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RADIO AIRPLAY 101 - Traditional Radio vs. The Web |
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Saturday, 12 June 2004 |
How is web radio (and downloading) going to impact your efforts in reaching
mass numbers of people with your songs? Fortunately, for those who have
studied media (yes... "media" is a topic in and of itself,) there is an
answer that we can use. But you need to separate "radio" from "downloads"
in order to understand it.
"Radio" (web or broadcast) is the "cause" step; it causes the awareness and
desirability of a song to be built. "Downloading" is the "result" step; it
is the result of what happens after radio causes the song to be desired.
And this is true whether the radio and downloading are free or not.
Web radio will soon be just another box that we tune-in to. The biggest web
stations (meaning the ones that have the most listeners) will be run by
those that know how to run big stations: Traditional radio operators.
There will always be tons of small stations (web and broadcast)... just as
there are already tons of small AM and FM stations (there are 12,000
stations in the U.S. alone.) But most listeners, since the beginning of
radio, have always been concentrated on just a few stations on the dial.
Why? Because those stations know how to promote themselves. Adding a few
more thousand small web stations is not going to affect the balance that
much... most listeners are still going to be packed into a few (200 or 300,
worldwide) big stations, just as most web users today are packed into just a few search engines, even though there are thousands to choose from.
So, just like today, the future of radio will consist of key stations (web
or broadcast) that you will want to get your songs onto, in order to reach
the most people. 50 big stations (web or broadcast) that reach 50,000
people each, will always be preferable to 5000 stations that reach 5 people
each... because of the amount of work it takes to get on EACH station.
(Note: As of the year 2001, the average number of listeners to a web station
is less than 1. Yes, that's less than one listener per web station, on
average.)
Thus, what happens in the future is that the difficulty in getting your
songs on the big web stations becomes the same as getting your songs on the
big broadcast stations. It's just like if you were opening a restaurant:
It's more difficult getting your new restaurant into a crowded mall than it
is getting it into an area that is deserted. It's always more competitive
when there are a lot of people.
Next, add to this the fact that within a few years you will not have to
manufacture CDs anymore (all stations will play music files directly... mp3
or otherwise), and what you end up with are artists and labels with a lot of
money saved that they are going to use for promotion (phone calls, faxes,
visits.) This will make it imperative that big stations get the most push
to play your songs, because they will (and are) getting it from everyone
else. This is nothing new... it's the way music and radio have worked for
80 years. And even before radio, when the best you could do was have your
songs sung in theaters and music halls, the biggest places always got the
most push to use certain songs, because those places had the most listeners.
As for "downloading" a song, it will always be the end result of hearing
that song. Nothing changes here. And no matter which "result" you want...
charging for a download or giving it away for free... the "cause" is going
to be the same: Hearing it on a web or broadcast station.
Thus, the amount of work it takes to get your songs heard will always be
directly proportional to how many listeners you are trying to reach, just
like the bigger clubs that you want to play in are always going to require
more work in order to book, compared to the small ones. Amazing!
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 12 June 2004 )
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