When a movie contains a product placement the movie company gets paid by that company, when a TV channel plays a commercial for a product they get paid by that company. So someone explain this to me - when a radio station plays music by a band its essentially providing free publicity for that band and free advertising for the bands record label. So why don't radio stations get paid by record companies every time they play music?
Instead we have this bizarre state of affairs where they have to pay the record companies to pay music. WTF?
Maybe once apon a time people didn't actually have much music at home, most of their music consumption was from the radio so radio was providing the primary performance medium for music. But that's hardly true these days, increasingly most people are buying their music in CDs or online and listen to it at their leisure. Radio has just become a way to hear the latest and greatest output (usually over and over again), and occasionally catch some golden oldies from your youth - that perhaps now you're middle aged and bored you'll go and buy on CD or iTunes since you no longer have a tape player to play all those tapes you used to haul around in the car (and in any case they are most likely beyond replay anyway).
If radio isn't such a stimulus for music sales why are record companies always so enthusiastic to get airplay for their latest and greatest progeny? And why are all those services that tell you what's playing on the radio so you can go buy it so popular too? In England you can even hold your phone up to the radio and it'll tell you what the band is and give you the opportunity to buy it then and there!
I don't think any musician now would seriously suggest that radio play of tracks is dramatically harming its revenue. Its like RIAA saying that someone who downloads an album to sample it before buying (because until the new Napster came along you couldn't do that anywhere else) is robbing them of one CDs worth of revenue. Get over it guys, that person would never have bought the CD in the first place.
So, seriously, I think radio stations should all stop playing any music for a week and let RIAA get an idea of the true positive impact radio play is having on their sales. Then they can put out their hands and get paid for playing music the radio and providing all that music advertising. Then they could just ditch all the regular product commercials, not have to suck up to all those product companies and play even more money making music slots. Oh, I forgot, doesn't ClearChannel own all the radio stations now anyway and I expect ClearChannel and RIAA are pretty much in each others pockets so that would never happen
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I remember reading someone famous (Courney Love I guess) were already paid by record companies to play songs they wanted to be "the next big hit" so they've already thrown their independance by the window, and if they still have normal advertising it's because they want even more money, because not all the songs they play are paid for (but it's gonna be like that soon, I'm afraid) and the price they get paid to advertise songs/bands/record companies is not as high as it should be, radio stations should be told by their audience that hearing the same crap over and over again might make them lose lots of listeners, as well as normal advertising. After too many times I hear a song I had nothing against in the first place, I want to go to a record store and smash all CDs of said song with a bat and burn the remains, so guess what happens when I don't like the song from the beginning.... And I feel the same whenever subjected to any form of advertising. Maybe I should act on my urges to make them understand that ;)
I think it's the first time I feel the need to comment one of your posts while I've been reading you for a year or so, because I usually find you're 100% right, and I guess I'm not the only one, the teatime is my favourite english-speaking blog, but I find you don't post much lately :'( If it's because you feel a lack of motivation due to the lack of comments, believe me, people who read you but don't comment totally agree with you and think you provided all the relevant information :D I loathe SUVs/Monospaces too and love motorbikes, by the way :p
I obviously wasn't thinking straight - you're clearly right that even if radio channels got paid to play every song then many would still run commercials to make even more money. And perhaps those that don't quite play the same stuff over and over in the same day end up running more commercials.
I suppose that's why I like the new Napster model so much - my only guide for new music is other peoples recommendations. But the cynical side of my say they could actually be planting that data into the system to drive downloads... For the most part its been pretty good though, and I no longer have to listen to radio at all. Its probably only a matter of time before Napster starts dubbing commercials into the downloads to "make even more money" ;-)
Perhaps Clear Channel should just bite the bullet and buy one of the big music publishers and get it all over with. Then they can just play their own music on their own radio stations and plug their own concerts all day long.
Anyway, thanks for the comment Charlster. As you have pointed out - I don't really get many but it actually has no relationship to my lack of posts of late. I think I've kind of run out of fresh dark tea to deliver of late. As you may have noticed my posts tend to be longer than the average blog entry and usually pretty rambling. After just over two years and 376 posts I'm finding myself less inclined to post every time I think about something I could blog about. I've been thinking about cutting my posts (or even comments!) down a bit so I can bang a few more out more often. I've also thought about a moritorium on political and SUV posts for a while. But then maybe I'll lose the essential "long dark tea-time" aspect in the mix?
But its good to know I have at least one reader and your kind comments are most welcome. Now I'm almost feeling guilty about not posting so much of late. You see... I guess comments do have an influence after all!
I'm happy my comment had such an effect :D It's true you write a lot and it must be very demanding, it's the same for me, I post a lot on a subject about which I care very much about (the most important thing in my life, but it's in French, I can sum it up for you if you care, or get a hint on the site I indicated as my web page), daily extremely long posts (yes, longer than yours, that's how much I care about this) and have numerous other parallel activities which leave me very little time even if I'm jobless at the moment (I'm an English to French translator among numerous talents hehe) so I understand how exhausted you can feel. It would be a good thing if you had nothing to post about, but they seem to always have new schemes to wreck the world even more than it is at the moment, so I guess you'll never really run out of subjects :p
Oh, and I forgot, I think people should be able to make their own radios as amateurs by simply buying the transmitter and get a frequency by declaring where they're going to use it, or maybe webradios might be redirected to transmitters of the area, paid by the state ? Amateurs are always best when it comes to art IMHO hehe. If you like strange electro, try my MP3s from my website (okay, end of shameless promotion, I hate advertising like that hehe) and yes, I'm an amateur, even if I had a few missed opportunities to turn pro. Cya !
Unfortunately being British languages are not my speciality - I have two years of French under my belt from over 20 years ago. Lets just say I can count to 20 and order beer but that's about all.
However I'm willing to try Google translate on your French, it would be interesting to see what is comes out like.
And as for radio amateurs - well I'm already a licensed radio ham, but guess what - you're not allowed to broadcast or play and music along with your transmission (except in weird and unlikely circumstances).
However I think there's room for a less well regulated frequency allocation in the several gigahertz range. At those frequencies antennas are simple and radios are cheap, and signals won't propogate more than line of sight without concious efforts to repeat the signal. Then you can carve up a few thousand narrow bands for "personal radio" and reach a small local community audience.
As you say, the only problem then becomes how to assign frequencies efficiently, fairly and stop idiots transmitting illegal content or trampling over other stations. In the radio amateur world it works just fine for the most part, but in the general populace forget about it - such frequencies would quickly become as polluted as the old Usenet newsgroups.
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