Is Radio in a Coma? Nah, It’s Just Resting.

Is the country ready for change? Is the radio world ready for change? Some interesting posts this past week (all of which I, a middle-aged woman read online) bear on the future of classical music radio.

First is a post by Todd Feinburg, who despite his inane political blather has made some intelligent observations about the current dilemma radio finds itself in. He says radio is in a coma. In an article titled Is Radio Headed For Extinction? Feinburg writes

The radio industry is in shock. An absolute coma.

Radio sees the enemy bearing down and closing in, but it doesn’t know how to respond. It’s frozen in place, unable to move. No defense is being offered, no counter attack.

The foe that has radio folks terrified is the Internet. New technologies are encroaching on radio’s traditional domain with the same speed that the auto and airline industries once pounded the railroads into near extinction. And radio is mimicking the railroad industry’s response to its death knell — whether from arrogance, fear, or institutional inertia, radio is failing to see that it must embrace the future rather than resist it or run from it…

The radio industry needs to learn that it’s in the audio distribution business…But the fear that radio feels over the encroachment, and the revenues lost to the Internet, are causing radio to pull back rather than to be aggressive. In the short term, this means tighter budgets and fewer jobs. This is exactly the wrong response, of course.

Feinburg goes on to enthuse,

All of the tools to have your own radio station, or your own radio show, now exist online.

Not quite, Todd. Maybe it’s true in your field, Talkedy-Talk Radio. You can talk and talk online till the cows come home, but in music we still have work to do. That’s because while talk is cheap — nay FREE — music still has measurable value in our society. Anyone can talk, but it takes incredible skill to create music that people want to listen to.

The first real salvo has been fired over royalty payments to musicians for music on the web. The easiest article to read is Online music services could pay $100 million in royalties by Eric Auchard. The American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) has won a judgment from the court that its members should receive royalties worth 2.5 percent of the the posting company’s revenue, retroactive to 2002. The same information is in an article put out by ASCAP, with the subtitle Historic Decision Provides Framework for Valuing Use of Musical Works Online; Also Validates Need to Appropriately Compensate Songwriters & Composers for Role Their Works Play in Success of Online Businesses.

You can read the details for yourself. This is just one of the first decisions in a multi-year legal process that will determine how we’re going to distribute music on the web. The future is brilliant for classical music online. It’s tailor-made for us — a niche audience, the so-called long tail of the internet. We see it all the time at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Our listeners are all over the world — individuals listening online in far-flung places.

My first program director always said, “people listen in groups of one.” He was not just right; he was prescient.

We have to be patient until we figure out how the musicians are going to get paid, but by the time we do classical music radio will have figured out how to distribute its content on multiple platforms. It’s not scary. It’s really, really exciting. I can’t wait to hear the stuff I’m missing from Delhi, and Amsterdam, and South Africa.