Robert Paterson's Weblog

Future of Public Radio - The End of Status Quo

Here is a summary of the state of things by Chris Anderson. Again, I know that great programming becomes essential in this challenging environment, but faced with these kinds of trends - something more is surely required?

A successful strategy cannot be based on being the best radio station in North America. You can select this for yourself but you  cannot make this the requirement for 300 stations. It has to be based on something that is achievable by good, hardworking people.

Here is Chris -

Mainstream Media Meltdown III

A couple times a year, I take a statistical look at mainstream entertainment and media in decline. All figures are year-on-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. (The last version of this, from November, is here).

Down:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Mixed:

• Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year. 
• Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).

Up:

• Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
• Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
• Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google's revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.

A couple times a year, I take a statistical look at mainstream entertainment and media in decline. All figures are year-on-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. (The last version of this, from November, is here).

Down:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Mixed:

• Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year. 
• Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).

Up:

• Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
• Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
• Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google's revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.

A couple times a year, I take a statistical look at mainstream entertainment and media in decline. All figures are year-on-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. (The last version of this, from November, is here).

Down:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Mixed:

• Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year. 
• Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).

Up:

• Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
• Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
• Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google's revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.

Advertising - Beware of the Buggy Whip!

This week's results from Yahoo and Google I think demonstrate an important trend in business today.

The traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print, that are being replaced by web direct alternatives, and that use a shotgun approach to advertising are being replaced on the web by context sensitive ads and by sites that tell the truth.

I suspect that we are close to the Tipping Point. iTunes has irrevocably made web delivered music the norm. Sony will do the same for movies. Photography is decisively digital. The iPod has changed our use of music and photos. I am now using my iPod for books as I prepare for a long drive next month. I get my news online. The New York Times has a higher online readership than print. Soon local web sites will eat into the last gold mine of print media - the local newspaper.

I think back for a comparison to a point in the last century when the internal combustion engine found the Tipping Point versus the Horse. Before 1914 it must have seemed that the car, the truck and the tractor were complex and expensive playthings that depended too much on an incomplete infrastructure of the odd supply of gas, parts and repair. All the infrastructure was established around the horse. But surely at some time just after the war in 1918, the system tipped. By the mid 1920's the horse as the norm had gone and by the 1930's even those on the road in the great depression used a truck.

In a decade we will look back at network TV, mass radio, the newspaper, the music store with nostalgia the same way as I did in London in the 1950's when our milk and coal were delivered by horse drawn wagons.

The end of radio as we know it

In my piece - Going Home - I talk briefly about the end of the mass media and its replacement by micro media.

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, does a much better job that I on his blog and in this month's edition in explaining this bold statement.

Blogs and Education

"...... I look at my 13 year old sister who can design and make webpages. When I was her age - I was still in awe of the internet. I have bought some things online - but I'm sure my sister's generation will be much more eager to do so. I also noticed that my sister would rather chat on MSN to her boyfriend than talk on the phone. I asked her why one day and she said it was more fun on MSN.

Teenagers these days eh? haha"

This is a post in my class today from one of my class who may be 21.

Other than its funny to see the gap between a 13 year ols and her older sister - what else does this say to me?

It says that the interactive online world which is a mystery to most people is THE PREFERRED METHOD OF COMMUNICATION for most teens today.

This means that if you want to reach them you will have to use this channel
1. Advertising/Retailing
2. Education
3. Work
4. Health
5. Entertainment

So if you find all of this seems like a fad - worry

A9, Firefox - The web is on the move again

I have been using A9 since this weekend - WOW!!!! For me, linking the search into books, text in books, pictures, movies all in one page is amazing. A9 is especially helpful in the blogging world. I have also downloaded the Preview edition of Firefox.

The web has just made a big move in quality. Here is how the Economist sees this

From the Economist
JUST when you thought you knew the web, along come new competitors to keep things interesting. On September 15th, a new search engine called A9.com was unveiled by Amazon, the giant internet retailer. It repackages Google's search results, but with useful tweaks. Searches not only call up websites and images on the same page, but other references, such as Amazon's book search, the Internet Movie Database, and encyclopaedia and dictionary references. Moreover, it keeps track of users' search histories—an important innovation as search becomes more personalised.

Many had assumed the market was stitched up by Google and Yahoo! (who account for over 90% of searches), barring the expected entrance of Microsoft. Likewise, the market for online music seemed settled: Apple's iTunes is the leader, its main rivals being RealNetworks and Microsoft's MSN Music. Yet this, too, understates the potential for battle. Last week, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch, an online music retailer and software firm, for $160m. Music downloads are now worth roughly $310m annually but are forecast to grow to $4.6 billion by 2008, according to Forrester Research, so there is room for new firms to sprout.

Meanwhile, the most surprising new competition is in web browsers. Microsoft was the undisputed champ, after bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system in the 1990s and destroying Netscape. However, Microsoft's browser is so vulnerable to attacks by online crooks and various troublemakers that the American and German governments have recommended that users consider alternatives. This has been a boon to two small browser-makers, Opera, a Norwegian software company, and Mozilla, which developed the Firefox browser based on an open-source version of Netscape. Firefox boasted 1m downloads within 100 hours of its release on September 14th.

Security has become the main competitive difference. The software of both Opera and Mozilla is considered safer (partly because they have fewer users and so are a less attractive target for hackers). Microsoft's share of the browser market has actually shrunk over the past three months from around 96% to 94%. It is a highly symbolic phenomenon, albeit a modest decrease. Even Google is thought to be toying with the idea of launching its own browser.

Underlying this ripple of competition is the ability of large companies that already benefit from economies of scale to extend into new areas, says Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. That explains Amazon's A9 search service and Yahoo!'s move into music. As for browsers, “Microsoft had a lock on the market and just dropped the ball. Microsoft hasn't provided any innovation in the browser area and they had poor security,” he says. The message: watch your back.

Movie Making - A Cottage Industry? - The end of work as we know it

I normally pass by pieces about Apple on my Apple Splash Page but this one caught my eye.

The essence of the Industrial system is that it used very expensive tools and processes that could only be owned by the corporate entity. So we all became employees and went off to work. This post is about how the producer of the BBC's most popular Gardening Show, Ground Force,who with his partner and assistant edits his show at their cottage in the country using an Apple system and software (A G4 and Final Cut Pro). The growth of specialty channels has been a boom for documentary makers and a Sony/Apple system puts the costs inside an individual's budget. I am sure that in 5 years time most documentaries will be made "at home" by film makers who own and control all the production process. The real costs of film drops and the life style of the maker improves.

This then raises the larger issue of the erosion of the corporate ownership of tools and processes. Even lowly me has an office equipped way beyond most corporate counterparts. We have not only 2 PCs but 2 iBooks, a La Cie backup and all the peripherals. I can produce documents and do research that only a few years ago would have taken several people. Now I can do it all at home or on the road. Talking about on the road: I am even spared Hotel costs. I have family houses where I can stay for free in all the major cities in Canada and in London and Amsterdam. If pushed, I could stay with friends in many other places. My clients get my full attention and they do not hire the big guy and then have all the work done by a kid. They get all of me.

My costs are so much lower than a conventional consulting firm as I have next to no overhead. So I too am like the film maker. Obviously music is on its way as is all creative work. How soon before book publishing and print on demand going to change even the book trade. As PayPal becomes ubiquitous, it will be possible to run even the money side. Part of the growth of eBay has been that it provides many small businesses with a brilliant and cheap online interface. I can see how steel making will continue to have lots of employees. But maybe most of them will be robots?

I wonder how many other fields of work will soon fall out of the corporate need to have a job so as to have access to the tools of the trade?

The dark side, which we can see already, is if creative folks can work from home on their own schedule, what of those that have no creativity and have looked for jobs as their only salvation.

More later on the end of jobs.

Tom Kneebone -Goodbye my dear friend

I have always been stage struck. So when I was approached in the early 1990's to help an organization called the Smile Theatre Company that took productions out to Seniors Homes, I said yes. Little did I know that I would meet two people that would have such an impact on my life.

One of them, Tom Kneebone died in November. Being in the wilds of PEI, I did not hear of his death until today. I like so many on hearing Tom's name for the first time thought that it must be a joke. While being a very amusing man, Tom was no joke. He was the Pros pro. No one knew better how to put on a small show - whether cabaret or a small play. No one that I came across could make an audience get so involved with so little.

Smile was, and is, an interesting idea. Its job is to take theatre out to seniors who cannot get out of there home anymore. Being shut out of life is arguably one of the worst things that can happen to you. For an hour, they were not only at a real theatre but actively involved in the lives of people who meant something. Smile's plays were no sing a along. they were and are brilliant short pieces of art. At the heart of Smile was the idea of a series of one hour plays that were about real people's lives with lots of songs and drama. These were designed so that the entire production could be packed into a van and taken out and played in seniors homes. The plays had of course the most challenging of audiences - often deaf, sometimes a bit confused.

Tom wrote and directed most of the plays that we used. They would always focus on a person's life. My favourite was about the first black doctor in Canada, Doc Ruffin. Son of an escaped Slave, Ruffin trained as a doctor in Toronto in the 1850's and went to the US during the civil war and commanded a hospital before he returned to Toronto. Imagine what a career like this would have been like then? Like many of Tom's plays, Ruffin is about ordinary people who do extraordinary things and hence appeal to our innate sense of drama.

With Ruffin in the line up one year, we put on a fund raiser and invited all who claimed to be related. It changed how many of us thought about race. More than 200 turned up excited to find out about their famous ancestor and interested in finding out what the rest of the family looked like. Ruffin's family ranged from Scandinavian white with blond hair to pure African.

Smile was always on a knife edge financially. Tom was always optimistic and was central not only to the shows but to putting on events that somehow got us through the season. He started so many young actors careers. Smile was a great proving ground for young talent - all we could afford to hire. Tom is the "Godfather" to a generation of actors.

Tonight at the Jane Mallet theatre, there is a show in his honour. God bless you Tom

Music the New Paradigm - Slaying the RIAA

One of my favourite blogs is Teledyn by the inimitable Mr G. Most of what Gary Murphy writes is sensational but out of all the stuff written about the new music model and the RIAA this is a winner.

Snip:

The RIAA controls the only economical means of distribution of the 10-track CD. They are entrenched with all the big Vegas acts, and when people are pulling that sort of BMW-reaching income, you can't talk to them about turning back. I say we let them have it. Back when we created the Information Highway exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, we installed a bank of CDROM jukebox machines for playing the latest digital games; this was Patrick Tevlin's idea, and his reasoning was "the CD is the biggest bandwidth pipe we have today" -- the CD is a broadband simulator containing a dead snapshot of 700MB worth of living distribution.

Instead of reaching for the CD, we need to recognize the true listening requirements of our audience: People like diversity. My proof is this whole issue of CDRs and DRM. Give someone twenty CDs, they will mix and match, ripping tracks to produce 'samplers' -- we've been doing this since the invention of reel-to-reel home-recorders. The real listening habit of people is to create landscapes of sounds that cross the lines between performers, they re-purpose our material to tell their own stories, to create their own mood environments, and to do that, their basic building block is the song.

Johnny Cash said, "The song is everything"

Why persist in the 10-track compilation? I've seen so many bands with 5 good songs that they pad with 5 not-so-good tracks just so the whole process of the CD production is efficient, which is important given the cost of that process.

Having asked I think a good question Gary goes on to provide a coherent answer