Tag Archives: Uber

April 23, 2023 · 3:00 am

What Is That?

One of my granddaughters, who’s 8 years old, was at our home the other evening, before heading off to dance class, when she looked into my curio grandfather clock and exclaimed, “What is that?” I walked over to her to see what she was pointing at, and saw it was one of my miniature radios. I said to my granddaughter, it’s a radio, to which she replied, “What’s a radio?”

What’s a Radio?

We’ve all probably seen the YouTube videos of young people trying to figure out what a rotary telephone is and how to use it, along with having a good chuckle along the way. But, if you’re a lifelong radio person, like me, having your granddaughter ask you what a radio is, can be rather disconcerting.

My grandkids are all connected to audio sources via their iPads, smartphones and smart speakers. The only place they may even be familiar with a radio is when they ride with their parents in the car.

Saving AM Radio

Last week’s blog was another in a series about the state of AM radio in America and if it could be saved. You can read that article HERE

As the latest monthly radio audience ratings get released, I can’t help but notice how most markets have one big AM radio station – maybe – that’s still a dominant force. In our nation’s capital, there is none.

Recently, seven former heads of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) said “AM radio serves as a linchpin of the infrastructure behind the federal National Public Warning System, which provides emergency-alert and warning information from FEMA to the public during natural disasters and extreme weather events.” Which made me wonder if our nation’s capital is in severe peril, as AM radio listening is virtually non-existent.

However, fear not, as I’m sure that no one in Washington, DC doesn’t know that WTOP News Radio at 103.5 FM is fully staffed and ready to provide that emergency information 24/7.

AM Radio Formats

The real problem, it seems to me, is that people confuse the AM and FM broadcast bands with a particular format. The reality today is, both commercial broadcast bands are filled with music and news/talk/sports formats. What has been different, for many years now, is more people listen to FM radio stations than they do AM stations; and by a wide margin, with most of that listening taking place in people’s cars and trucks.

Car Radio Listening

Research presented this past week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas says 46% of radio listening by people over the age of 13 only takes place in the car; a number that jumps to 58% for teenagers, according to Edison Research.

The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that most people’s car trips are only three miles or less, so they aren’t listening for any length of time.

When asked what they listen to on long car trips, streaming jumped to 68% and broadcast radio fell to 32%.

Today’s Youth & Car Ownership

If radio’s last beachhead is a vehicle dashboard, the future for the next generation and car ownership should also be concerning.

It was only about two decades ago that 80% of American youth (18 year olds) had a driver’s license; today that number has fallen to just 60%. Here’s some of the reasons for the drop:

  • Lyft and Uber take them anywhere they want to go
  • Cost of getting a driver’s license
  • Cost of owning a car
  • Fewer teenagers have jobs compared to past decades
  • Having a car is no longer a “virtual necessity” (which the Supreme Court enshrined in law in 1977 for anyone living in America)

What Do Today’s Youth Do?

Today’s youth have their faces buried in apps and social media. It’s all about Instagram and Snapchat, YouTube and video games.

When you can easily access everything you want, from home on your digital devices, it’s easy to understand why teenagers today have little interest in getting a driver’s license and owning a car.

Digital interaction has replaced real social interaction for today’s youth.

And that’s another fly in the ointment of future radio listening by the next generation.

In my youth, there was nothing greater than putting down the top on my convertible, cranking up the radio and driving off to explore the world in my own car.

“On some nights, I still believe that a car

with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles

if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”


-Hunter S. Thompson

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January 15, 2017 · 4:00 am

Radio’s Jobs Didn’t Move to Mexico

75It seems like no matter what line of work you’re in, someone is finding a way to take your job away. If you’re in coal mining, you think the EPA is doing it to you. If you’re in manufacturing, you think its Mexico or China or some other country that pays their workers less and offers no benefits. But is that really what’s happening to jobs?

Where are the (Radio) Jobs?

I got into radio when I was in high school because I wanted to be a disc jockey. (Discs were what records were once called. Records were how we played music on the radio off of turntables, after live musicians were replaced by recorded music on the radio.) My DJ days are long behind me, but I don’t remember anyone from my earliest days being upset that records replaced the need for live musicians to play music on the radio. Do you?

Musician’s Union

I was also a musician. Played trombone. This was another way I earned money to go to college in addition to my radio work.

A fund set-up to promote live music from the playing of recordings on the radio is where the money came from to pay for my performances in local community concert bands. It was called the “Musicians Performance Trust Fund.”

To be eligible to be paid under this fund, you had to join the local musicians union AFL-CIO. I was a union member at age 15.

Truck Drivers

As high wage manufacturing jobs were leaving, many turned to the profession of truck driver. Truck drivers are well paid and people thought, let’s see them automate that. Truck driving employees have been untouched by globalization and automation. You can’t send truck driving in Ohio to be done by person living in Mexico. But that other factor, automation, is now on the horizon.

Uber Driverless Truck Delivers 50,000 Beers

I’m sure you’ve heard about driverless cars and that many expect they will be a reality by 2020 (3 years from now). But while many in the radio industry worried about the loss of radio listening in the car if the car starts driving itself and now everyone can watch TV or surf the internet, I worried that more middle class jobs would soon be automated, never to return.

Wired magazine reported in late October of 2016 how OTTO (Uber bought this company for $680 million) was driving the beer truck down the highway in Colorado without a human behind the wheel.

So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that we soon will see driverless cabs, buses, trains, planes, boats and a whole lot of people formerly known as the middle class will be out-of-work.

This same thing is happening in higher education too via the internet.

The Fate of the DJ

So where did the radio jobs, like being a disc jockey (DJ) go? They were high-teched. Automated. The industry calls it “voice tracked.” The very technology that did away with the need to have live studio musicians playing music now no longer needs the person that played the recordings of those musicians.

To radio personalities this is not news. It’s been that way since the late 20th Century.

To the multi-tasking, hard-working, over-committed and under-paid middle class it might have seemed as nothing had changed. Heck, they might have even seen the change as an improvement. Certainly recorded music was better in some ways than live studio musicians as it provided more variety in musical entertainment.

It’s Technology, Stupid

The wonderful high-tech devices designed to make our lives so much easier are also taking away the well-paying jobs that created the middle class of the 20th Century.

What’s the world’s 21st Century plan to deal with this change?

Ad Supported Media

The current crisis in ad supported media is that in a world of infinite media choices, and unlimited advertising avails, the money that used to be enjoyed from the sale of advertising is now less than previously realized.

About two years ago I wrote in this blog an article about what I saw as the future of ad supported media. I wrote it after reading Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the 21st Century.” I went back and re-read that article and see the trend lines of the graph on page 357 still all moving in the same direction and that should give us all pause.Picketty Chart on page 357

21st Century Media Business Model

All media is moving to a pay-for-play model. HBO, Showtime, Hulu, iTunes Radio, SiriusXM, CBS All Access, Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify etc. The ad supported model is coming to an end and the pay for what you want is replacing it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in the 4th quarter of 2016 that streaming revenues off-set declining sales of CDs and digital downloads.

People now rent what they want versus own.

And where does that leave your business?

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June 7, 2015 · 6:41 am

Digital Feudalism

I follow Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter. He’s been observing, writing and talking about the new collaborative or sharing economy for some time now. He says it’s the future and where all business is headed.

You might have heard of Uber (the taxi company that owns no cars) or Airbnb (the lodging company that owns no rooms) etc. and how they are growing by leaps and bounds. The venture capital is flowing into these new business models leveraging this collaborative concept.

So you can imagine my surprise to read this headline: “Jeremiah Owyang just dropped a bomb in Paris.” (Not literally, but figuratively) The “bomb” being the reality that “the driving force behind this disruptive movement isn’t peer relationships with customers,” but “the one percent own the collaborative economy.”

Why was this a stunning announcement? Because the concept of this new value proposition called the Collaborative Economy “is organic, peer-to-peer digital interaction to create opportunities that bypass outmoded processes of brick and mortar businesses.”

Much like I wrote about in my blog post “The Future of Ad Supported Media.”

Owyang was revealing the dark side of this new economy. The rich were getting richer and the poor, poorer. While some tried to dress this new sharing economy in the clothes of Ronald Reagan’s “Trickle-Down” economics, the reality is clear; that’s not what’s really happening. The world’s wealth-gap continues to expand and it’s picking up speed.

For media companies, this new economy is seen as sharing of thoughts, ideas, information and creation via the Internet. The result has seen the number of dominant media companies go from somewhere around fifty back in the 1980s to about five around the turn of the century.

The old ways of doing business – printing newspapers & magazines or broadcasting over radio & television – are dying.   The “smart money” is moving into digital marketing and advertising. The party’s over, turn off the lights, it’s time to go home – OR IS IT?

Have you heard about ad blocking?

It turns out this a big deal and growing exponentially. The advertising industry has simply looked the other way as though it didn’t exist, but it does.

While only about 15% or so of the US folks are using an ad blocking extension, other countries around the world are approaching 40%. Gaming sites are reported to be even worse with over 80% of their ads being blocked by gamers. Frederic Filloux goes into a lot more detail in his blog post titled “Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios.”

This could be a real opportunity for radio especially. But it needs to look in the mirror, put its big boy pants on and do what it knows it should have been doing all along.

Barry Drake spells it out better than I ever could in his book “40 Years 40,000 Sales Calls” (which I highly recommend you pick up and read). Barry writes the following prescription for radio’s future:

“…there must be investment, the fuel necessary to attack the four major issues.

In Programming:

  • Fresh content to attract a new generation of listeners, 95 million millennials

  • Promotion and advertising to achieve prominence

In Sales:

  • Severe reduction and limits to inventory  (Not a gimmick, smart business)

  • Contact with the BOSS (calling on decision makers by local sellers)

The very entity that caused so much grief is going to eat its own tail.

This is radio’s next big opportunity to reinvent itself and reassert itself as the powerful medium that it always was.

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