Peter Nowak

 Peter Nowak

Peter Nowak blogs about the cultural and competitive impacts of technology, as well as the political and economic issues tied to innovation. Follow Peter on Twitter: @peternowak

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Radio is sinkin’ man and I don’t want to swim

by Peter Nowak on Thursday, July 21, 2011 11:35am - 28 Comments

Photo by GS1311/Flickr

Last month, I broke down and bought a car stereo to replace the factory model that came with my 2003 Toyota Corolla. Given that the car is eight years old, the stereo didn’t yet have the necessary inputs to properly connect an iPod. I’d therefore been relying on one of those crappy FM transmitters that plug into the iPod, which not only results in crackly sound, but requires that you continually adjust the reception because of shifting FM stations in different towns and cities.

I shelled out for the new stereo, a simple $99 model from Pioneer, because I can’t take Canadian radio anymore. For one thing, there are all the ads. Since the CRTC allows radio stations to air as many as they want, the amount has been climbing and climbing. That’s good news for radio revenues, which are also climbing and climbing, but bad news for your sanity while driving.

Another reason is the CRTC’s Canadian content requirement. At least 35 per cent of a music radio station’s content must be Canadian in any given week, with a further requirement that 35 per cent of content be Canadian on weekdays between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm. If you like rock music like I do, that means you pretty much get The Tragically Hip every hour, on the hour—and that’s one band I can’t stand. I would rather listen to my car explode than have to hear New Orleans is Sinking one more time.

Since I got the new stereo, my iPod has been on non-stop. I’ve ventured back to radio once or twice just to hear what was up, but got disgusted and switched back quickly.

Evidently, I’m not alone. Radio audiences are plummeting. According to the most recent report from Statistics Canada (from 2008), Canadians are listening to two fewer hours of radio per week than they did a decade ago. Adult contemporary was the most listened-to form of music and kids barely tuned in to the radio at all. Translation: only old people listen to the radio.

So, radio stations are raking in an increasing amount of dough, yet they’re reaching fewer and fewer people every year. Does that sound like a sustainable business model? Most definitely not.

Which brings us back to last week’s post about the possibility of the CRTC regulating the likes of Netflix and YouTube. Rather than looking at expanding CanCon requirements to new businesses, the CRTC should perhaps be examining how its rules are inevitably going to hurt old media. I, for one, won’t go back to radio unless stations cut back on playing ads and weak Canadian music.

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  • http://dougsamu.wordpress.com doug rogers

    My teenage daughter managed to fix the car radio buttons. They seemed to have been stuck on the CBC. I managed to break them again.

  • pcoq

    I know the feeling about the advertising. I like country music when driving, not the sappy variety, but hard-driving, with good lyrics, but I found that I had to listen to incessant ads, just to hear a song or two. And rarely was it a song worth listening to.

    I always return to the CBC. What a fresh fresh breeze! They offer 4 channels, both Radio One and Radio Two, in English and in French. Even if you don’t speak French, there is lots of great music, and it is not all francophone. The four CBC stations play lots of blues, classical and jazz, as well as pop. The talk shows are mentally stimulating.

    Also, I listen to CKUA, the station from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Much like the CBC, it broadcasts classical, bluegrass, jazz, blues, eclectic and pop music. It has a bit of advertising, but only of the public service type.

    Who needs commercial radio?

    • Anonymous

      CKUA hasn’t been connected to the university for many years.  In Edmonton, CJSR is an independent campus station.  CKUA is “listener-supported” and may very well be the most eclectic radio station in Canada.  With the CBC, those are several good alternatives to commercial radio, which I only listen to for traffic reports.

  • pcoq

    I know the feeling about the advertising. I like country music when driving, not the sappy variety, but hard-driving, with good lyrics, but I found that I had to listen to incessant ads, just to hear a song or two. And rarely was it a song worth listening to.

    I always return to the CBC. What a fresh fresh breeze! They offer 4 channels, both Radio One and Radio Two, in English and in French. Even if you don’t speak French, there is lots of great music, and it is not all francophone. The four CBC stations play lots of blues, classical and jazz, as well as pop. The talk shows are mentally stimulating.

    Also, I listen to CKUA, the station from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Much like the CBC, it broadcasts classical, bluegrass, jazz, blues, eclectic and pop music. It has a bit of advertising, but only of the public service type.

    Who needs commercial radio?

  • Anonymous

    Too bad you don’t like the Hip; there’s lots worse – Canadian or otherwise – that gets played regularly.

    I don’t mind the CanCon rules; there are a lot of good Canadian artists I may never have heard of without that rule. Yes, there’s also a lot of crap, but that isn’t limited to Canadian music, and these days I find Canadian arists more creative and less formulaic than their American counterparts.

    I agree with the main thrust of the piece, though; there are too many ads, and while I tend to listen to the radio on the way to work, my iPod is jacked in for the drive home.

  • Anonymous

    Too bad you don’t like the Hip; there’s lots worse – Canadian or otherwise – that gets played regularly.

    I don’t mind the CanCon rules; there are a lot of good Canadian artists I may never have heard of without that rule. Yes, there’s also a lot of crap, but that isn’t limited to Canadian music, and these days I find Canadian arists more creative and less formulaic than their American counterparts.

    I agree with the main thrust of the piece, though; there are too many ads, and while I tend to listen to the radio on the way to work, my iPod is jacked in for the drive home.

  • Anonymous

    What’s “radio”???

    • Ottawa_Centrist

      A form of non-visible light, I believe…

    • Ottawa_Centrist

      A form of non-visible light, I believe…

  • Ottawa_Centrist

    I’m pretty sure the CRTC has mandatory AC/DC content as well.

  • Ottawa_Centrist

    I’m pretty sure the CRTC has mandatory AC/DC content as well.

    • http://harebell.wordpress.com/ harebell

      ACDC were getting on when I was young in the 80s, it’s sad that ACDC, the Stones etc still sell out huge concerts full of young people. That was the music of my teens, have modern teens become that lazy they won’t develop their own sound?

  • Anonymous

    Your point on CanCon is well taken, but if you’re hearing the Hip every
    hour on the hour I’d say that your radio station is to blame, not the
    CRTC.  Try spinning the dial. 

    With no commercials (yeah right!) and, say, an average of 4 minutes a
    song, a radio station could play 15 songs an hour, only 5 of which would
    need to be Canadian (with an occasional hour containing 6 Canadian
    songs).  Those are pretty conservative estimates (there’s no way, imho,
    that any radio station is playing 15 songs an hour, so the number of Canadian
    songs an hour required in the real world would likely be more like just 3
    or 4) but even with such conservative estimates there’s hardly a need
    to play the Hip every hour.  I could make up a program of songs only
    using songs from Juno-winning Rock Album of the Year
    albums from 2002-2011 and easily fill two Hip-free hours of radio
    without having to play more than one song from each album (I’d also
    personally replace the 2 Nickelback songs in that scenario with one
    Metric song and one from Arcade Fire, but that’s another
    conversation…). 

    If I’m right that the number of Canadian songs a station would need to
    play per hour in the real world is more like 4, then you could program
    4.5 hours a day of CanCon-compliant radio without ever going beyond “Rock Album of the
    Year” winners, never playing more than one Canadian song from the same
    album, and not playing ANY Hip (nor would you have used up any Arcade
    Fire, Metirc, Alexisonfire, Theory of a Deadman, the Trews, Tokyo Police Club, Hot Hot Heat, Bif Naked, Treble Charger… you get the idea…)

    Anyway, I don’t mean in any way to defend the CanCon rules but you’re
    not hearing so much Hip on the radio because of the CRTC, you’re hearing
    so much Hip on the radio because radio programmers are lazy, and people
    really like the Hip.

    • Anonymous

      Billy Talent is Canadian?  Awesome!

      • Anonymous

        Interestingly, I’d bet a lot of people don’t know that half of the bands they like are actually Canadian because they just assume they’re American.  I see it paralleling the medicare debate in the U.S.  Just like there are people who shouted “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” in the health care debate down south, there are doubtless Canadians who would argue “We need to get rid of the CanCon rules so that radio stations can play more great music like Arcade Fire and Metric and Billy Talent!”.

      • Anonymous

        Formed in Streetsville [Mississauga] ON

  • Anonymous

    To those of you who are interested in some of the key causes of radio’s current lameness, I recommend an excellent documentary, Before the Music Dies:

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760307/plotsummary

    Though it’s a US documentary, the observations there about corporate ownership and the application of the Clear Channel etc. business model to all radio were real eye-openers for me.  Especially the bit about how EVERYTHING on radio is now massively focus-group  tested before it even has a hope of getting on there.  The result is total mass-market blandness.

    • http://halooverride.blogspot.com/ Halo_Override

      A) Someone Businessy gets bright idea to monopolize Industry as much as they can get away with.
      B) Workers who create content for Industry say “hey, this is bad, we should (or used to) have laws to prevent this in the public interest because it’s gonna ruin everything”, are ignored by Legislators and Professionally Objective Observers who then get their kitchens remodeled.
      C) Businessy folks from A say “no, it won’t ruin anything, really, trust us, we care about Industry”.
      D) Industry turns to crap along the exact lines predicted by Workers, Businessy folks make tons of money, Professionally Objective Observers and Legislators say “oops, who could have known?”
      E) Workers lose their jobs, reputation of Industry goes down the toilet, Businessy folks get tax breaks.
      F) Smartass Internet Commenter writes alphabetized list complaining about it on newsite; comparisons to news-gathering profession wistfully inferred by anyone bothering to read it.

    • http://halooverride.blogspot.com/ Halo_Override

      A) Someone Businessy gets bright idea to monopolize Industry as much as they can get away with.
      B) Workers who create content for Industry say “hey, this is bad, we should (or used to) have laws to prevent this in the public interest because it’s gonna ruin everything”, are ignored by Legislators and Professionally Objective Observers who then get their kitchens remodeled.
      C) Businessy folks from A say “no, it won’t ruin anything, really, trust us, we care about Industry”.
      D) Industry turns to crap along the exact lines predicted by Workers, Businessy folks make tons of money, Professionally Objective Observers and Legislators say “oops, who could have known?”
      E) Workers lose their jobs, reputation of Industry goes down the toilet, Businessy folks get tax breaks.
      F) Smartass Internet Commenter writes alphabetized list complaining about it on newsite; comparisons to news-gathering profession wistfully inferred by anyone bothering to read it.

  • http://harebell.wordpress.com/ harebell

    Another blight on the radio scene has been the emergence of talk radio, or lie radio. Why listen to someone lie their way through a programme on air and cut off anybody who tries to point it out. These mouthpieces have destroyed sensible conversation, so that is one less genre to even bother listening to.

    • AVR

      Just because you disagree doesn’t make it all lies, dear. Most of us figure that out by adulthood.

  • Georg Sander

    Hey, this is my photo of a 1951 Volkswagen Beetle dashboard…: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geralds_1311/3821844473/

  • Georg Sander

    Hey, this is my photo of a 1951 Volkswagen Beetle dashboard…: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geralds_1311/3821844473/

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3N47ZB6GZAKBP52SEQNBWIMG7I Neil

    Let’s put those 2 hour-per-week declines into perspective: that’s about a 10% drop. Now compare that to any other medium in the last decade. In the decade of exploding entertainment choice and access that’s pretty good. Listening is not in freefall. When was the last time you purchased a copy of Maclean’s off the newstand? I wonder how Canadian periodical circulation figures look now compared to 2001?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3N47ZB6GZAKBP52SEQNBWIMG7I Neil

    Let’s put those 2 hour-per-week declines into perspective: that’s about a 10% drop. Now compare that to any other medium in the last decade. In the decade of exploding entertainment choice and access that’s pretty good. Listening is not in freefall. When was the last time you purchased a copy of Maclean’s off the newstand? I wonder how Canadian periodical circulation figures look now compared to 2001?

  • Anonymous

    The CRTC is one of the most useless organizations ever created, anything that is cool the CRTC will try and figure out a way to destroy. Like putting caps on internet usage(another brilliant CRTC plan) They are completely useless and look out for big business and not the average Canadian citizen. Disband the CRTC.

  • Anonymous

    The CRTC is one of the most useless organizations ever created, anything that is cool the CRTC will try and figure out a way to destroy. Like putting caps on internet usage(another brilliant CRTC plan) They are completely useless and look out for big business and not the average Canadian citizen. Disband the CRTC.

  • Anonymous

    The CRTC is one of the most useless organizations ever created, anything that is cool the CRTC will try and figure out a way to destroy. Like putting caps on internet usage(another brilliant CRTC plan) They are completely useless and look out for big business and not the average Canadian citizen. Disband the CRTC.

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