A *lot* of polish. I'd really like to see this environment up and running, but it's Windows 3.11 butt-ugly. Hard to imagine a large number of users getting past the appearance.
Your problem is that by clinging to ratings, you are forcing yourself to try to serve as many people as possible, and that does mean the smallest common denominator, which people grow weary of very quickly.
Yes, people cycle in and out all the time. In morning drive, we assume we are turning our audience every 20 minutes. That's the way it has always been, not something new.
The average TSL (Time Spent Listening) for a radio user is about 3.5 hours per day on weekdays. This is scattered throughout the day, and we are programming to this reality. This is one of the reasons we have short playlists: we have a very small window of opportunity when a radio listener walks into our store, and we want the best stuff right at the front and on the aisles.
Being ratings-driven is just the way things are. To provide free radio programming, we must sell ads. We must maximize the number of weekly radio listeners to compete in a hugely crowded and transient marketplace.
The only way we could abandon radio's current business model is to provide subscription services. But we can't do that -- our licenses provide only that we broadcast. In any case, I think most people feel overwhelmed by their existing subscription services: basic cable, XM or Sirius, HBO, telephones, cellphones, broadband, software services, etc. etc. etc.
There's no doubt that new technologies will challenge broadcast radio. But we're free, easy to use, familiar, and available damn near everywhere.
Given that most adults don't go to live performances, or clubs, or watch MTV, and probably don't watch the kind of that would feed the interest, where is "interest" generated?
Most adults have firmly ossified musical tastes by the time they hit middle age. That's why stations are so generational: age groups gravitate to a corpus of music, and are generally quite happy that way.
Which is why we have so many gold-based radio formats: Classic Rock, several flavors of Oldies, Classic Country, Adult Contemporary variants, and the like. Adults generally listen to what they know. Generally.
There are adults -- and I'm sure some are reading here -- who continue to explore new artists and music. They're the exception, pop music's version of early adopters.
Or is the teen market driving the adult market?
YOUR teen years drive your present musical tastes.
I think you badly underestimate adult live performance attendence. Adults *are* exposed to a lot of music on TV: in commercials, sitcoms, movies, and on channels like VH-1.
I agree that MTV is positioned very young these days. I'm 43 and find very little there which appeals to me. That's due in part to MTV's shift from music videos to lifestyle programming, which is all about my kids, not me. I watch a lot of VH-1.
I followed your original, and it's an entirely fair question.
Radio *does* feed listener tastes. But so do sales and live performance, TV, MTV, club play, and word of mouth.
Which is why we play currents. Carefully, in adult formats. You'd be surprised how interested we are in local CD sales. Our current-based station -- a lot of them, at least -- pay a lot of attention to things like Soundscan. It's a service that tracks how many units of what are moving in the stores.
We can't see who (age, etc.) is buying what, so sales info is a bit limited in its usefulness. But sales often lead airplay, and we can sometimes see hits coming before they really break big on the radio.
This is really a GREAT observation you've made, and a legitimate challenge to how we radio people look at our industry. I think you'll see our company and others address the issue over the next few years with a new crop of formats and variations old ones. This is already happening: Clear Channel developed a new gold-based Hispanic format last year that's doing very well, and my station is a new Adult Contemporary hybrid.
Rock is at an interesting crossroads right now. CHR has already shattered into several families of current-based formats. Soft AC has hit a brick wall (the core audience is rejecting the new music now). Country is long overdue for a format fork.
The advent of PeopleMeter audience measurement will also pressure us to innovate.
It could end up being a very cool time to program radio stations.
I'm with you on wanting to edit Slashdot posts after they're posted.
I have a lot more money and a lot more liking for music than those stupid punk teenagers that you pander to.
My station panders to 35-49 year-old females, but thanks for playing.
If you're willing to pay for XM or Sirius, go for it. They're great, for what they are. Sirius has a particularly strong Talk line-up. XM has excellent sports. Both have plenty of music choices.
And XM is owned, in part, by Clear Channel. The devil is right there in your dashboard.
Spare me the arguments about how "it's not really what people want" because it's force-fed by Clear Channel...
For what's it's worth, most of us Clear Channel programmers would love to have deep, eclectic playlists loaded with interesting songs and artists.
The problem is that not enough people would listen to our stations for us to keep the lights on.
We're not force-feeding anything. Our short playlists are dictated by the market, and we spend million each year researching the musical tastes of our various target audiences.
While people bitch and wail about short playlists, the fact is that when we exercise poor music discipline, our ratings generally decline. Since commercial broadcasting is still predicated on a free radio, advertiser-subsidized model, low rated stations go away pretty quickly. We're a publicly held company, and have to return value to the stockholders (this could mean you).
We know tight playlists aren't for everyone, but they're for *most* people. Amazing as it may seem, radio listeners actually like hearing their favorites on a regular basis. Adults, in particular, punch out more often than not when something new comes on -- no matter how good it is.
Real music enthusiasts with well-developed tastes have a lot of options open to them these days, if they don't mind paying for them. Hell, I own an iPod, too. But free radio is still out there, playing the hits, ready whenever you need a pop fix or breaking news.
RDS adoption is growing. it's certainly worth adding to Radio Shark.
I agree this gizmo would be cooler if it recorded streams, too. Think I'll still buy one, if only to aircheck the other morning shows while we do ours.
> I think the President has done a fantastic job in revitalizing our space program
Yeah: like cutting Hubble. And racking up record defecits while privately funded firms remind us what the excitement of space exploration used to be all about.
If Bush really wanted to show some leadership, he'd splash ISS, scrap the Shuttle, and set some realistic short-term goals that his administration would actually have to pay for.
NASA *is* doing great work with its robotic programs. But most of those programs were green-lighted when President W was still back in Texas making his bones by polluting his state and signing 152 death warrants.
The same can be said for any Mac, really. I've been fortunate to have endured only two hardware issues with any of mu Mac boxes -- both of which ended up bering bad aftermarket RAM.
I no longer buy anything but Crucial, and all is well. Cheap RAM is a bad idea in a Mac.
... I can see why the M$ crew loves this guy. Can't stand their OS, but Ballmer is one hell of a cheerleader.
Hey, if they can integrate Miami Vice and Lotus, maybe they can find a way to wedge some security into Windows.
Been seeing something like this for a while in my blog's comment spam: an apparently innocuous note with a URL that looks like the author's name (maybe something like "http://joeshmoe.com"). The URLs go nowhere. I'm sure they get redirected to pr0n and veye-ah-gra sites a few days after posting.
> Give me a break. Even Nike has a flash mp3 player that does shuffle.
And iTunes already shuffles, true. But buildinga player that's predicated on a randomized playlist is a rather different idea, designed to expose the digital music collectons we keep on iTunes.
It's not just that the player shuffles, but that it pulls a random playlist out of your much-larger master collection and airs them out.
Shuffle's interface is both innovative and daring.
> A word processor isn't rocket science but it takes a lot of work and time to get it right.
Absolutely. But I'm guessing they thought Open Office was too heavy and complex. Same reason they bypassed the also-excellent Mozilla for the KHTM rendering engine when they finally stepped out with Safari.
It's a G4, so pretty much all the PPC Linux distros will work. Take yer pick, Ladies 'n' Gents. Dual-boot with OS X, unplug your office monitor and keyboard, and jack in. On the cheap, at that.
> The new iPod is for the runners, for the people who take it with them to the gym, etc
Exactly. Commuters, too. Load Shuffle before bed, take a whole day's music (and much more) out the door in the morning. Always different. Freakin' genius. Once again, Apple changes how we manage our music.
Total home run. Well done, Apple. Watch the "random" meme spread to other product categories.
In all seriousness, I'd assume it handles RTF. Don't see why we'd expect Apple to import/export.swf, given the nearly non-existent Mac Open Office user base.
Not a lot of ponies, but this ought to sell. Damn: it's smaller than the cube (and considerably more powerful, even though it's no PowerMac). Hope their supplier can crank a lot of these things. Wonder how it will impact the sales of its more nimble iMac sister?
As I expected, iWork is a competitor for Microsoft Works, not MS Office (yet). That must be where they are heading, since it's bundled with presentation software. Won't get there without a spreadsheet app. But if it's light and fast, I might buy a copy. Never have liked Office's gaudy take an Aqua. A lot of folks have little need to open an Excel sheet.
Shuffle is a home run. Won't replace the iPod, kills off Apple's flash-based competitors, and doubles as a storage device. Great price points. The random music playback interface addresses all the repetition complaints we in radio hear on a daily basis. Just load it every morning and go. It's always different. Damn.
Best consumer-level Macworld ever. Once upon a time, Macs weren't just for well-heeled suburban types. With these affordable products, Apple has found its way home. Shame on Sony for letting Apple humiliate them -- again.
> I never read agreements that I signed when I install other software or when I sign up for things like Hotmail, etc.
And I close my eyes when I blow through red lights and stop signs.
Why would we Apple fans be upset if someone brought out a really cool portable audio player? Either we like the iPod or not. I know there are platform fanatics that confuse brand and personal identity, but most of us just like our gear for whatever it does. New products just drive prices down and give everyone more choices.
Slashdot Mirror
A *lot* of polish. I'd really like to see this environment up and running, but it's Windows 3.11 butt-ugly. Hard to imagine a large number of users getting past the appearance.
Yes, people cycle in and out all the time. In morning drive, we assume we are turning our audience every 20 minutes. That's the way it has always been, not something new.
The average TSL (Time Spent Listening) for a radio user is about 3.5 hours per day on weekdays. This is scattered throughout the day, and we are programming to this reality. This is one of the reasons we have short playlists: we have a very small window of opportunity when a radio listener walks into our store, and we want the best stuff right at the front and on the aisles.
Being ratings-driven is just the way things are. To provide free radio programming, we must sell ads. We must maximize the number of weekly radio listeners to compete in a hugely crowded and transient marketplace.
The only way we could abandon radio's current business model is to provide subscription services. But we can't do that -- our licenses provide only that we broadcast. In any case, I think most people feel overwhelmed by their existing subscription services: basic cable, XM or Sirius, HBO, telephones, cellphones, broadband, software services, etc. etc. etc.
There's no doubt that new technologies will challenge broadcast radio. But we're free, easy to use, familiar, and available damn near everywhere.
Most adults have firmly ossified musical tastes by the time they hit middle age. That's why stations are so generational: age groups gravitate to a corpus of music, and are generally quite happy that way.
Which is why we have so many gold-based radio formats: Classic Rock, several flavors of Oldies, Classic Country, Adult Contemporary variants, and the like. Adults generally listen to what they know. Generally.
There are adults -- and I'm sure some are reading here -- who continue to explore new artists and music. They're the exception, pop music's version of early adopters.
Or is the teen market driving the adult market?
YOUR teen years drive your present musical tastes.
I think you badly underestimate adult live performance attendence. Adults *are* exposed to a lot of music on TV: in commercials, sitcoms, movies, and on channels like VH-1.
I agree that MTV is positioned very young these days. I'm 43 and find very little there which appeals to me. That's due in part to MTV's shift from music videos to lifestyle programming, which is all about my kids, not me. I watch a lot of VH-1.
Radio *does* feed listener tastes. But so do sales and live performance, TV, MTV, club play, and word of mouth.
Which is why we play currents. Carefully, in adult formats. You'd be surprised how interested we are in local CD sales. Our current-based station -- a lot of them, at least -- pay a lot of attention to things like Soundscan. It's a service that tracks how many units of what are moving in the stores.
We can't see who (age, etc.) is buying what, so sales info is a bit limited in its usefulness. But sales often lead airplay, and we can sometimes see hits coming before they really break big on the radio.
This is really a GREAT observation you've made, and a legitimate challenge to how we radio people look at our industry. I think you'll see our company and others address the issue over the next few years with a new crop of formats and variations old ones. This is already happening: Clear Channel developed a new gold-based Hispanic format last year that's doing very well, and my station is a new Adult Contemporary hybrid.
Rock is at an interesting crossroads right now. CHR has already shattered into several families of current-based formats. Soft AC has hit a brick wall (the core audience is rejecting the new music now). Country is long overdue for a format fork.
The advent of PeopleMeter audience measurement will also pressure us to innovate.
It could end up being a very cool time to program radio stations.
I'm with you on wanting to edit Slashdot posts after they're posted.
My station panders to 35-49 year-old females, but thanks for playing.
If you're willing to pay for XM or Sirius, go for it. They're great, for what they are. Sirius has a particularly strong Talk line-up. XM has excellent sports. Both have plenty of music choices.
And XM is owned, in part, by Clear Channel. The devil is right there in your dashboard.
For what's it's worth, most of us Clear Channel programmers would love to have deep, eclectic playlists loaded with interesting songs and artists.
The problem is that not enough people would listen to our stations for us to keep the lights on.
We're not force-feeding anything. Our short playlists are dictated by the market, and we spend million each year researching the musical tastes of our various target audiences.
While people bitch and wail about short playlists, the fact is that when we exercise poor music discipline, our ratings generally decline. Since commercial broadcasting is still predicated on a free radio, advertiser-subsidized model, low rated stations go away pretty quickly. We're a publicly held company, and have to return value to the stockholders (this could mean you).
We know tight playlists aren't for everyone, but they're for *most* people. Amazing as it may seem, radio listeners actually like hearing their favorites on a regular basis. Adults, in particular, punch out more often than not when something new comes on -- no matter how good it is.
Real music enthusiasts with well-developed tastes have a lot of options open to them these days, if they don't mind paying for them. Hell, I own an iPod, too. But free radio is still out there, playing the hits, ready whenever you need a pop fix or breaking news.
Okay, flame away. But that's the deal.
RDS adoption is growing. it's certainly worth adding to Radio Shark.
I agree this gizmo would be cooler if it recorded streams, too. Think I'll still buy one, if only to aircheck the other morning shows while we do ours.
One that comes to mind immediately is to stay on this side of the firewall.
Yeah: like cutting Hubble. And racking up record defecits while privately funded firms remind us what the excitement of space exploration used to be all about.
If Bush really wanted to show some leadership, he'd splash ISS, scrap the Shuttle, and set some realistic short-term goals that his administration would actually have to pay for.
NASA *is* doing great work with its robotic programs. But most of those programs were green-lighted when President W was still back in Texas making his bones by polluting his state and signing 152 death warrants.
Feel free to mod me down, Republican bastards. ;-)
I no longer buy anything but Crucial, and all is well. Cheap RAM is a bad idea in a Mac.
Well, I -- for one -- welcome our new K-Melon ubergeek overlords.
... I can see why the M$ crew loves this guy. Can't stand their OS, but Ballmer is one hell of a cheerleader. Hey, if they can integrate Miami Vice and Lotus, maybe they can find a way to wedge some security into Windows.
You've not been married long, huh?
She wants the Mac. Buy it. Then get yourself a cool little PC, if you wish. She's happy. You're happy. Everyone stays happy. ;-)
Been seeing something like this for a while in my blog's comment spam: an apparently innocuous note with a URL that looks like the author's name (maybe something like "http://joeshmoe.com"). The URLs go nowhere. I'm sure they get redirected to pr0n and veye-ah-gra sites a few days after posting.
And iTunes already shuffles, true. But buildinga player that's predicated on a randomized playlist is a rather different idea, designed to expose the digital music collectons we keep on iTunes.
It's not just that the player shuffles, but that it pulls a random playlist out of your much-larger master collection and airs them out.
Shuffle's interface is both innovative and daring.
Absolutely. But I'm guessing they thought Open Office was too heavy and complex. Same reason they bypassed the also-excellent Mozilla for the KHTM rendering engine when they finally stepped out with Safari.
It's a G4, so pretty much all the PPC Linux distros will work. Take yer pick, Ladies 'n' Gents. Dual-boot with OS X, unplug your office monitor and keyboard, and jack in. On the cheap, at that.
Exactly. Commuters, too. Load Shuffle before bed, take a whole day's music (and much more) out the door in the morning. Always different. Freakin' genius. Once again, Apple changes how we manage our music.
Total home run. Well done, Apple. Watch the "random" meme spread to other product categories.
In all seriousness, I'd assume it handles RTF. Don't see why we'd expect Apple to import/export .swf, given the nearly non-existent Mac Open Office user base.
Not a lot of ponies, but this ought to sell. Damn: it's smaller than the cube (and considerably more powerful, even though it's no PowerMac). Hope their supplier can crank a lot of these things. Wonder how it will impact the sales of its more nimble iMac sister?
As I expected, iWork is a competitor for Microsoft Works, not MS Office (yet). That must be where they are heading, since it's bundled with presentation software. Won't get there without a spreadsheet app. But if it's light and fast, I might buy a copy. Never have liked Office's gaudy take an Aqua. A lot of folks have little need to open an Excel sheet.
Shuffle is a home run. Won't replace the iPod, kills off Apple's flash-based competitors, and doubles as a storage device. Great price points. The random music playback interface addresses all the repetition complaints we in radio hear on a daily basis. Just load it every morning and go. It's always different. Damn.
Best consumer-level Macworld ever. Once upon a time, Macs weren't just for well-heeled suburban types. With these affordable products, Apple has found its way home. Shame on Sony for letting Apple humiliate them -- again.
> I never read agreements that I signed when I install other software or when I sign up for things like Hotmail, etc. And I close my eyes when I blow through red lights and stop signs.
I hope Novell prevails, but this ain't no silver bullet.
Odd, considering AOL happily sells subscriptions to Mac users.
... nor a troll. But what a useless article. What's next? "Make love the SUSE way?"
Why would we Apple fans be upset if someone brought out a really cool portable audio player? Either we like the iPod or not. I know there are platform fanatics that confuse brand and personal identity, but most of us just like our gear for whatever it does. New products just drive prices down and give everyone more choices.