who don’t have smartphones and there are people who can’t afford the only available broadband. Some folks are unaware of how to find and listen to podcasts and some others don’t know how to connect their phone to their car speakers. But they can get radio and everybody knows how it works.
Radio scales at no cost. Station operators’ expenses are the same no matter how many listeners they have. There are no additional data costs if your online audience grows. Nor do your listeners need a bigger data plan to listen. And royalties are not calculated based on the size of the audience.
And finally, here’s one I hadn’t thought of (courtesy of Slate): “When the zombie apocalypse arrives, radio will save your hide. Anyone with a generator and an antenna can broadcast radio, and everyone listening hears the same key information in real time.”

Is it the end for terrestrial radio? No. At least not for now. Radio is looking like the last holdout of the analog world. But will radio have another revival? I’ll discuss that in next week’s post when I raise the question “Is It the End for Big Corporate Radio?”

Posted in Radio | Tagged AM/FM, broadcasting, car radio, future, media, Radio | 13 Comments

Made by Immigrants

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Ken Dowell

In Ybor City, they still roll cigars by hand.

In 1886 Don Vicente Martinez-Ybor established a cigar factory in what is now known as Ybor City, a section of Tampa, Fla. Martinez-Ybor was a Spaniard who moved to Cuba at the age of 14. His career is cigar manufacturing started there. He later established a factory in Key West and then moved it to Ybor. Other manufacturers followed and Ybor City became Florida’s first industrial town. Those factories and the jobs that they offered attracted a work force made up almost exclusively of immigrants from Cuba, Spain and Italy. Romanian merchants followed, establishing stores in the city, and German lithographers came along and are credited with inventing a new art form, the cigar label.

A central feature of life in late 19^th century and early 20^th century Ybor was the social clubs for Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants. El Club Nacional Cubano was founded in 1899. Two years later another cigar manufacturer Igancio Haya started the Centro Espanol. L’Unione Italiana came along in 1894 with the initial membership of 116 Italians and eight Spaniards. These clubs not only served as the hub of social life for their membership, but fulfilled a variety of functions that included a type of trade union and a healthcare provider.

The heyday of Ybor City as a cigar manufacturing hub was between 1890 and 1930. At one time it had tens of thousands of residents and it was almost entirely owned and occupied by immigrants. 500 million cigars were made in Ybor in 1929, but that also proved to be the beginning of the end for the industry. During the 30’s the demand for premium cigars waned and in future years manufacturers would turn to automated processes rather than hand-rolling. A decline set in that lasted through the 50’s and 60’s until the city was almost completely abandoned by the 1970’s.

Ybor began to make its comeback in the 1980’s as artists moved into the district. Gentrification followed and by the 1990’s Ybor was being reinvented as an entertainment hub, the “Latin Quarter” of Florida. It continues to be a thriving nightlife center with bars, clubs, restaurants and retail. The Ybor Chamber of Commerce describes it as “a cultural and intellectual hub for new-age immigrants.” It is a National Historic Landmark District and 7^th Avenue, the main retail drag, was named by the American Planning Association as one of the “Ten Great Streets in America.”

7th Avenue, one of the ‘Ten Great Streets of America’

Posted in History, Travel | Tagged cigars, Florida, history, immigrants, Tampa, Ybor | 4 Comments

A Mayakoba Boat Tour

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Setting off from the docks of the Fairmont Mayakoba.

Mayakoba is a one square mile resort area in the Riviera Maya section of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It is home to four luxury hotels. But it is also surrounded by undeveloped lands that include beach, sand dunes, mangrove and jungle. It is home to some 300 species and that number is growing as surrounding areas become developed and birds and wildlife find a refuge here. There are canals running throughout Mayakoba. These images are from a boat tour on those canals.

common moorhens

Green heron

Blackbird

Tilapia

Posted in Travel, Uncategorized | Tagged Birds, canals, jungle, Mayakoba, Mexico, travel, Yucatan | 9 Comments

Quintana Roo

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Quintana Roo is one of 31 Mexican states. It is on the eastern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. These images start in Cancun and proceed south along the coast through the Riviera Maya region to Playa del Carman and end in Tulum, an overall distance about 80 miles.