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August 26, 2009

Save your radio or save your hair - take your pick on terrestrial radio.

By: The Dude on the Right
I tried to type it exactly in my web browser when I got to a computer because my radio told me to, only it didn't really direct me to any set web site.  Yup, there it was, “SAVE YOUR RADIO DOT ORG”, scrolling on the radio screen as I was channel hopping in my car on a local radio station, you know, one of those stations you pick up on FM.  It was 103.5 here in Chicago, WKSC, aka KISS FM, and yes, sometimes I like to get down with what the kids are listening to.  The ladies on the radio were in a discussion about women who don't give their men oral sex anymore (Didn't Howard Stern get fined for this? Nevermind, that's a topic for different blog), and at first I was confused, wondering, “What kind of sentence is that?” Sure, maybe I should have been paying attention as to what causes women to stop giving oral pleasure, but I was intrigued about this odd sentence. And then it occurred to me -this was an ad for a website for a not-so-covert organization trying to squash a movement to change the way music artists are paid for your hearing their song on the radio.  The radio station behemoths are against it, so are some of the smaller station owners, and I even went to the web site for information and it seemed to scream that the radio world was going to end if government changed the radio regulations.  The thing is, the site didn’t have any real contact information, only a link to some lady named Diane Warren doing some kind of publicity, and the content buried in the web site was tied to an organization called BIPAC, or Business Industry Political Action Committee.

Now I’m not going to get into the entire hubabaloo of what the whole thing is about, only that as a subscriber of satellite radio and sometimes some streaming stuff on the internet, I do wonder why the terrestrial radio stations, as they are sometimes called, don’t have to pay royalty rates in the same fashion.  But that’s not important right now.  What I’m confused about is why, on a supposedly hip station, does the self-advertising scroll have to be spelled out as some kind of cryptic sentence when a simple “Please visit saveyourradio.org” would probably be understood by every person listening to KISS FM?  Are the listeners of that station that dense that they have to be able to “read out” a web address?

As someone who had dreams of being a music person years ago, I say the legislation should be passed – the artists deserve their money, and contrary to the website, it’s not a “tax” the government is proposing, because all that is trying to do is scare you into “Oh my God, if this passes, when I’m listening to “I Gotta Feeling” from the Black Eyed Peas, I’m going to have to declare it on my taxes this year and send more money to the government.”  No, you won’t, the radio stations will just have to adjust their advertising structure and maybe finally learn to come up with a business model to compete with the internet, satellite, and your iPod.

The one thing I will say about “SAVE YOUR RADIO DOT ORG” is that at least it is a funny ad that makes me chuckle, as opposed to another radio station scrolling an ad for Avacor.  Save your radio or save your hair – take your pick on terrestrial radio.

That's it for this one!  I'm The Dude on the Right!!   L8R!!!

Posted by Rightdude at 8:33 PM | Comments (0)