This Is Getting Weird

By Frank Absher

It happened again, and the journalist in me would have expressed serious doubts about such a probability.
In my mind, most people are passive when it comes to music radio. They are barely conscious of what’s playing.

We recently threw a dinner party. Guests included a retired CEO, a high-powered attorney, and their spouses. I put some music on the house’s sound system but kept the volume low so we could talk.

About two-thirds of the way through dinner, one of the wives asked what station was playing on the system. The music, she said, was excellent.

I had to explain it was an Internet station. She wanted to know how she could get it in her home, so I told her about the special radio, warning that I had paid a couple hundred dollars for mine. The price didn’t scare her away. She had to have one.

The same thing happened earlier this year with different couples. Admittedly, most of these folks are not targeted by broadcasters. The people are past age 54, and their income levels are off the charts of most radio station demographics. But this has to make you wonder.

Why is it that a station – any station – playing quietly in the background of a dinner party can motivate a diner to ask about it and then go out and buy a special radio so he/she can listen to it at home?

But let’s take this to a hypothetical situation: What’s going to happen when we have access to Internet radio in our cars?

We’ve already seen how the radio management around the nation has decided to go “cookie cutter” with formats, taking some kid in a broadcast booth in Tucumcari and having him/her VT for stations all over the country. “Live and local” is a thing of the past, so if I can get music I like from the Internet or satellite and drive with it in my car all over the country, I have absolutely no reason to listen to broadcast radio.

Maybe my limited experience with a couple diners who like what they hear and are willing to spend good money to get it is an anomaly.

Still, if the nation’s radio programmers don’t pull their heads out pretty soon and see the light, there won’t be anyone left listening to their mediocrity.

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