Gongol.com Archives: December 2022
December 28, 2022
The killer audio app of the future
Conventional over-the-air listenership for radio stations is in a precipitous state, falling by almost a quarter in just the last five years. The industry generally blames competition from streaming audio services, which is probably more or less correct: It's hard to compete with services customized to the tastes of every individual. But streaming services, as conceived up until now, generally lack the sense of immediacy and common experience that radio has always excelled at offering. ■ The killer app of the future of audio would merge user-driven music selection with auto-inserted drop-in clips delivered by a live personality. The dirty little secret is that a lot of radio is already voice-tracked, and if the host were live (heard by the listener within, say, five minutes), this would be an improvement. Everyone wants to hear their own music, but we also are attracted to the sense of being connected to what's going on right now. ■ Radio in many cases has slacked off quite badly in its reputation for being immediate. It really wouldn't be a big stretch, technologically, to insert drop-in bits into a stream in almost real-time. Ads on streaming services are often already geo-tagged, so doing the same for someone "broadcasting" to a streamed audience in a given geographic area wouldn't be difficult. ■ And let's be realistic: The chatter that people find interesting doesn't actually vary that much from format to format. Being interesting, extremely-close-to-live, and (ideally) local is way more engaging than whether a DJ has anything specific to say about the next song. Listeners already know what's playing now -- the screen on the dashboard radio or on their phone already tells that part of the story. ■ Music commentary isn't all that interesting, and artist-related news is often pointless or perfunctory. If you're really a Harry Styles fan, you already follow him on social media and know what he's up to; you don't need a DJ to add anything to it in the 10 seconds ramping up to the next song. (Nobody appreciates it anymore when radio people hit the post anyway.) ■ But as for what's happening in your own community? That's where real value could be added, and it's not format-dependent. The local updates that make sense on Top 40 stations -- event reminders, traffic reports, comments on the weather, and so on -- make just as much sense on country, classic rock, and even classical formats. ■ The art of providing human companionship is the kind of skill that radio hosts in some markets are already well-practiced at delivering across different formats: At some station clusters, you already might hear the same individual voicing airshifts on three or four different stations under different names. There's no reason a rather basic app couldn't do the same thing on streaming audio, freed from the constricts of format. ■ It should come as no surprise that spoken-audio programming is booming thanks to podcasts. People want to "talk" with other people, even if the conversation is one-sided. That's where the hybrid of local hosting (in the tradition of radio) and customized music (in the well-established preferences of the present) is destined to offer a viable new service for the future.
What's with the Greco-Roman cosplayers on social media?
Among the people who cosplay as ancient Greco-Roman philosophers on Twitter, one has yet to see even an iota of real self-awareness. The ancients didn't have the world all figured out -- there were slaves everywhere, for crying out loud! That doesn't diminish the many valuable contributions many of them still have to offer, but it's weird for anyone in 2022 to aspire to be that retrograde.
