In response to Dick Taylor's blog "Automation Killed The Radio Star" and the subsequent discussion on The Broadcast Club on Facebook.
The narrow formatting of American radio is what killed the radio star. There are simply too many stations and formats. More group owners who see radio as nothing more than just a billboard with music to keep people entertained between the ads.
Radio used to be a companion and in other places of the world, it still is. Local and national presenters are very alive and well in the UK and Ireland. The mere culture of Japanese radio has about a 50/50 music to talk ratio on the FM stations. Of course in Japan, new music is still heavily promoted on the radio where in the USA, music promotion has been relegated to Radio Disney, WalMart and iTunes.
Our country has too many full-service stations, all of them with a narrow formats that dawned this "more music less talk" nonsense. When you have iHeart programming the same ten songs around what feels like nearly 10 minute stopsets, this is why people are tuning out.
In many ways, it was the bean counters that killed the radio star. Now, they are jamming more stations on FM (through AM revitalization) without any room for growth (even though that it is possible by refarming 20 TV stations nationwide to other channels). The industry has an excellent opportunity to move more stations to HD multi-casts that are received with an HD radio as opposed to an analog crutch translator but the industry refuses to promote HD for its original purpose and now its nothing more than just an overglorified STL.
Our industry killed the radio star.
