Gongol.com Archives: April 2021
April 3, 2021
"Unbundled" radio sounds a lot like full-service radio
Ezra Eeman, who works for the European Broadcasting Union (promoting public broadcasters on the continent), shared a vision of what he called "unbundled" radio -- a radio-like experience of audio programming that comes to the listener across a range of applications streamed directly to the smartphone. The most insightful part of this interesting article is the final graphic, illustrating how a person might easily consume audio from seven or more divergent sources across the day, from a news podcast to a live-streamed interview to customized music apps. ■ What's striking is how much Eeman's mockup of a personalized listening experience looks like the programming clock for what we once fondly knew as "full-service radio" here in the United States. While full-service radio is still around in a handful of places (usually in micro-sized markets where the "general store" approach still works on the air because there may only be one radio station in town), it's surprising that bigger markets haven't tried streaming it. Not broadcasting it over the airwaves -- just streaming it. ■ A never-ending stream of music alone isn't very satisfying (certainly no more than sitting by a jukebox in a bar, especially when someone else is picking all the songs). But on the other hand, the popular malcontent-with-a-mic approach to talk programming isn't very good for companionship. For as much as people repeat the trope that Rush Limbaugh "saved" AM radio, all he can be credited with doing for certain is ensuring that Americans think of speech-based radio as a genre dominated by men with an axe to grind. ■ As Eeman's article suggests, we may well be watching "the great unbundling" of radio right before our eyes, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones (and, boy, was it ever a screwup to fail to get FM receivers activated in all of those phones). But the hangup with the unbundled listener day is that curating one's own highly satisfying day-long listening experience takes...well, programming skill. Not computer programming, but audio programming. And most of us don't want to be part-time radio program directors on top of being listeners. It's quite enough to ask the individual listener to put their podcasting playlist in order, much less to schedule out listening for the entirety of a day. ■ There's still time for radio to offer more complex, richer listening experiences than "perpetual jukebox" and "shouty man". And with an infinite number of streams possible, it's really quite insane for programmers not to try. The rush to try every new live streaming service, from Twitter Live to Clubhouse to Spotify/Locker Room and inevitably more, shows that listeners are eager for an experience they aren't getting today -- one with a richness of content not adequately supplied by the incumbent sources of audio programming. It's likely to take a while for the optimal listening experience to emerge -- but it's probably not going to consist solely of pre-selected tunes, nor of mindlessly-provocative talkers. It's as good a time as any for alert radio programmers to think beyond.
