By Mike Lyons Mike Lyons started his career in Orlando back in 1971 by publishing the city's first underground newspaper and promoting the first rock show at the Citrus Bowl (Cactus, Bloodrock, Potliquor and Dr. John for $3). He was MD/announcer for WORJ, WDIZ and WHTQ in Orlando, PD for Abrams' 98 Rock (WXTB) in Tampa, and spent the last eight years of his radio career as mornings/APD at WZTA Miami. From 1995-2000 he was VP of AAA Promotions at Lee Arnold Marketing. Lyons prefers to call himself a "post millennial pop culture theorist" instead of a "former record promotion weasel."

5/4/08

RADIO & ARBITRON - NOBODY'S HOME
 
     Despite the opinion of Paul Rudd's character in "40 Year Old Virgin" that, "if you like Coldplay. You're gay," I'm a fan. A hetero fan. A fan who didn't hear Coldplay's new single "Violet Hill" anywhere on Orlando radio this week.
     When the song became available from Coldplay.com last Tuesday, I downloaded it and listened to it repeatedly, letting the big, Brit, echoey, wall-of-sound build its hooks into me.
     "Violet Hill". Not anything earth-shaking. But a cool, Chris Martin tale with a sound I've become fond of through the last few years. Yeah, it's U2-lite, but it'll do until we get a new U2 record.
     As I sat listening on Tuesday afternoon, I remembered the excitement of getting hands on any superstar release during my 25 years working in radio. I would have aired it immediately and let the cease and desist fall where it may.
     I still haven't heard it on the air.
     Not hard enough for Clear Channel's WJRR's active-rock format. Now that they're the only rock station in town, why should they risk it?
     Not on CBS' Hot/AC, WOMX. New tracks aren't any priority there.
     How about Cox's classic rock WHTQ. Nope. They've drawn the line at Def Leppard and G&R as far as "new" artists.
     How about Cox's once AAA WMMO? Nope. New music left their playlist a few years back. It's just Boston and Matchbox over and over and...
     Even the non-comms here in Orlando are classical and jazz. Maybe the college station? Nope.
     I don't know. If you're a music station and new music isn't anywhere on your list of "important ingredients," is it any wonder?
     That Arbitron SVP/chief research officer Bob Patchen had to apologize after telling a monthly PPM conference call that the reason samples were down is because, "people don't like radio anymore".
     All of the big market, big company programming reps threw their arms up and cried how outrageous this statement was.
     Of course, they all know it's true or they wouldn't have reacted so angrily.
     They're deeply in denial and hoping their "act" will continue working on national radio ad agency reps for as long as possible.
     Nonetheless, Patchen apologized a few days later and Arbitron promised that they would be working harder on scraping up enough respondents for the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics. Especially males.
     Truth is, Arbitron has been talking about reaching the younger demos better for as long as I can remember.
     It is even worse in 2008 because the company, a monopoly in the radio ratings field, still doesn't use cell phones in getting the ratings for which it charges so much.
     This is not just a problem in getting accurate radio ratings. It's become a problem for all research in the U.S.
     For the first time ever, I heard MSNBC's Chris Mathews finally talk about the lack of cell phone usage in polling for the ongoing Democratic presidential race last week. Yeah, maybe that HAS led to so many polls being so far off the results this primary season. It's about time somebody brought the topic up.
      For the first time, the USA Today/Gallop Poll began using a representative sample of Americans who rely on cellphones rather than land lines for personal use starting with the New Hampshire primary this year. Gallup is now including about 130 cellphone-only respondents in each sample of 1,000 people on account of the growing number who use cellphones exclusively. When Gallup calls, the second question posed to those on cells, after confirmation, is: "For your safety, are you currently driving?" If respondents say yes, the poll taker sets a time to call back.
      So Gallup is at least shooting for 13% to start. Though I think, in reality, that the amount of folks using cellphones exclusively may be larger than 13%.
      Other polls have been slow to pick up on this and, in politics, the reigning pollsters still act out of touch and slow to evolve.
      In Arbitron's case, they've been saying, "we're studying the possibility," for the last few years. But they still have not incorporated cell phone users in the establishment of their samples.
      Initially, cell phone users were often using calling plans that charged them for the incoming calls. This was why pollsters and ratings services didn't call cells. Nowadays, such plans have evolved away.
      But the ratings and polling industries still act the same old way. Basing their stats and samples from people available only on land lines.
      Who believes these statistics?
      Society is evolving rapidly in this new hardware and digital age. It's time for the customers of this flawed methodology to evolve too.
      Yeah, people don't like radio anymore. Especially when they compare it to what it meant to them a decade or more back. Before deregulation led to the risk-free, bland product that radio has become today. When stations won't play a new Coldplay song until a VP of programming OK's it down the line maybe a month from now.
      The only stations that still provide a music service that's still compelling, are stations like AAA. And the non-commercial AAA stations that will convene in Philadelphia later this month are way ahead of the curve, because they have a format constructed without the old five-minute ad clusters that are the true death of music radio today. It's hard for boomers like me to stay tuned to a station through another spot cluster. I'm rarely convinced that there is something worthwhile on the other side of it.
      Generations X and Y don't even consider it. They're gone.
      When Arbitron starts using cells to complete its samples. The truth may really kill those still in denial.

TV: The spastic network schedule resulting from the writers' strike gives us the season finale of "30 Rock" this Thursday at 9:30pm Matthew Broderick and Edie Falco guest star as Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) faces a positive pregnancy test while Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) leaves GE to become Bush's new Homeland Security director for Crisis and Weather Management...Only two guests confirmed for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart as of this writing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be there Monday and Newsweek Middle East bureau chief Fareed Zakaria will stop by on Tuesday. Guests on The Colbert Report this week will include author Carl Hiaasen on Monday, singer Nathan Gunn on Tuesday, authors Hasan Elahi and George Johnson on Wednesday and Arianna Huffington on Thursday...New on Letterman this week will be Jimmy Eat World on Monday, Steve Winwood on Tuesday and Panic At The Disco on Thursday...On Leno this week, it's KT Tunstall on Tuesday and Carly  Simon on Friday...Mike Doughty is on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson on Wednesday...This week on Conan, it's Thrice on Monday, Galactic on Tuesday, The Duke Spirit on Wednesday and Tokio Hotel on Friday...Finally, there's a new SNL this weekend with Shia Lebeouf and My Morning Jacket.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: " Hillary Receives 3 A.M. Phone Call From Drunken Bill Clinton".

MOVIES: "Iron Man" opened almost $20 million better than expected by having the largest opening of the year so far, at $100.7 million, to kick-off the summer movie season. "Iron Man" was the second best premiere ever for a non-sequel (Spiderman One took in #114m). Debuting in second place was "Made Of Honor" with Patrick Dempsey taking in $15.5 million. Third place was "Baby Mama" with $10.3 million followed by "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" in fourth with $6.1 million and in fifth, "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay," took in another $6 million. In limited release, David Mamet's martial-arts drama "Redbelt" opened solidly with $68,646 in six theaters. "Son of Rambow," a comedy about two British boys making their own "Rambo" movie, also opened well with $52,549 in five theaters. Both go wider this weekend. Despite the pop for Marvel Studios' "Iron Man," box-office was down compared to the same weekend last year when "Spiderman 3" opened. Movie  attendance remains down 6% for the year so far. Now that the summer season is on, that means a major studio release every weekend now. Up next is "Speed Racer" from Warner Brothers and the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") starring Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci. Reviews point out dazzling FX, a zillion 3-second shot cuts and a target of kids. Also opening will be "What Happens in Vegas" starring Aston Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in a standard rom-com workout. OK reviews.

SCHMUTZ: Great Winter book for WXRT Chicago. 2.3 from 1.8!...One of the few women not romantically linked to Roger Clemens this week released a terrific new CD. Hello...x from Tristan Prettyman has been on my list this week along with Coldplay...I love it when newscasters announce "this exclusive first look" to a story that is nothing more than a free ad...Glad to see Rich McLaughlin segue from Sirius Alt.Nation 21 and Left of Center 26 over to content director at WFUV. Coupling of the month...Finally, there are now 201 House members who have signed on to support House Concurrent Resolution 244 which is "Congress should not impose any new performance fee, tax, royalty or other charge relating to the public performance of sound recordings over-the-air, or, on any other business for such public performance of sound." This is even before Congress actually focuses on the proposed radio giveaway to the labels the RIAA so desperately wants. Never had a  prayer.

—Mike Lyons

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Archive: 4/27/08

SERVER NOT AVAILABLE?
    
     I saw an interesting news item on C/Net earlier this month. The headline read, "AT&T Says Internet Will Reach Capacity By 2010."  In the article, AT&T VP of legislative affairs Jim Cicconi told the Westminster eForum in London that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010, primarily due to increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.
     "The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today", Cicconi said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today. Today, eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD next year, and HD is seven to ten times more bandwidth hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80% of all Web traffic by 2010, up from 30% today."
     According to Cicconi, $55 billion will be needed in U.S. infrastructure alone. $130 billion worldwide. He pointed out that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic would increase 50-fold by 2015", and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and to upgrade its backbone network.
     What does this mean? Why the chicken little "the sky is falling" routine? In truth, one has to remember that Cicconi is the legislative main-guy at AT&T and prefers to remind people how much time and money is being spent on research and development by the company to save the Internet. And AT&T doesn't want the government to enforce something like the Net Neutrality Act, which would mean regulation the phone companies and ISP's don't want. So that's his angle.
      The fact is, private industry runs much of the Internet. AT&T's saying to government, "you wanna spend this kinda money?"
      It's just another indication of how young we are in this new digital world. There are few economical standards to replicate. There is almost no precedent law. No traditions. And we may be heading towards a wall soon.
      Just a reminder that, as radio, television, newspapers, record companies, telephone companies and Internet pioneers face this new "flat age," as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman put it, we still got a long way home.
      Get ready for massive changes in "conventional thinking" as to how to do business in the new digital media world.

BIZ: Last week we had Procter & Gamble announce their new record label,"Tag," so as to enchant hip-hop fans to use their "Tag" deodorant products. This week, Starbucks handed off their Hear Music label to Concord because they weren't having successes like Ray Charles' "Genius Loves Company" every quarter. Remember, just because anybody can be a label nowadays, that doesn't always mean it's a good idea or that they'll know what they're doing.

TV: The sweeps started this past Thursday so everything is new through June for the broadcast nets. On cable, Ira Glass returns to Showtime for another season starting next Sunday, May 4 at 10pm...SNL is a repeat this weekend with Jonah Hill and Mariah Carey. Shia Lebeouf/My Morning Jacket on the next new show May 10...NBC this week announced that Jimmy Fallon will replace Conan O'Brien when Conan replaces Jay Leno on The Tonight Show next year...This week's musical guests on Leno include Brit sensation Duffy on Monday, Natasha Bedingfield on Tuesday, Augustana on Wednesday, Avril Lavigne on Thursday and Sleepercar on Friday...Letterman has the Roots on Monday and Nick Lowe on Friday...Conan has Santogold on Monday, The Kills on Tuesday, Feist on Wednesday and Was (Not Was) on Friday...Craig Ferguson has Morrissey on both Monday and Tuesday this week along with The Grand Archives on Wednesday and She & Him on Thursday...Jimmy Kimmel has Def Leppard  on Wednesday, the reunited Stone Temple Pilots on Thursday and Estelle on Friday...Both Jon and Stephen are new this week. Guests on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will be former President Jimmy Carter on Monday, former Speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday, historian Robert Schlesinger on Wednesday and current Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean on Thursday. On The Colbert Report this week, it's Feist on Monday, author Anne Lamott on Tuesday, author Noah Feldman on Wednesday and author James Kunstler on Thursday.

MOVIES: Tina Fey's "Baby Mama" opened better than expected this weekend and took the #1 slot with a box-office take of $18.3 million. Opening in second place was "Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" with $14.6 million. Some thought Universal might be killing itself by opening so many comedies in a row but "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" held steady at #4 with another $11 million followed by "Nim's Island" with $4.5 million in the fifth position. Overall it was the second "up" weekend in a row at the box-office compared to last year. 17%. Next weekend, summer officially begins for the studios as Marvel's "Iron Man" opens. Starring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role and Gwyneth Paltrow as the squeeze, very favorable reviews have already popped up. Looks like a hit. We'll see how much of a hit. Also opening Friday is "Made of Honor" starring Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan in a reversal of the "My Best Friend's Wedding" plot and "The Life  Before Her Eyes" starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. The charming Young@ Heart continues to go wider on more screens too. One more business note: "Pan's Labyrinth" director Guillermo del Toro was chosen this week to do "The Hobbit" for producer Peter Jackson. It will come out in two features. The first in 2011.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Southwest Airlines Now Taking Passengers To Destinations By Shuttle Bus."

SCHMUTZ: You can see the entire article under our Triplearadio.com Format News, but I am so happy to see KRCL in Salt Lake City and KDHX in St.Louis each restructure their format to better attract listeners. Both stations are longtime "community" stations and have had to deal with angry board meetings and sometimes bitter feedback from some listeners after breaking up their block-gramming for a more consistent sound. Both stations are doing this for one reason. NO ONE'S LISTENING. And both station's were in danger of losing their CPB funding. Reminds me of the "too hip" days back in the 70's when certain AOR jocks had to learn that their audience wasn't primarily Rolling Stone and Creem record reviewers. Today, one has to program to that "sweet spot" in the middle so you've got a target audience to actually save and keep. Remember that working at the absolutes at either side of the spectrum doesn't work anymore. Too-safe and too-hip are death to broadcast music radio...Here's the sweet spot. At Coachella Saturday night, Prince ended his headline set with covers of Radiohead's "Creep" and "Come Together" from the Beatles. Here in Orlando at the Amway Arena Wednesday night, Bruce Springsteen, returning to the road after Danny Federici's funeral, took a written request from a member of the crowd and then did it.
"Jungleland". Spine tingling.

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

Archive: 4/13/08

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN.

     It's 2008 and both Wall Street and the listening public regard radio, in the words of recent Project Runway winner Christain Siriano, as a "hot, tranny mess." No, actually, if it was that, people might be talking about it.
     Listenership and billing declines since deregulation have resulted in zero growth. All caused by the industry's evolution to a cheap, generic product. Three or four consultant lists dominate the sameness heard on thousands of music stations across the country in every format, while the talk formats are 99% syndication. Talent has been eliminated because it costs too much. Localism is dead.
     It has crushed the appeal of the medium drastically. Nowadays, people still turn on their tuners, but radio, to these eyes and ears, is now used primarily as a utility. The songs are the same every day, and they're obviously familiar enough. But music presented this way often appears far in the background in the businesses and homes I've visited in the last several years. God, it's even missing from the lobbies of radio stations I've visited (there is no AAA here in Orlando). Folks are using their cells in the car so the radio volume is lower there too. If it's on at all.
     How one gets copy points for an advertiser through this treacle to a customer is beyond me. No wonder revenue is down.
     I've long advocated the AAA, or the adult-rock format, as one savior for the industry. Thousands of arbitrarily unplayed but obviously worthy songs and artists are available for play. Plus, the appeal of AAA to both boomers and the college demo provides an awfully attractive audience. During the last decade and a half, it's been consistently shown that most commercial AAA stations bill higher amounts than their rated audience share would normally indicate. That the AAA "power-rating" (percentage of a market's radio advertising billed by a station versus the percentage of listeners that station gets in a market) has always been among the highest in the business, often between 1 and 2 times. This means AAA stations can charge more per spot because their listeners are extremely desirable and listen longer. At the same time, non-commercial AAA radio fund drives are setting records and getting shorter as their audience has exploded. The ability to  deliver these kinds of customers is why Google is over $450 a share. The ability to deliver specific customers to its accounts.
     AAA does it in radio today and has been doing so since its beginning.
     Plus, AAA is a terrific product. Who else plays Radiohead, Coldplay, Sheryl Crow, Neil Young, Dave Mathews, Jack Johnson, REM, Amy Winehouse, U2 and Bob Dylan? And those are just the obvious box-office appeals. Who else plays the Long-Tail artists that just popped into your head? AAA!
     Our format also communicates with it's listeners. Information on the music and the lifestyle and the sensibilities that go with it. When you add news and localism and sincere personalities, it's easy to see how a loyal P-1 audience is gathered in radio's tough times here in the new flattened digital age.
     Last month, Emmis Broadcasting brought commercial AAA radio back to New York City, the largest market in the country, when they flipped their lackluster smooth jazz station WQCD to WRXP, "The New York Rock Experience," a AAA with an up-tempo edge. An interview with Emmis Vice-President of Programming Jimmy Steal, an old friend, is currently posted on Triplearadio.com under our Programming section. By the way, they have a new, complete streaming Web site up this week too. It's at 1019RXP.com. They're sometimes harder than a typical AAA but they're covering the obvious songs and artists long missing from the New York airwaves and they cover the AAA Long Tail just fine.
     Then last week, after buying Radio One's Urban AC KRBV-FM in Los Angeles, Bonneville flipped it to AAA, "100.3 The Sound. World Class Rock For Southern California," bringing commercial AAA back to the second-largest market in the country.
      Reportedly, Bonneville President Bruce Reese's favorite station is KFOG in San Francisco so he's a man with good taste and some business acumen.
      Two new AAA's in the top two American cities from two different companies.
      Somethings happening here.
      Can you ask for a better way out of a "hot, tranny mess"?

BIZ: Speaking of Bob Dylan, he received the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a rock musician this week. While Pulitzers are primarily a journalism award, jazz and classical music have dominated their music awards throughout the twentieth century up until now. Dylan was given the honorary Pulitzer for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture marked by compositions of extraordinary power." That's why you can only hear him on AAA radio...Rumors were everywhere this week. Will Bonneville buy Emmis? Will Time/Warner sell AOL to Yahoo? Will Microsoft get Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to join them in buying Yahoo so they package MySpace, MSN and Yahoo together in a new form of online critical mass?  (No.No.Maybe)...Oh, and this just in from Artie Lange - "Howard Needs a Headline!".

TV: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that it was a possibility that Katie Couric would leave "The CBS Evening News" as soon as this January, although her contract still runs for another three years. Katie never brought the expected audience that CBS thought she would as the show sounds terrible, weighed down by 70's era semantics and puff pieces. I'm particularly fed up with all those contrived "Thank you Bob," "Thank you Lara," rejoins to obviously canned reports. It's just a ton of jargon clogging up the newscast. Fact is, it's simply a different day and age since this idea first popped up back in the late 90's and Couric just doesn't sound effective grinding this show out...Speaking of "Project Runway," the producers of the show, The Weinstein brothers, signed a new five-year deal to move the show from Bravo over to Lifetime starting in November. NBC/Universal, which owns Bravo, is suing the Weinsteins on accusations that they didn't get an  opportunity to bid on the show. Won't work. "Project Runway" still has to deliver one more show-cycle to Bravo, which will run in June/July followed by the Lifetime debut in the Fall. That will mean "Runway," which has become the highest-rated reality series on cable, will have three "seasons" in 2008. Is that gonna be fierce or a fast burnout on the concept? We'll see...On new TV listings this week, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will have new shows but the list of guests wasn't available on Sunday night. The Colbert Report will be live from Philadelphia this week leading up to the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary a week from Tuesday. Guests with Stephen will include John Legend, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and MSNBC's Chris Mathews on Monday, The Roots on Tuesday, The Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell on Wednesday and Representative Patrick Murphy on Thursday...Letterman is new this week with Rogue Wave on Tuesday, The Gossip on Wednesday and The Black Keys on Thursday...On new Lenos it's Ingrid Michaelson on Tuesday, The Young @ Heart Chorus on Wednesday and Flogging Molly on Friday...Craig Ferguson has Daniel Lanois on Monday, BellX1 on Wednesday and Morrissey on Friday...Judd Apatow and Lyrics Born on Jimmy Kimmel this Friday...Conan's in repeats this week with Spoon on Monday and The Kooks on Friday...I got SNL wrong last Saturday so I'll switch from checking the NBC website and go back to checking Lorne's live tape if I miss the show. Amy Adams and Vampire Weekend are in a repeat this weekend. The next new SNL will feature Shia Labeouf and My Morning Jacket on May 10.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Charlton Heston's Gun Taken From His Cold, Dead Hands."

MOVIES: "Prom Night," Sony's remake of the 1980 slasher flick, opened at #1 with $22.7 million over the weekend. Fox's "Street Kings" starring the incredibly stiff Keanu Reeves, debuted in second with only $12 million barely beating out Sony's "21" which had $11 million in third place. The weekend's only other top ten debut was Miramax' "Smart People" with Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker which debuted with $4.2 million in seventh place. Fox's Young@ Heart which features elderly singers averaging 80 years old singing songs from the Clash, Coldplay and the Talking Heads opened solidly at four locations in New York and L.A. with $63,606. It goes to 28 cities next weekend. Overall the weekend box-office was down 16% from the same weekend last year, continuing the studio's 2008 slump. Opening this weekend is "88 Minutes" with Al Pacino, "Forbidden Kingdom" with Jet Li and Jackie Chan, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell and  Mila Kunis from the Judd Apatow comedy machine, "Pathology" starring Milo Ventimiglia, "Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden" from director Morgan Spurlock and "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" starring Ben Stein. Jason Reitman's "Juno" comes out on DVD this Tuesday.

THIS JUST IN: It now appears that Katie Couric will become the ninth new program director for Sam Zell's Tribune company at WGN in Chicago. Be back April 27.

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk
                 

Archive: 4/6/08

SCHMUTZ. NOTHING BUT SCHMUTZ...

Just emptying the notebook this week:
 
Now that Sam Zell's Tribune Company has hired Clear Channel Programming VP Marc Chase and two other CC execs to join Randy Michaels and Lee Abrams, among others, at the Tribune Company, you wonder how many more programmers will be needed to take care of Tribune Broadcasting's sole radio property, WGN, Chicago. Who's kidding who? You don't suddenly accumulate this wealth of radio programming talent unless you were about to expand. After the Wall Street Journal declared the Clear Channel deal to go private "dead" last week, the only possibility left for the Mays family is to start spinning off stations to get some kind of health on their bottom line. Could start any day. Especially with the smaller markets.
 
What a week for Jay-Z! He marries both Beyonce and Live Nation, who also picked up 270 degrees of U2. Stunning to first see Madonna leave Warners for Live Nation and now Jay-Z leave Universal for Live Nation. U2 re-upped with Universal last year so that's not part of their deal but, Jesus, the labels are losing huge, money-making brands in their hour of need. At least they inspired a great hit by Sara Bareilles. That's the big guys best move since 1998.
 
IS: Reuters reported on Thursday that the NPD Group has now certified that Apple's iTunes Music Store has passed Wal-Mart to become the number one music seller in the country. Last month, Wal-Mart reportedly insisted to the major label groups that they drastically cut their wholesale price to between $5 to $9 per unit or that Wal-Mart, which now has 127 million customers nationwide every week, might stop racking CD's in it's stores. What's next for the big labels? Well this week Sony/BMG, WMG and UMG cut a deal with Rupert Murdoch to create MySpaceMusic by the end of the year. Songs, albums, merchandise, ringtones, the whole shmear. Then on Friday we hear about 50 Cent creating his own social network on the Web. Will the labels ever be able to be fast enough to get ahead of the curve?
 
THIS THING: Speaking at the Kagan Summit last week, noted broadcast attorney David Oxenford warned radio that the labels are aiming for as much as one-fourth to one-third of radio's gross revenues in their attempt to get a new Performance Royalty Tax applied in this country. Too little too late? Too much too late. Does anybody really believe that the broadcasting industry would accept this? It's both greedy and logic free. Talk about blowing up a village to save it. Uh uh. Not gonna happen. Not in this economy.
 
ON?: Then there was news last week that the major labels are about to get serious in pursuing Universal CEO Doug Morris' Total Music concept in talks with Apple. The Total Music concept involves providing free access to music tied to a specific device in return for a cut of the device price, essentially bundling the cost of a year's worth of music into the cost of the device. Another version of the labels "subscription" model. The buzz started after UMG recently cut a deal with Nokia. London's Financial Times reported Nokia would provide about $80 from each device sold. Apple is offering $20. So this deal may end up lying-in-state too.

TV: Bill O'Reilly wanted one so bad he lied about getting one on-the-air and on-his-resume until Al Franken called him on it so it was a perfect definition of irony for him this week when Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" won a Peabody Award along with NBC's "30 Rock, Bravo's "Project Runway," AMC's "Mad Men," Discovery Channel's "Planet Earth" and Showtime's "Dexter". Not only are those all deserving shows, NPR's delicious "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" also picked up a Peabody, which will be awarded in New York City June 16...In further evidence to the fact that the media world is changing ever more rapidly, last week NBC announced it's Fall 2008 season plans more than a month earlier than the usual "upfront" presentation date in May. In fact, new NBC Entertainment President Ben Silverman rolled out all of his network plans through the summer of 2009! Silverman said the network would now be aiming to provide new programs on a "year-round basis" with less  emphasis on repeats. No pilot footage was available because, since the writers strike , no pilots have been produced. But a few highlights on the schedule will be a spin-off from "The Office" debuting after the Superbowl next year, which NBC will have along with their marathon coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics (cough). Also, every Thursday in October, Saturday Night Live will have a half-hour prime-time slot leading up to the Presidential election..."Spectacle: Elvis Costello With..." will be a new 13-week series starting this December on the Sundance Channel in which Costello will play host to artists and other personalities for an hour of discussion and performance. Elton John will exec produce...New episodes this week from "30 Rock" and "The Office" on NBC this Thursday while ABC has "Desperate Housewives" back from the strike delay on Sunday..."Letterman" is in repeats this week but if you missed The Mars Volta in January, they're on this  Tuesday...New shows for "Leno" this week include Jimmy Eat World on Monday, P.O.D. on Tuesday, Angie Stone on Wednesday and The Redwalls on Thursday...Counting Crows on "Craig Ferguson" Wednesday..."Conan" has Hot Chip on Monday and They Might Be Giants on Thursday...Ben Harper on "Carson Daly" this Thursday...new "Daily Shows With Jon Stewart" this week will include guests Nathan Lane on Monday, Cokie Roberts on Tuesday, Bin Laden biographer Steve Coll on Wednesday and Ahmad Chalabi biographer Adam Roston on Thursday...Guests on the Peabody Award winning "Colbert Report" this week will be Jesse Ventura on Monday, Madeleine Albright on Tuesday, "Citizens For Retiring The Penny" leader Jeff Gore on Wednesday and Washington Post Middle East expert Robin Wright on Thursday...SNL this weekend will be a repeat with Amy Adams and Vampire Weekend.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Knicks Fastbreak Takes Two-And-A-Half Minutes".

MOVIES: Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary "Shine A Light" opened well at 276 screens over the weekend, taking in $1.5 million, including $1.1 million from high-grossing IMAX venues for a solid $5,475 per-screen average ...The Weinstein's high profile drama "My Blueberry Nights," starring Norah Jones in her acting debut along with Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz, debuted on six screens with $73,742, a knockout $12, 290 average. It goes wider this weekend..."21" came in first in this weekend's box-office race, falling just 37% from its #1 opening last weekend to take in another $15.1 million. George Clooney and Renee Zellweger's "Leatherheads" fell about $5 million short of projections and just debuted in second place with $13.5 million, barely beating out the third place debut of Jodie Foster's "Nim's Island" which took in $13.3 million. "Horton Hears A Who" was fourth with $9.1 million and "The Ruins" debuted in fifth with $7.8 million. Overall the weekend was down 23% compared to the same weekend last year. So far, 2008 b.o. now trails 2007's b.o. by 1%...Opening this weekend  new are "Street Kings" starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker, "Smart People" with Sarah Jessica Parker, Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page, "Snow Angels" with Kate Beckinsale and finally, "The Band's Visit," about an Egyptian police band that gets stuck deep in Israel. It's a well reviewed comedy, believe it or not.

FINALLY: Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis forty years ago on Friday. On Saturday night, VH-1, had a fascinating show, "The Night James Brown Saved Boston". In case you missed it, the program chronicled the night after King's death, when James Brown was booked to play a concert at the Boston Garden. Cities across the country were experiencing riots. Boston Mayor Kevin White, fearing the worst, decided to convince Boston's public television station to broadcast the performance in attempt to keep Boston riot free. It worked. But not without at least one stunning historical moment. Jaw dropping actually. The announcer's tone of voice would have made Alistair Cooke sound vulgar. It was sooooooooo unctuous. Remember, it was 1967.
"We invite you to stay tuned for a live memorial concert at the Boston Garden featuring negro singer Jimmy Brown and his group."
                That that remark didn't cause Fenway Pock to burn to the ground that night is a miracle.

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

                                                                                                                                               
Archive: 3/30/08
 
UNEXPECTED SNIPERS DELAY MAYS' C.C. CASH-OUT
 
     Let's see what's happened since we last looked at The Forest.
     First, as I predicted two years ago, the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio has been approved by the Justice Department. Look for the FCC to OK the deal in about a month. Republicans don't exist to create hurdles for the business community. Hell, if Mel Karmazin had asked them, the Federal Reserve would've probably paid Howard and Oprah's salary this year too. Look for tiered-pricing and the elimination of duplicate music channels however. Cutting satellite radio's overhead has been the whole point in this merger.
     Second, the banks that signed contracts to underwrite the purchase of all Clear Channel's stock, in a last cash-out for the Mays family from Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, failed to show up at a closing meeting on Thursday. It is supposed to close on Monday (tomorrow, 3/31) but this past Friday, Clear Channel told the SEC that the deal "may not close". The original agreement had a purchase price of $39 a share for CC's stock, which closed Friday at $29. That's more than a 25% decline! The banks are ready to pay a penalty fee and walk away, though Clear Channel is now ready to sue everybody. And PR be damned! The largest radio owner in the country may have good profit margins right now, but that came at the sacrifice of the product as programmers, air talent and other cutbacks reduced their nut. At the same time, radio shows no growth and little success in reaching the next generation of listeners. They'll have to settle for less  eventually. Then watch as Bain and Lee sell off most of the assets to Sam Zell's Tribune company as has been widely anticipated. Zell wants it cheap so he can give new hires Randy Michaels and Lee Abrams something that takes advantage of their talents.
      So, in the first case, you have two businesses that spent way too much money and have to merge with their competitor to save themselves.
      Then on the other hand, you have a business that underspent on their product and now tries to cash-out one more time before exiting the business they had a major factor in damaging. Remember too, that CC paid way too much for most of the stations they bought up in their late 90's expansion. They were lucky to get both Bain and Lee to join in their exit in a moment of financial hubris. But those days are over. The American debt crisis currently underway on both Wall Street and Main street makes you wonder what Bain and Lee were thinking.
      All these millionaires have demonstrated stunning incompetence.
      But they'll all walk away just fine.
      It's the thousands of talented, hard-working entertainers and communicators who will really be screwed.
      Since when has that become the American way? Or a good way to do business period? 

TV: Network series continue to return with new episodes since the writers strike ended and ratings show that viewers have returned at season high numbers. At least that was the case for CBS' Monday night comedies "Two and a Half Men," "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Big Bang Theory" last week. This week, "My Name Is Earl" returns to NBC Thursday at 8pm. "CSI" and "Without a Trace" also return this Thursday on CBS. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE returns with a new show featuring host Christopher Walken and Panic At The Disco this Saturday...Musical guests this week - LETTERMAN has Cat Power on Tuesday, Norah Jones on Wednesday and Jay-Z & Mary J. Blige on Friday...On LENO it's the B-52's on Tuesday, Ani DiFranco on Wednesday, Ferras on Thursday with Ben Lee on Friday...Moby is on CONAN Monday...On JIMMY KIMMEL, he's got Carole King on Tuesday and Paramore on Friday...Guests on THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART this week include Senator Chuck Hagel on Monday, William Safire on Wednesday and George Clooney on Thursday...On THE COLBERT REPORT it's authors Eric Allerman and Michael Reynolds on Monday, author Van Jones on Tuesday, R.E.M. and author Susan Jacoby on Wednesday and author Clay Shirky on Thursday.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK : "Report - 32% of Prayers Deflected Off Passing Satellites."

MOVIES: Columbia's new blackjack saga "21" exceeded expectations and opened at #1 with $23.7 million in the weekend box-office results. Fox's "Horton Hears a Who" took in $17.4 million in second place to become the first pic of the year to pass $100 million. The spoof "Superhero Movie" from MGM came in about $5 million under expectations with $9.5 million in third place followed by "Tyler Perry's Meet The Brown's" in fourth with $7.8 million and "Drillbit Taylor" with $5.3 million in fifth. Good reviews for director Kimberly Pierce's "Stop-Loss" didn't help much as yet another film about the Iraq war opened to poor business. It took in $4.5 million to debut eighth. Overall, box-office was down for the second weekend in a row compared to last year. The first quarter take for the studios was $2.1 billion, up just 0.64% from a year ago and attendance was down 2.6% compared to 2007. Big picture? The future looks slow until the summer-season begins with "Iron  Man" on May 2...Opening wide next weekend is "Shine a Light," Martin Scorsese's doc on the Rolling Stones performance at New York City's Beacon Theater last year. This is also the show where Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun fell and eventually passed away after hitting his head backstage. Also opening is "Leatherheads" with George Clooney, Renee Zellweger and "The Office"'s John Krasinsky, "Married Life" with Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson and "Nim's Island" with Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin.

SCHMUTZ: Some notes on other things in print I've seen recently - Bill Gruber from WAPS was quoted in John Jurgensen's profile of Akron's Black Keys in the March 22 edition of The Wall Street Journal...Jesse Barnett, an AAA indie (Right Arm Resource) who I've always liked, was featured in Billboard's cover story "Ingrid Michaelson Flips The Script" back on January 12. Appearing in print has always been a big deal to me but last week, Los Angeles Times pop music critic Ann Powers, in a column concerning The Raconteurs, even fell into ruminating about how newspaper critics may be losing their influence in the new flat-earth Web age. I have to admire her honesty and perception. She's right, of course. Hope her owner Zell didn't read that column though.

FINALLY: I am so happy to see that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings will be the star of the opening night party at the upcoming NON-COMMvention in Philadelphia. Along with Jim White, they'll be performing at the World Cafe Live Studios at the WXPN building on Thursday May 29. Sharon's red-hot "Dusty in Memphis" on steroids soul revue knocks me out. She and the Dap-Kings are so in-the-sweet-spot that they're set to open for the summer tour by the Dave Mathews Band and will be the kickoff to a simmering NON-COMM.
 
—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk
                                                                                                              
Archive: 3/16/08

ICE CREAM CONES TO THE FOREHEAD. TAKE...ONE.
 
     The failure of the record labels to capitalize on the Internet beat out Decca A&R Veep Dick Rowe's legendary 1962 brushoff of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, ("groups with guitars are on their way out"), for the top position on Blender magazine's list of "The 20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups Of All Time," from their April edition. So, if you're just sitting around waiting for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to join the rest of the Bush administration in resigning to cash out in the private sector now, just check in at Blender.com for the entire jaw-dropping list. While the stunning decision to ignore, then fight the Web has left the major labels in desperate condition, the history in this piece can really flash you back. Dazzlingly. Rowe arrived at Liverpool's Cavern Club but was aggravated by the difficulty in getting in because of the long lines of excited teens. ("Damn it! All these incredibly enthralled new customers!") So he smoked a cigarette.
Harrumphed. Then went to another Liverpool club where he signed up Dickey Poole and the Tremeloes instead. Oops...Two reports last week also seem to confirm why the labels have such a tough time getting any sympathy during these tough times. First, the New York Post pointed out that it's been quite some time since the labels received $270 million in their settlement for copyright infringement against Napster. Remember too, that KAZAA  also settled for $100 million. But talent and managers are asking, "Where's the money?" Appears nobody's seen any of that settlement money. Then, last week, CNET noted that the major labels signed deals with Google-owned YouTube during the last 18 months but no artists have seen any of that money either. It makes me angry to watch the labels' SOUNDEXCHANGE keep pressing for a radio performance royalty and a prohibitive royalty rate for Internet radio, empowered by a Congress that has demonstrated in their public hearings  that they don't have a clue as to how the radio, Internet and music industries work. That'll just kill the two major outlets for a potential financial recovery of the major label's business. Then there was a story Friday on NPR about how the labels are trying to strong arm the publishers for more bucks, typically, one of the RIAA's strongest allies. The signs of desperation and denial are constant. It's been hard to watch the daily flow of bad news surrounding the record industry. The Chrysalis catalog is up for bid! Make an offer for Death-Row? Geez, it's like witnessing a probate settlement. Oops! Maybe it is.

TV: Tucker Carlson and John Gibson have had their shows canceled by MSNBC and Fox News respectively. Carlson's show will be replaced by Race For The White House With David Gregory who is also the White House correspondent on NBC's Evening News. Fox News will replace Gibson with a similar daily election focused show. Both will remain in their buildings popping up on other shows until their contracts are up. Meanwhile, Andrea Mitchell will now anchor MSNBC afternoons starting at 1pm throughout the rest of this election season...ABC's Lost has another new episode this Thursday before returning with five new episodes playing at 10pm starting Thursday April 24...Guests on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart this week will include author Brian Fagan on Monday, author Jeffrey Sachs on Tuesday and Senator Arlen Specter on Wednesday...Guests on The Colbert Report this week will include author Samantha Power on Monday, singer/songwriter Carole King on Tuesday and former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers on Wednesday. Thursday's Stewart and Colbert show guests weren't available at press time....Letterman has new shows with BellX1 on Monday, The Cribs on Tuesday, the Gutter Twins on Wednesday and a repeat with A Fine Frenzy on Thursday...Leno's lineup this week will feature The Bravery on Monday, Erykah Badu (!) Tuesday, Jim Lauderdale on Wednesday, Nada Surf on Thursday and The Black Crowes on Friday...Guests on Conan this week are Billy Bragg on Monday, Stars on Tuesday, Paul Thorn (!) on Wednesday, Yael Naim on Thursday and Big Show on Friday...For those who'd like to see Tina's impassioned endorsement of Hillary Clinton again, this week's SNL is a repeat with Tina Fey and Carrie Underwood from a few weeks back. She does it during the 'Weekend Update'.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Actor Matthew McConaughey To Star In Whatever."

MOVIES: Fox's Horton Hears a Who had the largest opening of the year so far and the fourth-best March opening in history with $45.1 million to top the weekend box-office. It healthily exceeded Fox's tracking expectations. Last week's #1, 10,000 B.C., fell to second place with another $16.4 million. The mixed-martial-arts flick, Never Back Down, debuted in third with $8.6 million. College Road Trip was fourth with $7.9 million and Vantage Point was fifth with $5.4 million. The only other new film to debut in the top ten was torture-porn, Doomsday, that opened in seventh-place with $4.7 million. Overall, the weekend was up 8.5% from the same weekend last year. Opening this weekend will be Drillbit Taylor from the Apatow comedy factory with star Owen Wilson, Shutter, a horror tale with Joshua Jackson and Tyler Perry's Meet The Browns with Angela Bassett and, of course, Tyler. By the way, the buzz is excellent on Iron Man with Robert  Downey Jr. opening May 2 and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull opening May 22 for Memorial Day weekend. Harrison Ford pulls it off again even though he's 65. Maybe because his costar is Cate Blanchett in black leather.

SCHMUTZ: Hope that all at SXSW last week found a gem or two that they had never heard of before. I always loved that about Austin...No Depression magazine is going totally to the Web soon. Subscriptions are stable. Rack sales are stable. Record advertising has disappeared...Best wishes to old radio friend Mark Samansky, who's joined the morning show at new AAA reporter KTNI-FM in Denver. Mark would love material like this: according to USA Today, Kabul, Afghanistan had two hours of power a day under the Taliban. It's just three hours of power a day under Karzai...I just love this sound - "Mercy" by Duffy...Keep hearing "Hush" by Deep Purple under the new Jaguar TV campaign. Reminds me that new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is such a DP fanatic that not only did he have Ian Gillan and Ian Paice's version of Deep Purple in for a Moscow performance in February, he flew in former lead singer Joe Lynn Turner from Japan for a show on March 7 according to  Bloomberg. Joe Lynn Turner?...So the Rolling Stones are likely to be the next act to follow Madonna to a recording deal with Live Nation? Who needs a label?...Lee Abrams leaves XM to join Randy Michaels at Sam Zell's Tribune Company just as Mel gets ready to arrive. I've always loved Abrams and his wisdom but is this really just about newspapers?

FINALLY: As Maureen Dowd put it - "do you want Natalie for $1,000 or Kristen for $4,000? The dopes never realize they're both the same girl. When do johns ever compare notes?" Join me on my return March 30 when Silda Wall Spitzer puts Eliot headfirst into a meatgrinder!

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

Archive: 3/9/08

Winter Always Turns Into Spring

      One of the great truths I've embraced in my twenty one years of Buddhist practice is that Winter always turns into Spring. A thought that both radio and records should consider as they continue through a great phase of historical change due to the growth of the digital media age.
      So, as March Madness, Spring Break and the Spring Book approach us, I'd like to take an opportunity to point out an excellent recent article by Radio & Records AAA editor John Schoenberger that shows again how AAA distinguishes itself from other music formats that continue struggling.
      Under the headline, "Finding Like-Minded Listeners" from the 2/22/08 edition of R&R, John writes about KTBG (The Bridge), Kansas City Program Director Jon Hart's use of direct mail using resources from Jim Olenick's A1A Consulting in Kansas City to reach new listeners.
      Both Jon and Jim are friends from the many Non-Commventions over the past, but this particular story reminds one that tapping into new audience can be achieved. But you gotta do it, not talk about it.
      Using the results of a research project called the Claritas Life Study, KTBG targeted a demographic they called  "Money and Brains" whose attributes included being: IN THE TOP HALF OF THE 25-52 DEMO
                       MARRIED
                       OWNING SINGLE-FAMILY HOME
                       COLLEGE GRADUATE
                       WHITE-COLLAR PROFESSIONAL
                       UPSCALE WITH A MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME OF $80,000+
      This describes the very desirable AAA core audience.
      This demographic was sent CD's of acoustic performances from The Bridge plus a newsletter with the station's scheduled programming details along with re-purposed content such as interviews that had run on the station with artists like Todd Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters (Hillary's favorite band according to an ex-Obama aide). This especially was cool for those fans who had missed the interview over the air.
      Olenick researched how to reach the exact potential listeners throughout the greater Kansas City area, and Hart told Schoenberger that, while it is still too early to have a definitive result, membership and underwriting support is up almost 20% for the first seven months of KTBG's fiscal year.
      This isn't groundbreaking news, but it reminds me how relatively easy it is to specifically target and reach potential new customers of your AAA radio station.
      No bull or sales jargon. Simply deliver something of inarguable value, (CD or newsletter), as an introduction to new folks who may already be dispositioned to like the station. Get in front of them. Help them in.
    This is something obvious that the radio industry has long talked about but has basically abandoned on the commercial side since the advent of deregulation and quarterly profit reports turned broadcasters/communicators into simply worrying about the bottom line instead of the product.
      Which, for most music radio stations other than AAA, is their sorry state of life in 2008.
      Non-commercial AAA's should all do this as a matter of course.
      I'm also impressed with Jim Olenick's work here too. The specificity and resulting efficiency of having accurate access to those potential new customers is one of the new advantages of the digital age.
      Remember that this is why Google shares are over $500. Through their research and click-count methodology, they can give a client a list of exactly who might be inclined to use a product.
      We've been talking about these projects for years at conventions. Don't ever forget that they work.
      You just have to actually DO it rather than just talk about it.
      For more on this story, check out the article at RadioandRecords.com or reach Jon Hart at KTBG.FM (their Web site) or contact Jim Olenick at A1A Consulting, 913.362.5070 or via email.

BIZ: How bad off is the music radio programming business? I remember back in the 70's, 80's and 90's when there were more than a dozen programming conventions annually. Now, there are, like, four. And half of them are AAA's You've got the main R&R convention and the Conclave for the commercial guys (I even did the AAA part of the Conclave back in the 90's) and then there's R&R's Boulder AAA Summit and our Non-Commvention. Why does AAA have over half the annual music radio programming  conventions? Because the commercial guys aren't looking for new hit songs or artists. For the most part they could care less. New music means risk to today's commercial music programmer and they don't wanna lose their job. They're just gonna play that 300 song list from the owner's consultant anway. Nobody above them is encouraging them to create. So their conventions are primarily syndie sales pitches combined with commiseration sessions. ("I had to blow out two-thirds of  my morning team" say the rock and Top 40 PD's, "I had to blow out my midday girl" say the AC guys this year). Sad. The next move may be Smooth Jazz PD's trying to figure out how to include AAA artists in their mix. But I doubt if these companies have either the talent, will or commitment to do so. After New York, Denver and Washington D.C. lost their Smooth Jazz stations in the last month, rumors have some owners considering AAA flips. Better have someone who knows what they're doing going from a passive/background music format to a format targeted to upscale active listeners who want to be communicated with. The quick fixes won't work in 2008. You gotta do it.

MOVIES: Warner Brothers' unintentionally hilarious "10,000 B.C." came in on top of the weekend box-office with $35.7 million followed by the debut of "College Road Trip" with $14 million. Will Ferrell's "Semi-Pro" dropped almost 60% in its second week to fourth place with just $5.8 million. Maybe four sports farces in a row is one too many Will. "The Bank Job" debuted in fifth with $5.7 million. Overall, business was down for the fourth week in a row compared to last year. Maybe the public is like me and watching all the Oscar nominees coming out on DVD. "Michael Clayton", "No Country For Old Men". Opening next week is "Horton Hears a Who" with the voice of Jim Carrey among others. Also up will be "Funny Games" with Naomi Watts, "Never Back Down" with Djimon Hounsou and "Doomsday" with Bob Hoskins.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "FCC OKAYS NUDITY ON TV IF IT'S ALYSON HANNIGAN". An FCC official clarifies new broadcasting regulation that clears the way for more nude scenes featuring the beautiful, auburn-haired Alyson Hannigan.

TV: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will induct Madonna, John Mellencamp, Leonard Cohen, The Ventures and the Dave Clark 5 on Monday night. Too bad that Mike Smith, the lead singer and pianist of the DC5 died just two weeks ago. The ceremony will be broadcast live on VH-1 Classic at 8:30pm...South Park returns for another season on Comedy Central this Wednesday at 10:00pm followed by the debut of the new series "Lewis Black's Root of All Evil" at 10:30pm...On LETTERMAN it's British Sea Power on Wednesday...LENO has Sheryl Crow on Monday, The Blind Boys of Alabama on Tuesday and Gavin DeGraw on Wednesday...Drive-By Truckers on CONAN Tuesday...Sheryl Crow on JIMMY KIMMEL on Wednesday...New guests this week on THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART include Lt.General William B. Caldwell on Monday, right-wing icon Grover Norquist on Tuesday, author Ronald Kessler on Wednesday and Bush's Presidential Press Secretary Dana Perino on Thursday (Love the bob, hate the sound)...Guests on new COLBERT REPORTS this week include George McGovern on Monday, Geraldo Rivera on Tuesday, Dr. Laura Schlessinger on Wednesday and author Sudhir Venkatesh on Thursday...This week's host on SNL is Jonah Hill (from "Knocked Up" and "Superbad") and musical guest Janet  Jackson.

LINE OF THE WEEK: "Fidel Castro has stepped down as President of Cuba. He expected to be replaced by either his brother Raul or his idiot son Fidel W. Castro" - David Letterman.

SCHMUTZ: You can now hear WRXP New York online by going to 101rxp.com and clicking on the headphones icon. It's a little bit harder than a typical AAA but it's still loaded with locals and lots of adult-rock gems...The NPR corporate board blew out CEO Ken Stern on Wednesday even though he doubled their audience to 26 million and stabilized their finances during his time there (1999-2008). Remarkably, many NPR affiliates are upset with the Stern regime on account of its success in podcasting and streaming. They'd rather pose as the ONLY source of "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" for their pledge drives. To those NPR affiliates: Don't bother chasing that horse. It's not only outta the barn. It's over the horizon line. Try the cinema. Movies are in color now. Evolve!!!!

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk


Archive: 3/2/08

FREE. OK. NOW DOLLY BACK. LOOK. FREE

    Well, the buzz this week is about "The Long Tail" author Chris Anderson's new article in his magazine Wired. "Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business," is from Anderson's new book, "Free," coming in early 2009 from Hyperion in which he says, "Just as Moore's Law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: To Zero.
    Google is free. Free music from Radiohead, NIN and any other myriad MySpace sites. Gaming starts online with ad-supported free entrees. It all goes back to King Gillette offering the U.S. Army free razors around World War 1. Troops ran out of razorblades, had to buy new ones. And a monstrously successful business, Gillette Razor Blades, (now primarily owned by Warren Buffett), was born.
    Cross-subsidies is what that marketing technique is called. Anderson describes five other free marketing techniques in the first chapter of his new book.
    There's a new paradigm coming to the marketplace as distribution costs/connections fall to nothing over the Web.
    Anderson even gives us some good history. The original "free lunch" was a gratis meal for anyone who ordered at least one beer in San Francisco saloons in the late 1800's.
    The point Anderson is making is that monetizing your product over the Web is starting to go under an extraordinary change. And marketing on the Web is only a decade and a half old. It's time to look at the big picture. Something's happening here.
    Today, radio makes approximately 10 to 12% of its money over the Internet in the best cases. Most broadcasters were late to the party and, admit it, it's not an area in which programmers and GM's have expertise. Many original radio station Web sites simply followed the trend of their industry peers.
    That's why I recommend checking out "Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business" at Wired.com.
    Chris Anderson, in "The Long Tail" took the time to explain how Amazon and eBay's business models were working in our new digital age. It was also a perfect explanation of the future of the music industry, in which, record sales would rapidly evolve from the 30 million selling Michael Jackson, Eagles, Def Leppard, Metallica and Alanis Morissette age to the 500,000 to 1 million selling Wilco, Jack Johnson, Fiest age, which fits into AAA's appeal much better.
    Instead of shooting for the 10 million unit grand slam, the labels could survive just fine on the sales of thousands of available artists with a track record as well as selling catalog. Which is what AAA plays. Add it all up and you can still aggregate the same approximate total of the golden days. Hell, all measurements show that people are buying more music than ever before.
    But the big labels never had the patience or leadership to do that.
    Radio in the AAA format, both commercial and non-commercial, has the history, talent, ability and courage to take the aggressive steps necessary to make the take the next step in monetizing their Web impact.
    Anderson's clear, journalistic writing style, complete with myriad specific examples, is a touchstone for the future of our new media age.
    Check it out. You'll get it.

BIZ: The record industry, in its history, has fought the innovations of the LP (78's sound better), the cassette (too much hiss, nobody'll buy them), the CD (too cold versus analog sound), MTV (that's not what our promotion department thought the song was about), and then, the Internet (no security). But all of those innovations were inevitably successful. This week the NPD group pointed out that Apple's iTunes is now the number two music retailer in the U.S., behind only Wal-Mart. The NPD group also predicted that iTunes would pass Wal-Mart to become the #1 American music retailer by the end of this year...This week the Los Angeles Times reported that 48% of American teenagers bought no CD's at all in 2007. That's up from 38% in 2006...How about that Maxim review of the Black Crowes new album, War Paint where the reviewer gave it two and a half stars after only listening to the single? Maxim admitted it was an "educated guess preview". Hilarious.
 Don't expect anyone to ever take Maxim seriously again. As if the ever did.

TV: Senator Hillary Clinton opened up SNL last night and was funny screwing around with Amy Poehler (who plays her on the show). "Enchanted" star Amy Adams and NYC's own Vampire Weekend will be on SNL this Saturday. Meanwhile Hillary stars on the return of THE DAILY SHOW w/ JON STEWART Monday night. It's the first new show for Stewart since he hosted the Oscars last Sunday, which, through no fault of his, were the lowest rated Academy Awards ever. 32 million viewers, down 21% from last year. Why? Cuz it was kinda star-free, big-mass-appeal-hit-movie-free and, I think, folks are finally tiring of the blur of award shows at this time of the year. There is a liability in being the last one...Other guests on new DAILY SHOWS this week will include Ralph Nader on Tuesday, NBC News Tel Aviv bureau chief Martin Fletcher on Wednesday and, from the Obama campaign, former Senator Tom Daschle on Thursday...LETTERMAN, LENO and CONAN are all in repeats this week...New  COLBERT REPORTS this week feature authors Shashi Tharoor on Monday, Jennifer 8. Lee on Tuesday and Gregory Rodriguez on Wednesday. Singer John Legend joins Colbert on Thursday...On CRAIG FERGUSON this week, new shows with Collective Soul on Tuesday, Nicole Atkins on Wednesday and Grizzly Bear on Thursday...On CARSON DALY it's Chuck Prophet on Monday, A Fine Frenzy on Tuesday and Joshua Radin and Ingrid Michaelson on Thursday...The "Project Runway" finale is this Wednesday at 10pm on Bravo. After Christian wins, in order to balance out my own hormones, I plan to eat raw steak for a half hour while spilling whiskey on the floor and firing a 45 over the fence knocking out streetlights as Metallica's "Black" album screams at 11...Here's an update on the return of several network series after the effects of the strike. "30 Rock" and "The Office" will return with five new episodes starting April 10. I said a different date last week. "My Name Is Earl" returns  on April 3. "Grey's Anatomy" and "Ugly Betty" return with five new episodes apiece starting April 24. How about the best episode ever of "Lost" last week. Now we know why they shoulda kept pushing that button. It's time travel, not purgatory, finally revealed after 3+ years. "Lost" will have three new episodes (3/6, 3/13, 3/20) before ending the season with five more new ones starting April 24.

ONION HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of 2008 Election Early"

MOVIES: Business was down for the third straight weekend. The overall box-office total was 25% less than the same weekend last year. Will Ferrell's "Semi-Pro" opened at #1 with $15.3 million, way less than his usual openings of $30 million plus for "Anchorman" or "Talladega Nights" and "Blades of Glory". Has he done the same dumb sports movie three times in a row? Last week's #1, "Vantage Point" came in second with $13 million. "The Spiderwick Chronicles" did well with kids again, taking in another $8.8 million in third. "The Other Boleyn Girl" beat expectations with $8.3 million to debut in fourth place with the highest per-screen average of the weekend, over $7100 per theater. The weekend's other debut was "Penelope" with $4 million in eighth place. Opening this weekend are "10,000 B.C.", a "300" clone from "Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich, "The Bank Job" starring Jason Statham, "College Road Trip" with Martin Lawrence and "Miss Pettigrew  Lives For A Day" starring Frances McDormand....By the way, did you see that the new Time-Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes merged New Line Cinema with Warner Brothers Pictures? This means that New Line heads Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne are gone. So loading up on Oscars and box-office gold from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "Crash," the "Austin Powers" series, those Will Ferrell comedies plus "Sex in the City" and "The Office" wasn't good enough? Reminds me of radio today. The creatives get dismissed (program directors) and one guy at the top decides that HE can do this. Cost cutting instead of making a better product is a fatal disease, especially when the smart folks who can create, get summarily, mistakenly, pushed aside. Remember, according to Arbitron, radio has lost 16% of its audience in the last nine years.

FINALLY: Daylight Savings Time begins earlier this year under a new law. Spring forward one hour at 2am next Sunday morning. Remember that your music scheduling programs are still set for another date unless you've already changed them!

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk


Archive: 2/24/08

WILL RADIO EVER GET TO HAVE MAKE-UP SEX?

     We're trimming The Forest tonight while the 80th annual Academy Awards are underway. Host Jon Stewart opened with some good lines. One of which was his remark that, "The writers strike is over. Welcome to the make-up sex."
    Cool that "Falling Slowly," the Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova song from the movie "Once" won the Best Song Oscar since it was a AAA favorite. The word of the night appears to be "hope," perfect on a broadcast that is seen by over 1 billion people worldwide.
    Also, that Tribute to Binoculars and Telescopes was a highlight for me.
    Honestly, I wonder if radio as a business, will ever be able to have make-up sex with the audience that is leaving them.
    You know my long held opinion that only AAA has shown the ability to hold and build a contemporary music format right now.
    Hope and a good ear springs eternal.  
    More good news for the AAA format this week as another major market, Denver, got a new AAA station, its third, as the Denver Radio Company's KTNI-FM has morphed from hip Adult Standards to a Triple A format. The station has modified its brand moniker from "Martini On The Rockies" to "Martini Radio" under OM/PD Tim Maranville. Of course, Denver already enjoys KCUV and format pioneer station KBCO as well.
     But the news hasn't all been good.
     The format lost one of its oldest stations this month when Pamal, the new owner of WEBK, Killington, Vermont, finally flipped the station from AAA to Country. But I find Pamal's move self-defeating.
     During my days doing record promotion, I made a habit of researching the markets where AAA stations existed. It clicked my programming mind into recognizing who the available audience was. College towns are loaded with 18-24 year old's. Major markets have their particular histories.
     Killington is a prime weekend skiing destination for Greater Boston during the long New England winters.
     That skiing audience was upper class 30-54 year old's. Hip and well-to-do. Former WEBK owner Daniel Ewald sought and set top rates for advertisers targeting that attractive demo.
     So, I know the market is still there. Ask WNCS Montpelier PD Zeb Norris (The other Boleyn brother). Folks from Boston still flock to the White Mountains for skiing every Winter. How you can't make money selling to that demographic, after you've got it, is beyond me.
     That indicates that the sales effort for WEBK was a problem. For which Pamal hopes a format switch to country will be the solution.
     To me, this simply sounds like another typical desperate measure by a commercial radio owner in 2008.
     Rather than putting more effort into management, sales or the format, Pamal has decided to go with the "stunt". Supposedly to dazzle and attract new customers with a public relations move and assuming that business will jump resulting from the publicity of the new format.
     Screw the established brand of adult rock long offered on WEBK. Drop in this 300 song country music list they get cheap from (insert consultant here) and that will save their day.
     Good luck Pamal. But I suspect you're still going to have as much trouble selling country as you did AAA.
     In 2008, you can't sell radio just like you did back in 1988, and I have a suspicion that is the liability at Pamal.
     One of their GM's gave a pitch at an R&R Summit a few years back. "Give away more stuff at remotes" he offered, among a litany of boilerplate 70's promo ideas.
     They're going to need more than hope.
     Call it! 

BIZ: The commercial radio industry's troubles were evident this past week as the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) announced that radio ad sales were down 6% in January compared to last year including an alarming 11% drop in national ad sales. Wachovia Securities analyst Marci Ryvicker described the numbers as "a horrible start to the new year"...
Arbitron's latest "American Radio Listening Trends (including Fall 2007) shows a 3% decline in U.S. per capita radio listening over the last year and radio listening has gone down 16% over the last decade. You can't just talk about getting local and putting a better product on the airwaves. Why not do AAA with an actual staff? Bullshit only goes so far...Meanwhile TSL to online music radio grew 26% last year according to Accustream iMedia Research and WiMAx and 3G haven't really kicked in at the marketplace yet...APPLE this week started selling its iPod shuffle for only $49 and also patented a new podcasting software that can provide customized news/weather/sports pods to customers. Again, programmers: MAKE YOUR PRODUCT BETTER! The competition is still coming and coming and coming.
Or at least its eyes are watering.

BAND NAME OF THE WEEK: Sovereign Wealth Fund.

TV: Saturday Night Live returned last night with a strong episode featuring host Tina Fey and guests Steve Martin, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Internet icon Obama Girl. Austin fave Fred Armisen was OK as the new Obama impersonator. As a result of a funny, Fey return, SNL enjoyed its highest ratings in two years. The show is returning with four straight new programs. "Juno"'s Ellen Page and Wilco will be on this weekend... Fey's "30 Rock" will return with new episodes on Thursday April 3...Guests this week on LENO include Tift Merritt on Monday and Cat Power on Thursday with the Punch Brothers on Friday...CONAN has the Super Furry Animals Monday, James Blunt on Thursday and Shooter Jennings on Friday...Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert continue in reruns this week with new shows coming back next week.

FAVORITE ONION HEADLINES OF THE WEEK: "New Auto Security System Will Not Allow Car To Start If Driver Is Nick Nolte" and "Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice To Look At."

MOVIES: The weekend box-office was down 8% from last year but was topped by the Forest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox thriller "Vantage Point" which opened with
$24 million. About as predicted. #2 was "Jumper" with $12.7 million in its second week followed closely by "The Spiderwick Chronicles" in third place with $12.6 million. The only newcomer to open in the top ten was Jack Black's "Be Kind Rewind" with $4.1 million in seventh place on 808 screens. Opening next weekend are "Semi-Pro" starring Will Ferrell, "Bonneville" with Jessica Lange, Joan Allen and Kathy Bates, "Penelope" with Christina Ricci as a girl with a pig nose, and "The Other Boleyn Girl" with Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Eric Bana and Zeb Norris.

FINALLY: Perhaps it's a shortage of money, organization and direction? You get a sense of why Hillary Clinton's campaign has fallen off its rail from Frank Rich's column in today's Sunday New York Times. "For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn't file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
       "This is the candidate who keeps telling us she's so competent that she'll be ready to govern from Day 1."           
       But hope springs eternal...
       Call it!

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

Archive: 2/17/08

KEELY SMITH & KID ROCK? COMMERCIAL AAA IN NYC?
BOY, THIS STUFF IS STARTING TO TAKE EFFECT!

     A check-up on what's happened since the last Forest:

     Giants upset the Patriots in the Superbowl 17-14 while Vegas cringes and New York city finally accepts Eli Manning as their own. Who knew two brothers would ever win back-to-back MVP awards in the Superbowl?
Game becomes the second most-watched television show ever (following the M*A*S*H finale) with 97.5 million viewers. Petty shines at halftime. Now, as the lack-of-new-mass-appeal-stars era approaches two decades, which boomer act is left to fill the slot in '09? Madonna?
                                                
     The Grammies award five awards to Amy Winehouse, who performs solidly live by satellite from London.
Kanye West, despite his obvious talent, continues to display his insufferable selfishness, losing the Album Of The Year award to a stunned Herbie Hancock.
     While many AAA artists won deserving awards, the show itself was extremely old-school, starting at the beginning with Alicia Keys singing to a black and white Sinatra clip. It was a 90 minute wait til the first rock performance (Foo Fighters). Then, Andy Williams, Keely Smith and Kid Rock?
     My mom would've loved it.
     Unfortunately, with a target of folks in their 80's, the rest of the America's television audience didn't choose to drink NARAS' milkshake. Ratings were only 17.2 million. The second lowest in history.The show even offered its audience the incoherence of winner Alicia Keys thanking "every radio station who ever played me" followed by NARAS President Neil Portnow declaring not only his thanks to radio for playing the music of nominated artists but radio should now begin paying for that opportunity to play those records. Wha?
     No wonder the Grammies are becoming more and more irrelevant.  
                                              
     The best news since my last column was the sign-on of a new adult rock commercial station in New York City, Emmis' flipping smooth-jazz WQCD to 101.9 WRXP, "The New York Rock Experience". This is a station that signed on with the Velvets "Rock and Roll" before segueing into a new R.E.M. track. Emmis VP of Programming Jimmy Steal, who is an old friend of mine, has given me an interview on this new Big Apple miracle, and it's now posted under our Programming section here at Triplearadio.com.
Amazingly, the debut of the new RXP coincided with the agreement between Seattle's KEXP and New York's WNYE to share content. Along with WFUV, The nation's largest market is suddenly alive with AAA music!

TV: The producers offered .3% of Internet revenues, the writers wanted 3%. They settled for 2.5% and a short waiting period before the residuals kick in. A better deal than the directors guild received, by the way. Now that the strike is over, here are the facts I've picked up on. ABC's "Lost" will produce five more episodes to run after the eight new ones are done running. With maybe a few repeats in between. NBC's "Heroes" and ABC's "Pushing Daisies" and "Private Practice" will be back, but not until the Fall. Fox's "24" will return in January. NBC's "30 Rock" should be back by the first week of March. Look for Tina Fey to host the return of new "Saturday Night Live" shows on February 23...This week both Comedy Central's "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" will be in reruns. Jon Stewart will host the Academy Awards this Sunday starting at 8:30pm on ABC...This Saturday, the Independent Spirit Awards will take place live from Santa Monica Beach at 5PM on IFC. If your cable system doesn't carry IFC, AMC will re-run the Spirit Awards at 10pm Saturday. Much better acceptance speeches at this one...Musical guests of note this week include Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings on LETTERMAN Monday, with Ray Davies there on Tuesday and the Foo Fighters on Wednesday...LENO has the Hives on Tuesday, John Fogerty on Thursday and Grammy-winner Herbie Hancock on Friday...CONAN welcomes The Whigs on Wednesday and Black Mountain (!) on Thursday.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "China is the most capitalist country I've ever seen!" - former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan on Thursday.

MOVIES: While production was lost on several projects due to the writers strike, you don't know the original release date of "Justice League of America" anyway, do you? So get ready to see it in 2010 instead of next year. The MPAA is just glad to get its Oscar on this Sunday. Over the weekend, Doug Liman's ho-hum reviewed "Jumpers" opened fine anyway, taking in $27.2 million for first place followed by "Step 2 The Streets" which beat expectations in second place with an opening of $19.7 million. "The Spiderwick Chronicles" also opened well in third, with $19.1 million and the new "Definitely, Maybe" met expectations with $9.7 million in fifth place. Opening this weekend is "Vantage Point" starring Forest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid and "Lost"'s Matthew Fox. Also new are,"Be Kind Rewind" with Jack Black,"Possession" with Sarah Michelle Gellar,"Charlie Bartlett" with Robert Downey Jr. and "Witless Protection" with Larry the Cable Guy.  

SCHMUTZ: As predicted, Blu-ray won the format battle with HD-DVD this week after Wal-Mart, Best Buy and NetFlix all joined the Sony bandwagon...Two things we've learned for sure out of the primaries so far - For the first time ever, either a black man or a woman will be one of America's two choices for President and no matter who wins, the Presidency will be won by a United States Senator for the first time since JFK won in 1960.

FINALLY: Don't forget that this is a leap year, so make sure your music programming software is set up for that extra day.

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

Archive: 1/27/08

HE SAYS HE CAN SHOUT. DON'T HEAR YOU.

     "Internet radio is the killer app," wrote USC professor Jerry Del Colliano in his InsideMusicMedia.com blog this week, and as a longtime proponent of Internet radio's probable growth into a dominant roll in American pop culture, I'm glad to see that other business veterans can see which way the wind is blowing.
     This past week, there was more good news on the future of Internet radio going portable. On Thursday, the FCC began a three month test of transmitting high-speed Internet service over unused television airwaves, called "white spaces," to new prototype devices made by Microsoft, Motorola and Philips using new software from Silicon Valley's Adaptrum.
     The tests are an attempt to make Internet service more accessible and affordable especially to rural areas. The same software and receiving devices would also enable the reception of Internet radio to become more available in cars and portable devices such as an iPod.
     Tests of this procedure initially failed last July, causing TV broadcasters great relief, since they contend that this use of the spectrum might interfere with their transmissions.
     However, it turned out that the Microsoft devices used in the initial test were defective. Plus, the FCC now says that the new procedure will not have any effect on the TV station owners' signals and other tests confirm that.
     If the tests are successful in the next 90 days and the devices are approved by the FCC, the coalition of Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and Adaptrum plans to introduce commercial devices for sale after the digital television transition is completed next February.
     This development, along with Sprint-Nextel's plans to implement WIMAX coverage in Washington D.C., Baltimore and Chicago within the next 90 days, means that access to wireless broadband may become extremely more easy. And portable, within the next year. Don't forget, Apple and Intel are already in on this new opportunity. Wi-fi would end up going for miles, not yards.         
      The playing field is changing incredibly fast.

BIZ: Shoot. We'll have USB ports on every American dashboard before YAHOO finishes ordering lunch. They're still talking about starting up an online music store to compete with iTunes. They've been talking about it for three years. Still no decision. Amazon and Wal-Mart opened stores to compete with iTunes last year and Apple responded by lowering their prices and increasing their MP3 compression standard. Customers won. But YAHOO already has more customers under its tent than almost any other Web site. The slim margins on Web music sales appear to make it easier for them to "make it work", in the immortal words of Tim Gunn. Maybe Jerry Yang doesn't watch "Project Runway"... As far as the Writers Guild Strike causing a cancellation of the Grammy Awards, looks like the guild (WGA) and producers (AMPTP) will begin formal negotiations tomorrow (Monday 1/29). Hopes are that a settlement will be forthcoming by as early as this week. The Guild has already  settled with thirteen production firms and has said that they will not picket the Grammies so Beyonce, Foo Fighters, Carrie Underwood, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Rihanna and a reunited Time (with Morris Day and uber-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis) are all confirmed for performances. It remains to be seen if the WGA will give the Grammies an official exemption if the strike is still underway on February 10 but NARAS might not need one now.

TV: This week it's the return of "Lost" and the Superbowl. ABC will rerun the two hour finale of "Lost" from last season on Wednesday night at 8pm so you can bring yourself up to date. The first of eight new episodes will run Thursday night at 9pm. New time from last year's schedule. The Superbowl game itself will begin at 6pm this Sunday. Pre-game show has already started if you follow any of the ESPN channels. "Proposition bets" in Las Vegas have "Free Falling" leading as the favorite for the last song Tom Petty will play on the half-time show. Will root for the underdog but expect the Patriots to take it from the Giants. Whether you like head coach Bill Belichick or not, his teams seem to have a better will and a better way...Here's some good news on an old friend, Lynn Grossman, the manager of Ingrid Michaelson who also brought us Alexi Murdoch. Lynn will now be the music supervisor for Fox's "House" when it returns to production after the strike ends...New DAILY SHOWS and COLBERT REPORTS this week, but still no guest lists. On LETTERMAN this week, its The Whigs on Monday, the Matt Savage Trio on Tuesday, Colbie Caillat on Thursday and Vampire Weekend on Friday. From the "Can't Go Up Forever" Department: NASCAR ratings are down 21% since 2005.  

MOVIES: Studio sales at the just completed Sundance Film Festival were slimmer than expected because...there weren't many good films! Too many docs and art films that were just...OK. The send-up of "300" from Fox, "Meet The Spartans," (from the same guys who brought you "Date Movie and "Epic Movie"), opened at the top of the box-office list over the weekend, taking in $18.7 million. It was followed by the debut of the dreadfully reviewed "Rambo," from Lionsgate and Sly Stallone, at #2 with $18.2 million. "27 Dresses" was third with another healthy $13.6 million. Last week's top grosser, "Cloverfield" dropped like a rock (68%!) and came in fourth with $12.7 million. Diane Lane's "Untraceable" debuted in fifth with $11.2 million. Lane's co-star in that film, Colin Hanks (Tom's son), according to a press release last week, will next be making a documentary "on the decline of the music industry". Note how that perception of the record business is now standard in our current pop culture. Good job RIAA...Seven Oscar nominations means that "Michael Clayton" will be returning to a theater near you in February. Opening next weekend are "The Eye" with Jessica Alba, a sci-fi horror-lite pic, "Over Her Dead Body," a comedy from Eva Longoria-Parker that looks DOA in its trailer. Also new will be "Strange Wilderness" starring Steve Zahn which looks like a lamer, cheaper ripoff of Judd Apatow's "Superbad"...The MPAA sez the Oscars are still happening with host Jon Stewart on February 24 but they still do not have a waiver from the striking WGA yet either.

WHAT ARE WE LISTENING TO THIS WEEK? "Valentine's Day in Juarez" by the Ike Reilly Assassination. Warren Zevon lives! "Foundations" and "Dickhead" from Kate Nash. You could run a niche AAA format now featuring just smart, talented, "don't fuck with me" British girls. Kate Nash, Nellie McKay, Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse.  Love 'em all. Also like the new Peter Gabriel "Whole Thing" that WXPN broke this week. It's from Peter's "Big Blue Ball" album, features Tim Finn and Karl Wallinger and is now available at iTunes. Ryko Distribution just set up a deal so it should be coming soon in hardware form.

CORRECTIONS: Jerry Del Colliano's excellent blog is available by clicking insidemusicmedia.com. Also, Non-Comm founder Dan Reed is the OM at WXPN, not the APD - who is Helen Leicht - and was lead singer for "Poached Salmon In A White Wine Sauce," not the "Mangled Baby Ducks".

SCHMUTZ: The Fed is expected to cut interest rates by another quarter-point, at least, this Thursday. You know why our economy is in a state of crisis? There is an estimated one-quarter TRILLION dollars of sub-prime mortgage debt. Add that to one TRILLION in current credit card debt in a nation with a 0% savings average and you simply have too much investment based on things that have no value. There's no there, there, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland. I remember reading in the Wall Street Journal about how the two American political parties differ. "Democrats tax, spend and govern. Republicans borrow, spend and govern." When you keep living with the attitude of "How far can we go?" - sooner or later you find out how far...The FCC approved a Clear Channel sale this week but instead of a deal happening, CC has frozen spending until April. Is Sam Zell playing "chicken" with Mitt Romney's old company, Bain Capital and Thomas Lee over a purchase price so his colleague Randy Michaels can return to running CC again?...Speaking of CC, KBCO is now #1 25-54 adults in Denver in the Fall book...Buddy Miller has signed on for lead guitar duties for the European tour of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

FINALLY: I'll be back with a new Forest after the Grammies on February 11th. 

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk
                         
Archive: 1/20/08

LABELS NOW BLAMING TROUBLES ON TRIP TO MEXICO WITH JESSICA SIMPSON

      Honestly, I have to admit that I get tired of constantly expressing disbelief and disgust at the pathetic steps both the radio and record industries continue to employ in an attempt to "turn things around". It's depressing. When I first started writing about our industries about eight years ago, I may have been ahead of the curve but there is little happiness derived by saying, "I told you so," over and over again. I'm just stunned by every announcement like the rest of the world is. Unless it's about AAA.
      So, one of the top wishes on my "Bucket List" this week is to take a break from repeating my critiques of our current "business" situation, which has become identical to the standard L.A. "live" television hit record. Shots of some idiot criminal trying to elude police in a car while being under the constant view of a helicopter equipped with a camera.
      They never get away.
      Even if they escape the cop cars on the ground, the copters in the air will always have them on camera and inevitably, that big-picture view plus GPS (or in radio and records case, the market), always wins.
      The positive take I wanted to emphasize this week is that registration for the eighth annual NON-COMMvention is now available through the link in the Format News section of Triplearadio.com.
      We'll now be getting together annually in Philadelphia where NON-COMM founder Dan Reed lives and works as APD/MD at WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania's groundbreaking AAA station.
      Along with General Manager Roger Lamay and Program Director Bruce Warren, Reed and WXPN not only kicks ass in its home town (the seventh largest metro in the country) but since 1991 has produced the most successful syndicated program in AAA history, "The World Cafe With David Dye". It is now the source for most of NPR's music channels and now, the NON-COMMvention, one of the few annual events in which the adult rock format can both genuinely exchange ideas for actions that make the AAA format better and enables all of us in the format to get a social chance to experience new music and artists and each other.
      Hell, this is the only music format in the current radio business enjoying unqualified and increasing success. The non-commercial side of the AAA family has been breaking records in both audience growth and fund raising since this convention began! At your typical Conclave or R&R confab, all the programmers have done lately is ponder whether to rotate their top 20 songs every 55 minutes or every 40 minutes and save more money by having all their morning drive personalities voice-track afternoon drive too.
      At the fifth annual NON-COMM in Philadelphia back in 2005, we didn't consider such ridiculous programming moves. 2005 was terrific. More GM's talking about capital campaigns and new music. Being in the northeast corridor makes it more available to many more artists and the XPN facility has been built into an increasingly successful part of the Philadelphia scenery.
       First thing; The convention will now be held over four days. Registration and still-to-be-announced performances will begin at the host hotel, The Hilton Inn At Penn, on Wednesday May 28. Radio personnel can register for the convention for just $85 until April 30. All other registrations are $185 before April 30. After that, radio folks go up to $135 and others go to $235. All the info is available through the link in our Format News.
       Dan Reed will release the list of confirmed scheduled talent performances before too long. Should be full of surprises as well as a few usual suspects.
       As 2005 Non-Comm keynote speaker Harry Shearer told the last time we were there in Phillie, "this city gave birth to our country and some of the best music ever made in America!"  Of course, we were both talking to one another in the voice of a pretentious news anchor trying to suck a windsock across the room but... 
       But it was fun, accurate and at the NON-COMMvention in Philadelphia. See you at the return.

TV: After the Directors Guild of America (DGA) settled with the producers on a new deal within six days, there is now hope that the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) will be able to use the DGA agreement as a means to end their strike. The television industry would be the first to benefit from an end. On Saturday the WGA said they would start informal talks with the major studios this Monday as a prelude to official negotiations with the full Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that could take place later this week...The DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART and the COLBERT REPORT  are new this week but new guest lists are still up in the air there and at all the other talk shows except for the LETTERMAN and CRAIG FERGUSON shows. Ringo Starr is on LETTERMAN on Monday with former Senator John Edwards and "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody on Tuesday. Ringo stops by on the FERGUSON show on Thursday. Wilco is on a CONAN repeat this Friday with  Barack Obama. Awards shows (including the February 10 Grammies and the February 24 Oscars) remain in limbo. However, both the Foo Fighters and Beyonce announced this week that they would play the Grammies "no matter what" so enough musicians may cross the lines to make a credible Grammies show possible even if an agreement isn't reached by the tenth. The Oscars are really squirming becuase the actors won't want to cross a picket line next month when their own union is set to negotiate with the AMPTP next. The Screen Actor's Guild Awards will be live and sanctioned by the WGA next Sunday night at 8PM on both TNT and TBS for the celebrity deprived. I think I felt something move over the weekend by the way.

MOVIES: Paramount got a pleasant surprise when J.J.Abrams' "Cloverfield" opened on top of the weekend box-office with a whopping $41 million. Largest MLK weekend opening ever! Fox also appreciated the continuing revelatory appeal of Katherine Heigl as the new romantic-comedy queen as "27 Dresses" opened #2 with $22.4 million. "The Bucket List" fell from first to third with another $15.1 million. "Juno" continued its indie success as it took in another $10.2 million in fourth place. The only other newcomer debut of note was Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah's "Mad Money" which disappointed with only $7.7 million in seventh place. New openings next weekend include "Rambo" from Sylvester Stallone. I'm not kidding. He's 62 and he's back. (Cough), "Untraceable" starring FBI agents Diane Lane and Colin Hanks. Good genre picture from the reviews I've seen. Also opening is "Meet The Spartans" starring Kevin Sorbo and Carmen Electra (urp!) and "How She Move" with  Keyshia Cole, a dance pic. The buying frenzy at Sundance continues through next Sunday as the major movie studios try to fill their summer and Fall '08 pipelines. Oscar nominations will be announced this Tuesday morning.

BIZ: Another reason the NON-COMM is so important. The Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) said on Friday that commercial radio had suffered its eighth consecutive monthly decline in advertising billing, including an alarming 12% drop in national ad spending in December. December. Christmas. Uh-oh. On the record side, new EMI owner Terra Firma started cutting 1/3 of its employees. That means 2000 cuts coming in the next few weeks. How's it working for them so far? Let's see. Paul McCartney and Radiohead are already gone. The Rolling Stones left Thursday and Coldplay is striving mightily to find a legal "out" before they deliver their next completed album. "We'll renew our focus on finding and developing new talent," said new EMI head Guy Hands. EMI is now in the process of firing both veteran and young A&R directors, some of whom I know and admire, just as SONY/BMG, WMG and UMG have recently done. And this is how you're going to find and develop new hit records? If the war between the major labels and the record buying public was a heavyweight fight, the referee would have stopped it by now. Too much bleeding and the victim doesn't even know what day it is.

FINALLY: Congratulations to KFOG for moving up to third 25-54 adults in the San Francisco Fall Arbitron. And welcome back to former KINK programmer Carl Widing, who's consulting the new AAA in Lakeport/Ukiah, California, KNTI. Have a good week!

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk

Archive: 1/13/08

SCHMUTZ. NOTHING BUT SCHMUTZ.

      First thing, the item about Entercom's new Regional Presidents also being required to voicetrack middays at their new stations was, a joke.
      Though, by my account, managers at at least three radio ownership groups read the item and paused. Took a long pause. It could happen! Because the radio industry in this day and age no longer prides itself on creating an attractive product. It prides itself on coming up with new ways to save money. So we are amazed on a daily basis as our industry reveals new, incredible ways to make tuning in to radio stations less and less important in listeners lives while cells, satellites and iPods take over American life.
      Entercom made it even more necessary to clarify last week's Forest material when they flipped their classic-rock KYYS in Kansas City to AAA last week. Now called "99.7 The Boulevard," Entercom gave up the classic-rock battle with Cumulus' KCFX, the "Fox," and went AAA. It's a tight-listed sucker that will still leave plenty of room for Jon Hart's excellent NPR/AAA non-commercial KTBG, "The Bridge," to fill, but as a relentless advocate for the adult rock format, I'm happy to see more signals switch to AAA. Especially in a major market and especially at a station that once featured friends such as John Duncan, Max Floyd and my old morning partner Carren Sheldon in its past.
                                                                                                                                              
Lately, alternative stations and programmers are going down like pheasants at one of Dick Cheney's canned "hunting" trips in Texas. Last week I mentioned that CBS had blown out the staff and format at WOCL here in Orlando, switching to a clone of its WCBS-FM New York format this past Thursday. Then on Friday, Clear Channel blew out PD/morning man Pat Lynch at active-rock WJRR here in town. Format still remains as of tonight (Sunday 1/13), but one never knows nowadays. I also see the Leslie Fram's long run at 99X in Atlanta is over as the alternative format has bitten the dust up in the nation's #10 market. Opens an opportunity for CBS AAA WZGC there. Down in the large American Sunbelt markets, witnessing alternative stations crash is filling folks' schedules until NASCAR arrives in Daytona next month.
                                                                                                                                               
At last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sprint-Nextel announced a variety of new business partnerships that would result in the deployment of WIMAX in Washington D.C., Baltimore and Chicago by the end of April. This will be the true future for Internet radio. The company plans to spend $5 billion to ensure many more major markets would be covered by WIMAX by the end of this year. This is Sprint-Nextel's baby. It's the one tool in their competition plan against Verizon, A,T &T and T-Mobile, who aren't yet on board with WIMAX, though it is also an integral part of INTEL's growth plan for 2008-09. So the WIMAX announcement wasn't such a surprise. The surprise at CES for me was how soon it would be so much easier to show Internet content on your TV. Panasonic, Fujitsu and Sharp all presented new TV sets that can plug directly into an Internet connection, making it simple now, to connect the growing wave of available video content  from the Internet, directly into the TV set. SONY announced a new Bravia model with an optional feature to access Internet programming from partners like AOL, Yahoo and SONY's own user-generated-content Web site, Grouper. INTEL also announced that soon, it will ship chips designed to enable devices, most importantly, televisions, to connect to the Internet. So finally, an easier and better alternative to watching video on one-inch square screens on your cell or, at best, laptops, is heading to the market.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails - ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls - especially exit polls - with scientific precision they simply don't have." That was Karl Rove, former senior adviser to George Bush, on Thursday's op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal, trying to explain the massive miss the pollsters laid on Hillary Clinton Tuesday night in New Hampshire. Just wanted to agree with him in print at least once for my Republican readers. He'll still be sharing a duplex with Nixon's lawyers in hell.

TV: This was also interesting this week. CNN beat FOX NEWS in election coverage ratings for the first time since Roger Ailes' cable channel has existed. For Iowa and New Hampshire primary coverage last week, CNN nearly doubled their '04 numbers to 3.29 million watchers while FOX NEWS averaged 3.06 million, up 60% and MSNBC attracted 1.64 million, up 150% from '04. To add more to the perception that right-wing cable has perhaps peaked, ratings for the first quarter of existence of the FOX BUSINESS CHANNEL, created by Ailes to go after CNBC, yielded an average daytime audience of just 6,300 persons while just over 16,000 nationwide showed up in primetime. But those numbers do beat the cable-access channel with the middle-school kids reviewing movies so at least it's a start...There are a few new shows this week. Wanna check out Kate Nash? The latest British chanteuse will be on THE LATE, LATE SHOW WITH CRAIG FERGUSON on Tuesday night... On LETTERMAN this week it is Maroon Five on Monday, K.T.Tunstall on Tuesday and Mars Volta on Thursday!...All the other talk shows that feature guests are new too but publicist's are advising clients not to allow pre-publicty while the WGA strike is underway. This is likely to change soon but who knows?...FOX's "American Idol" returns this Tuesday at 8pm and Comedy Central's "Reno 911" starts its fifth season at 10:30pm this Wednesday.

MOVIES: It was clear that no writers crossed the picket lines to work for NBC's "Golden Globe Announcements" tonight. It was just Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell prattling cliched banalities between naming winners. Trouble is, this strike may end up effecting both the Grammy Awards and Oscars next month if stars refuse to attend. Globe winners were all the usual suspects. Lewis, Depp, Cotillard, Christie, Blanchett and Bardem. One note not on the TV show was that Eddie Vedder won Best Original Song from the Globes for his song "Guaranteed" from Sean Penn's "Into The Wild". Academy Award nominations will come out next Tuesday morning (1/22)...Over the weekend, "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman came in first with $19.5 million. "First Sunday" with Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan debuted in second with $19 million followed by "Juno" with $14 million, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" with $11.5 million. The only other new film to debut in  the top ten was "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie" that debuted in ninth place with $4.4 million. "There Will Be Blood" had the best per-screen average of the weekend, taking in $2 million at only 129 theaters. It goes wider this weekend. Other new arrivals at theaters will include "Mad Money" with Diane Keaton, "Cassandra's Dream" with Colin Farrell and "Cloverfield," the buzzed about sci-fi project from director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams ("Lost"). If the constant, shaky hand-held camera work of "Blair Witch" brought on your motion sickness, be advised to take Dramamine for this one too.

FINALLY: Loving Stereophonics "It Means Nothing" and Radiohead's "Weird Fish/Arpeggi" this week. Who are you wearing best boy?

—Mike Lyons

Discuss! Visit the AAA live forum: TalkTalk
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