Dances With Wolves

A wolf pack is extremely good at circling prey from a distance and then closing in on it. Their ability to travel over a large area to seek out vulnerable prey makes them good hunters. Even a grizzly bear is no match for a wolf pack, which will get close to its prey before testing its resolve in the form of a high-speed chase. Terrestrial radio in 2007 finds itself much like that grizzly, encircled by a pack of hungry wolves and in the high-speed chase of its life.

Wolves come in all forms, (some in sheep's clothing) with satellite radio being a wolf pack member in good standing. True to form, with heads down and eyes up, let's examine what they've plucked away from the grizzly bear on a day's hunt or two: Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, NHL,NASCAR,PGA, Howard, Oprah, Martha and local traffic for starters. Their music offerings, in multiple genres, dwarfs any tower station mainly because it's a commercial-free platform. They're slowly architecting their Talk formats -- terrestrial radio's LAST bastion of exclusivity.

If Congress approves the proposed satellite radio merger and the unified entity finds a resting place in something like an I-phone, it will pack one devastating punch to anybody's audio industry. In graduated time, 'in-car' listening metrics will give way to 'in-hand' listening as a coveted category. And the business that we know and love could be dramatically changed.

Wolves, Dogs ... and The Dangers Of Mistaken Identity

At this current juncture, I get the feeling that radio has been in so many dogfights over its lifespan that today it is mistaking the wolf for a dog. Dogfights such as television, 8-tracks, cassette/CD players and the like have conditioned radio to a false sense of immunity. Fact is, wolves are dogs! Genetically, there is little difference. Morphologically, there is a huge difference. A wolf is an aggressive predator. Technology and its ability to flatten traditional landscapes is a hungry wolf pack not to be mistaken for man's best friend.

Recently an ad agency took steps to redefine radio, stating in a press release, "radio should no longer be viewed as a discreet medium, but part of a greater array of audio media -- including satellite, online, mobile and a variety of personal media technologies." Radio, the world's first interactive media vessel, has been asked to rethink its importance in media. Perhaps in our inability to distinguish wolves from dogs, we have rightly deserved a reduced status.

It has been said that truth is pure and rarely simple, but this much seems clear: We are fast approaching the tipping point of a domino cascade that creates an endangered species. With radio revenue flat for the last seven years, Internet growth skyrocketing, and the prospect of hundreds of channels on a near-future Wifi dashboard, this game is now ours to lose.

How The Bear Survives ... If It Has The Will

I submit that radio is one bear that can level this fight -- if it can muster the will to research and invest in the new distribution platforms available to it. Every bit of data I read tells me that traditional AM/FM is still consistent across age, gender, income and locale, which means we've still got everybody's attention. The old hibernating grizzly is still the consensus pick for audio based media. This is called leverage (for now).

However, we must escape the mindset of a towered, rate card world and understand our listeners live in a world of options. The lack of an Internet strategy means you cannot compete with media at large. Every radio station in the future will have a revenue-generating online presence or they simply will not exist. Naturally there will be terrestrial audience erosion for the next decade. That is the nature of our business today.

Yet there will still be potential top-line growth. Smartly done, your web services presentation will change your local equation and make -- or break -- you.

Network and cable TV are doing excellent jobs of creating transparency between their distribution platforms. Truncated news and entertainment features have their long-form depth of topic on the TV website. They execute on the break and the crawl very effectively. We must take our 24/7 local and collective cumes and start shifting interactive emphasis to the local radio website, in a suite of options, as a direct tool of programming.

When you can imagine that your radio station was discovered online rather than the dashboard, it'll be easier to envision and construct the day when "Time Spent Viewing" exceeds "Time Spent Listening" as the benchmark metric at your station. Finding content that constantly creates new demand curves of stickiness, and monetizing it with hybrid on-air/online methods to a "with it" measured audience is the vision. Communicating digitally with that audience in a variety of ways is your future. The unique power of live on-air audio programming woven into the tapestry of web services is an unbeatable combination ... if we use it correctly.

I am merely regurgitating what smarter people have said about the future of our business, but at the same time warning you not to mistake an in-dash 8-track for something that can vaporize you. The answers lie within us all, if only we'll make the commitment to forget everything we know about radio and focus on a new frontier of communication.

Above all, remember the distinctive howl of the wolf. When hunting, wolves will sound the howl, signaling other pack members to pounce on targeted prey. As I see it, our mission is to build on our inherent strengths, make technology our friend, and gradually reduce that howl ... to a whisper.