Autopsy - The Death of Local Terrestrial Radio

What happened to radio???

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome in to another edition of The Truth Behind the Truth. My name is Jonathan Perell. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, thank you especially for giving us your time. We know that we're all strapped for time these days, and we do appreciate the time that you give us to listen to these episodes. Now, this episode is going to be a little bit different than what we've done in the past. We're not really going to emphasize a lot of politics here, even though there are some politics involved, but we're not going to have a political discussion and we're not going to talk about all these different controversial things, even though this particular issue does have a lot of controversy with it, but it's not going to be one of those typical things. This is actually an episode that I've wanted to do since 2015. And in 2015, that was the year that I retired after 30 years in terrestrial radio, which means public, over the waves, radio, you know, like you listen to in your car, your bedroom, you know, in your stereo, wherever you used to listen to the radio. Well, that was the year that I retired. And I first got into radio in late 1984 and the beginning part of 1985. So I had 30 years. And one of the reasons, well, I the main reason that I retired is because at some point radio stopped being fun. I mean, literally stopped being fun. Not that every job you have in the world should be fun, but you should be getting something out of it. But the radio industry had changed so much in the time that I was in it, it took all of the good out of it. It took all of the magic out of it. And when I talk about the magic, I'm talking about that very special relationship. If you're old enough to remember radio in the 70s and the 80s, radio had a very, very special relationship with the listener. And it was really cool. I was mesmerized by radio DJs from the time that I was very, very young until the time that I actually first went to broadcast school and got my first regular job on the radio. But there was just something very special about it. It was a one-on-one thing. It was a relationship between you and the listener. And that was the proper way to do radio. You were always taught never talk to an audience, even though you know you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of people listening to you, but you're not talking to those hundreds of people. You're talking to one person. So everything that you say is between the DJ, me, and you. And you and I are going to relate. And that relationship was so cool. And you had so many events. I mean, it was a big deal in a town. If you went to the mall on Saturday and one or more of the local radio stations was set up at the mall to do some kind of a live remote broadcast, that was cool. That meant something was going to happen. They're going to give away a car, they're going to give away some money, but something really cool is happening. Well, all of that changed. And radio declined, I think, very rapidly. And it wasn't any one thing that could be blamed for this. Well, yeah, it was. And we're going to talk about this, but it just happened so much over such a long period of time, which is why I called this episode The Death of Local Terrestrial Radio. And the decline of radio as we knew it then, not as we know it today, because today it is dramatically different. I personally find it unlistenable between the commercial content and the promos for go to our website, go to our Facebook page, go to our Twitter page, go to our YouTube channel, all this stuff. It just, you know, go to our Instagram. It just became a little bit overwhelming. But the decline actually did not start with one company executive or one company. But the results, in my opinion, meant many different factors, including deregulation, first and foremost. There was corporate consolidation. And the two biggest things were probably the rapidly changing technology and the listener habits. And this can be targeted at a specific point in time. This all started in 1996 with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which basically relaxed, or some people might even argue completely eliminated, ownership restrictions, which would allow these companies to own far more stations on a national level and even in the individual markets. Back then there were restrictions. And you had small companies that maybe you heard of, small regional companies, then you had small local companies that maybe had, you know, some of the regional companies might have had three or four radio stations, maybe in two, three, four, or five different markets, but nobody had this huge monopoly that we saw. But once that Telecommunications act passed in 1986, that opened the floodgates. And at that time, it was one executive who was working for one company who said, Hey, I see an opportunity here. And the opportunity that he saw was twofold. It was power and control. And that's what it was all about. It was dominating or maybe even monopolizing the entire industry to work to your advantage. That's when we started hearing things about shareholders. You know, it it was about making money back then, but it was also, and everybody knows that's what the commercials are for on radio is to sell, you know, I'm in the broadcasting business, I'm in the country music business. No, you're not. You're in the business of selling refrigerators and cars. That that really is what you're in the business of, because without those things, you're probably not going to have a radio station to be on. But so there was a money thing. But with buying all of these radio stations, you can only imagine that that was a humongous investment. And these companies started to grow very, very, very quickly. And one of the first ones to start all this was Clear Channel, which is now known as iHeart. But at one time, Clear Channel owned and operated over 1,200 radio stations across the country. And that didn't include the other companies like Cumulus and Citadel, and you name the company, but they all grew exponentially in a pretty short period of time. And being able to own all these different radio stations everywhere was an opportunity for these cut for these companies to be in control and to be dominant. But something else that came with that was a new attitude. And the guy that started all this at Clear Channel was a guy who actually started with a local company called JCorp Communications. His name was Randy Michaels, and he was a very revered programmer. And when the Telecommunications Act passed in 1996, he was the one who saw the opportunity to turn radio from a local business to a national business. And in my personal opinion, that was the absolute wrong mindset. Radio stations, as we said in the beginning, were very special. They were community-oriented. And when all these major companies, I mean, there are a lot of factors that go into all these companies owning these radio stations, but the biggest thing that happened is they had to figure out a way to dramatically cut costs so they could operate all these radio stations while at the same time investing in their product and investing possibly in new technologies that are going to be coming our way, which would be coming our way a little bit later on. But that meant you had standardized playlists, you had national programming strategies instead of local programming strategies. You did a ton of audience research. They did, they spent millions, uh, all the companies did, on audience research. What turns the radio listener on? What music do you like? What artist do you like? What motivates you to listen to the radio? What are you expecting from the radio? What are you looking for from the radio? That was a community thing. You can't really do that on a national level. And that was one of the things that was so special about radio, is they basically took that sense of community and that sense of localism, these companies did, and they just completely ignored that and moved in a completely different direction and created a national model. Unfortunately, if you own all these radio stations throughout the country, let's say you have country stations, you have rock stations, you have uh adult contemporary stations, hard rock, whatever it is, jazz stations, whatever it is, is a very specific format targeted to a very, very specific listener. And on the national level, what was happening is these companies felt the only way that they could operate the way they needed to was to basically have everybody doing the same thing. In other words, we own 47 country radio stations across the country. So all 47 of our stations, they're gonna have the same playlist, they're gonna have the same national promotions. Uh, and that was another thing that really changed at the local level. It used to be all about the radio promotions. Who could be the most creative? How can we give away this car? How can we give away this lawn tractor? How can we give away $10,000 cash instantly? That's what the promotions were. They moved from that at the local level to a national level, which meant that any time you were listening to a radio station that was operated by one of these companies, when you heard the cue to call and be eligible to win your $10,000, you weren't competing with a few hundred people where you live. You were competing with the entire country. So you can only imagine what happened to the odds of winning. But that is just, that is just one example of the things that changed. Now, from a listener's perspective, something very, very important was lost. And we already started to get into some of that. Local DJs who knew the community. Again, a special relationship. You lived in that community, I lived in that community. We could share things about the community, and it was a great relationship. Music directors back then were willing to take chances on new artists, especially artists that you know for a fact is going to work in your part of the country, which is very important when you're getting ready to launch a new artist because you're looking for a certain sound and a certain kind of relatability. And if you hear that, you're probably going to want to be on that song. So a lot of times, music directors, in conjunction with their program directors, uh, would have these meetings and they would determine their music playlist. They would determine their current singles, and then you had different categories of currents, and then even the stuff that your station is known for, which is called your gold library. So you but you had music directors and programmers that were willing to take chances, and we were known for breaking artists. You know, I certainly had my share of breaking artists and was in on the ground floor on fortunately early on, some of the biggest names in country music, uh, even today, and some even in the past. But you also had something else that was very, very important to the local radio station, local news departments. Well, when consolidation happened and everything went corporate, uh, one of the first groups to go was local news departments. And that is what most people would listen to the radio for in the morning, especially when they were driving to work. They wanted to hear what they missed overnight. Is there anything going on that I need to be aware of? Uh, if we live in the Midwest or if we live in the Southeast, what about what about tornadoes? What about hurricanes? What about severe weather? That's what you depended on your local radio station for, and those things were eliminated. You know, let's say you had a cluster in a particular city, you had five signals. In other words, you had five stations under one roof. You might have 10 DJs at any one given time running around the building before deregulation in 1996. After deregulation, you were lucky if there was three left in the building. And in some cases, none at all, because one of the things that came out of this was a thing that the industry calls voice tracking. And if you're not familiar with voice tracking, voice tracking is a technology that allows one particular personality to be on multiple radio stations at the same time, not just locally, but across the country. So you could be on 20 different radio stations at the same time. So when you've got that, there's certainly no need for local DJs. Now, in most cases, you're gonna have a live local morning show, but even that, sadly, has uh completely disappeared. And then you had your midday shift, which was like 10 to 3, and then your afternoon drive shift, which was three to seven, and then seven to midnight, then you'd start all over at midnight. But you had somebody in the building 24-7, including on weekends. Well, nowadays, I challenge you to go to any radio facility on a weekend and see if there's anybody even there. There won't be, which is very problematic if you live in the Midwest and you get uh, you've got one of the personalities is is voice tracking for the weekend. And that personality probably sat down on Tuesday or Wednesday to voice track all of these weekend segments. But let's say Friday night, Saturday morning, 2:30 a.m., a tornado warning is issued for a particular area. What's the first thing you're gonna do? Or what back then, what would you do? You would reach for the radio or your weather radio and you would try and get that information so you knew exactly what to do and where to go. Well, you couldn't do that anymore with the advent of voice tracking, which meant that you could no longer do things as part of your voice track that would indicate you did this way ahead of time. You certainly couldn't give the weather. You certainly couldn't, you know, come out at 220 in the morning and say, well, it's supposed to be mostly cloudy today, maybe a little bit windy overnight. We might see a few sprinkles here and there, but nothing too terrible. And then 10 minutes later, there's a tornado warning. And so somebody's gonna have to go in and they're gonna have to man the station. And it was just, it was a great big, it was a great big pain. But these companies became so big and so powerful, and that's what it was all about. It was about control and power. And and they they didn't want to rely on the local people anymore to make decisions. But what better group of people to make those decisions for your radio station than the people who actually live in those communities? The program directors, you know, anytime I was a program director and an operations manager almost my entire career. And the one thing that I never did that I thought a lot of executives did do, one of the worst things that I could do when I got hired, especially in a new market, uh, as a program director, my goal before I did anything else, my primary goal was to make sure that I got to know the market and that I adjusted my skill set toward the market, not the other way around. I didn't come into a market and expect you listeners, okay, there's a new sheriff in town. This is the way I do things, so you're gonna have to adapt to me. I would adapt to the market. And anytime I hired a personality for a particular market, they had to have that same mindset. Because without it, you can't do anything. You absolutely cannot do anything. Radio stations in their heyday were a direct mirror image of great communities. And radio in major markets like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, those are big markets, and they're they're they're a completely different animal. The listener tastes, the listener habits are very, very different. But I will tell you, some of the best radio was done during its heyday in the small local markets. That's where the best radio was done because the DJs knew the market so well, the listeners knew the DJs so well, and it just worked. And I don't know why they got the idea to eliminate all of that localism and all of that sense of community when we can do this much more efficiently under and instead of having a group of 25 program directors out there for all your country stations. We will have what we call a format leader who will be based somewhere other than the market we're in. And he's gonna make all the decisions or she's gonna make all the decisions about our playlists, the music that we're gonna play, uh, how we're gonna adjust our rotations, and you know, all that is very, very technical. But I just don't know on what planet they thought that was gonna be a good thing because I thought, and I did think that this could be great nationally when consolidation happened if they continued to maintain those local neighborhood community aspects of what the station was all about. Heck, back in the day, we had to file a thing with the federal communications once every six months. It's uh called a public file, which every radio station in the country has one. And they each have their own. And basically, the public file is a list of everything that happens in your market, what you did on the air, complaints that come in from listeners about weather coverage, about you know, this DJ was really, really rude. Anything and everything that pertained to your radio station was kept in this public file, and you were required by federal law to maintain that. And so from that perspective, yeah, okay, we we have just reduced the number of public files. You know, we can now do one public file for all the stations that we have under one umbrella. It usually didn't work that way, but it very easily could. So that created some challenges. But at the end of the day, because these companies spent so much money for all of these radio stations that they now own and operate. And just to give you an idea of what it would cost to buy a radio station at that time, uh, the idea of the local owner gone. Absolutely gone. There's only one station that I know of in Savannah, Georgia, that is probably, if it's not the last, it is one of the last standalone FM stations that is locally owned in the nation. It's too bad their programming doesn't match that. Their programming sounds like they could be broadcasting from any market in the country because uh there's nothing unique to Savannah in their programming, but you know, that's a whole that is that's a whole different ball of wax. But the whole thing comes down to that community and local aspect was absolutely key. And you could do that on the national level. It was it was fine to have a company with really deep pockets. It would certainly help a local radio station promotionally to be able to say, okay, you know, we used to be able to give away a lawn tractor a year, but now we can give away a truck. Maybe we can give away a couple of trucks, and maybe we'll have an opportunity to give away $10,000 instantly with all the $10,000 winners at the end of the contest eligible to win $100,000. So you had these big companies with deep promotional pockets that would help you do that. That didn't always happen either. National contesting is a pain and make No mistake, make no mistake. It is almost impossible to win because again, you're competing with the rest of the nation. You're not competing with people in your community. You're competing with the entire competing with the entire nation. And that is just absolutely not going to work. And even the industry, you know, figured out that it was going to have to deal with massive layoffs, cost-cutting measures. Let's get back to the point that I brought up just a minute ago, the cost of a radio station. Back then, when all of this started, there was a simple formula that would determine the sale price of any one particular radio station in a particular market. And that formula was generally 12 times cash flow. So whatever your cash flow is in your radio station or your cluster, the sale price is going to be 12 times that amount, which means if you're the purchaser, you're the company buying these radio stations, that means you are so far in the red before you even close because you had to write a humongous check. So now you are going to have to look at things. You are going to have to look at cost-cutting measures. You're going to have to look at mass layoffs. You're going to have to increase commercial loads. And that's one of the biggest things. But you know what? All of that was preventable. And again, I wanted to talk about this since I left in 2015 because since I've lived where I live now, and people find out that I was in radio, one of the most common questions that I get even today is what's what's going on with radio? Does it exist anymore? What about these morning shows? What's going on with radio? It is nowhere near what it used to be, and it wasn't. So the thing that killed, not that local terrestrial radio is necessarily dead, but it's clearly on life support. And you know whose fault that is? The companies that did this. They did not think this through when they made these purchases. They started thinking on grander scales, on scales that would benefit the shareholders. That's what it was all about. They prioritized profit over anything and everything else, including people, community, neighborhoods, localism. They prioritized making sure that the shareholders got their share. And they were going to do whatever they had to do to keep that stock price up at a particular level. Now, one of the most common complaints that listeners had about terrestrial local radio up to that point were commercial loads. And believe me, as frustrated as you might have been at some time, or even maybe are now when you're watching even a TV station or you're listening to a radio station in the car, the amount of commercials is maddening. I was in radio for 30 years. I can't stand to listen to terrestrial radio anymore. They take a break and it just seems like these breaks go on forever. And it used to be radio commercials were made up of 60s and 30s. That's really what it was. And in most cases, outside of your what they call morning drive time, which is 6 to 10 a.m., outside of that, you're going to run probably three commercial breaks an hour and roughly four minutes worth of commercial units in that break. So when you're biding that up between 60s and 30s, it's really not going to be that much. And study after study has shown that listeners understand that. They know that's how radio and TV stations pay their bills, and they're willing to give you a little bit of commercial time. But what the industry decided they needed to do, because all the program directors basically revolted and said, playing 25 to 28 minutes an hour of commercials is ridiculous. We're going to lose our entire audience and our ratings are going to tank. And they did. And that's why the programmers all got together and said, look, we got to figure this out. Our thing was three breaks an hour with a maximum length of four and a half minutes. And that's when these companies decided, you know what we can do? We can start making 10-second commercials and 15-second commercials. Insert those into the commercial breaks. We'll be able to charge almost as much for those as we're charging for a regular spot. And we're going to get the deal of a lifetime. Didn't work out that way. Didn't work out that way. Because what you had is you had commercial breaks that consisted of maybe four or five elements, maybe four or five commercials, and then the break would end with some kind of a station promo or something like that. Well, now what you have, you still have the four-minute break. But instead of having four or five units to have to sit through, you've got 10, 12, 14, 16 units. And when you're listening to this in your car, at home, on your iPod, whatever, when you're listening to this, you're thinking, my God, this is the longest commercial break ever in the history of broadcasting. When time-wise, it isn't. It's the same amount that it's always been. But element-wise, yeah, it is crazy. And they also did studies when programmers started complaining about this. And the studies showed, and us programmers were begging our general managers and our VPs of programming to look at this information because what they found out was that listeners couldn't care less if a commercial is 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or 60 seconds. All they know is that's a commercial. They view 10-second commercials the same way they view a 60. And when you've increased the number of elements from 5 to 13, not going to happen. Absolutely not going to happen. And the other thing, the advertiser. The advertiser gets completely hosed in that situation. Again, when you have a format where you've got three four and a half minute breaks per hour, which, and again, the number of elements might be four or five. Well, the problem came when the 10s and the 15s came into play because how would you like to be an advertiser and you're kind of skittish about spending money on advertising? You've never done it before, but you've got a radio salesperson in there all the time who's trying to convince you to do this, and you're thinking, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to work for me. Um, I'm going to have to see results right away. And then they have to be too, well, you know, it's going to take time. You know, it's going to have to get a little bit repetitive. You can't expect results right off the bat. But what they have done is they have sold these advertisers on the idea of 10s and 15s, which overall are cheaper. But what if you are an advertiser and you're so skittish about spending money on doing commercials and you are the second to last element in a 13-element break? Do you think that advertiser is getting his or her money's worth for their investment? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And that's when they started doing things like sponsoring, you know, the studio that you broadcast in. Hey, you know, we're coming to you live this morning from the ABC Mechanic Garage and Wrecker Service. You know, for example, they don't, no, that's our station. We own the station. That advertiser does not own the station, but the perception could be that that advertiser has a stake in the radio station, which means they have a say in what's going on. And that was very, very frustrating for programmers to deal with. But the main thing that programmers dealt with was this corporate conglomerate landscape that for the local person was impossible to navigate. Because more often than not, you weren't in on the initial discussions for a new idea or something like this. Basically, they would get together in their corporate offices, they would decide this is what we're going to do. And then they send a memo to all the radio stations. Here's what you're going to do, here's how this promotion is going to work. And you're sitting there in your market thinking, man, I don't know if that's going to work. We just don't have that kind of a makeup here. The people who live here, this is not really who they are. But, you know, it doesn't matter. And so the local guys were ignored. And uh again, radio did this to itself. But when all the new technologies came in, and this ties into what I was talking about earlier: people asking questions about what happened to radio. Uh, did music streaming kill it? Did Spotify kill it? Did Pandora kill it? Um did Instagram kill it? What? No, those were great technologies that had huge potential for opportunities when they first came to fruition. But the problem was these companies, as excited as they were about the new technologies, knew that they were going to have to make a huge investment into these technologies. And they're going to have to try and recoup their cost almost immediately. So what they did was, again, much to the chagrin of local program directors everywhere, is that they created this system. I don't even know what else to call it, but you're being told this is what you're doing. You're not involved in the conversation, just do what we tell you to do. And that in radio, it that model can't work because radio was so special. Do you remember listening to the radio? It was kind of a neat experience, you know, to listen for your favorite song, or you would sit there with your cassette player, and your cassette player had an FM radio on it, and you would have a cassette all lined up, ready to go, play and record. You push it, and as soon as you heard your favorite song, boom, you record it, you got it. You don't have to go to the record store and buy it now. Well, now there are so many choices out there with all the different technologies. You got podcasting, and you go, and I thank goodness for podcasting. But these new technologies were going to require a huge investment. And they were going to have to recoup it pretty quickly. So what they did, they took their most valuable assets when these things became available, their most valuable assets, which were their local radio signals, and they used those radio stations to promote all of their different platforms. In other words, here's what we can offer you outside of the radio station. So there's no need for you to listen to the radio station anymore. You can listen to our music stream. You can listen to your station on a stream, which has a delay on it, which is very annoying if you're trying to do contesting or anything like that. But it just messes with the timing of absolutely everything. And before you make that investment, you really need to think how are you going to monetize it? And using your biggest asset, your local radio stations, to promote all that, in my opinion, was the biggest mistake that these radio conglomerates ever made. Not to mention the fact that the industry musically and even from a programming standpoint completely overconsulted. Completely overconsulted. You had consultants everywhere. And in my opinion, honestly, a consultant was nothing more than an unemployed program director. So the model should have been when all these new technologies came in. The model should have been, okay, we have all these different avenues now and all these different platforms to promote ourselves. So let's promote all of these things. And the end result is kick it back to the radio station at the very end of it for the payoff. In other words, hey, we're going to be doing this contest, we're going to be doing this, we're going to be giving away concert tickets. George Strait's coming to town, Kenny Chesney's coming to town, we're going to have a bunch of packages, we're going to have front row seats, we're going to have backstage passes, all of this. And what we want to do is we want to promote that on our YouTube channel, on our Facebook page, on our Twitter account, on Instagram, anywhere else. But in order to win, ultimately you're going to have to go back to the radio station. And that's what our company, and I can only speak for the companies that I worked for. And I worked for Regent Communications and Townsquare Media. And this started before Regent sold to Townsquare Media. So we were already seeing some of this, but it wasn't until after that transition from Regent Communications to Townsquare Media that all these things started to take hold. And they wanted everything put in immediately. And we had to, you know, all of a sudden the DJs were responsible when they got off the air. They were responsible for doing 10 quality blogs on the station's website per week. I mean, that's only two a day, really. And then you would do a couple of extra that you would schedule to post or publish, you know, at a certain time. But that that was a pain because you couldn't just in the beginning, when people were doing that, people were just finding cool YouTube videos and saying, here's my post. Here are my 10 posts. Yeah, but they're all YouTube videos. Yeah, but it didn't take me very long. So, you know, again, that kind of the creativity aspect of it kind of flies out the window. And they should have been doing it the other way. They should have been using all of these different platforms to promote back to the radio station at the end. And the companies that did that in Townsquare absolutely did not do that. Not at all. Not at all. And it was it was so maddening. And they didn't want to hear what we had to say. And the thing that finally led me to resign in 2015, you would have these monthly programmers' conference calls where you'd have your VP of programming. In our case, it would be our VP of programming who was in Dallas, Texas. And you'd have maybe a couple of hundred radio stations on the line at a given time. They'd have this uh, you know, have a conference call and talk about whatever needs to be talked about. And this one conference call, I'll never forget it. And this is when I went home that night and told my wife, I'm done. I'm retiring. I'm gonna go on my own terms. What we were told on this conference call, if you have anybody on your staff that is over 50 and has been with the station for 10 years or longer, get rid of them. You're gonna have to move in a different direction, get younger, get more vibrant blood in there. Well, guess what? I was the operations manager of our seven station cluster in Kentucky and Indiana, and I had been with that station for 18 years. And I was 55 years old, going on 56 that summer. The program directors that worked under me, our rock station program director, sat right next door to me in the next office over. He heard the same thing. Our country programmer in Kentucky heard the same thing. And as soon as the call ended, I had the guy next door in my office and the guy in Kentucky on the phone faster than I could do anything else. And they asked, Did we just hear what we think we just heard? Because again, I had been there for 18 years, I was 55, our rock programmer had been with the station for 32 years and was over 50. And our uh programmer in Kentucky was a country radio hall of famer, one of the most successful consultants the business had ever seen. He knew more about radio or had forgotten more than any of us would ever know. But he was also 72 years old. And he had been with the station at that time about eight to ten years. That's when I decided to give it up. And that's when I also decided that nothing good has come out of the corporate mentality in terms of local radio. But I'll tell you what did come out of it. All these new platforms that are out now, they're amazing. And as somebody who's in their mid-60s, you might think, oh, you're not going to embrace that. You're one of these older guys. They're amazing. The music streaming services, amazing. Pandora, amazing. Spotify, amazing. And you've got Apple and companies like that involved. You know, it's, and one of the biggest things is podcasting. Because I think I can speak for any radio programmer out there who's no longer doing radio, who said, gosh, if I could just, if, if, if, if I just had control of my own radio station, that I could do all of the things that I want to do and not have to answer to some maniacal vice president of programming who would make no bones about telling you there are two ways to do radio and two ways only my way and the wrong way. How do you work for somebody like that? So when podcasting came to be, I thought about it, retired in 2015, did a couple of other things before I decided I kind of wanted to get back in, but I know I didn't want to get back into a terrestrial radio situation. And that's when my wife said, you should do a podcast. I said, I don't know anything about podcasting. What do you mean podcasts? I didn't even know really how they worked. And then I started doing some research, and I thought, you know, yeah, there are pieces of equipment that you can buy. And if you think you need a bunch of expensive equipment to launch a podcast, you really don't. All you really need is a microphone and a cell phone. And in some cases, you may not even need to buy a microphone if you have your cell phone. But being a 30-year radio professional, I started researching equipment. And the equipment that I'm using right here, that's right in front of me right now, is essentially, and I couldn't believe it when I got it. I opened it, I plugged it all in, and all the lights came on and all that. I basically have a radio station in a box. And I can be in complete control of what I'm doing. And the people who are listening to this podcast. I want feedback. What are you not getting enough of? What are you getting too much of? Talk to me. You know, this, but this allows me to have that one-on-one communication with you, which is what it's all about. And it brings back, I love doing this because it brings back the whole reason I got into radio in the first place. I was so blown away by that concept of having that one-on-one relationship with an audience that sounded so personal. And it was. And now here I am, I'm in control. I've got my own thing going on. I don't have some maniacal vice president of programming calling me every five minutes saying, What the hell are you doing? And boy, I got those calls. Man, oh man, did I get those calls? But that's the long and short of it. Radio did it to itself. And as much as people want to blame all these new technologies, no, they would have been perfect tools for radio to use had they used them in the right way. But they allowed these things to go way past terrestrial radio. And that's why terrestrial radio today is hurting. But uh this episode has been a long time coming. I started thinking about it in 2015. I finally felt that now's the time to do it. And by the way, if if you would like to share wherever you get this podcast, as you're listening to it, you should have an option on there for what they call fan mail. You can you can click on fan mail and it'll give you an option to either text a message or leave a voicemail message. And that's through the audio provider. So I don't have a specific site for it yet, but you can get in touch with me. Just look for that fan mail, write down your thoughts. Uh, and I would love to read what you have to say, and I would love to interact with you, talk about the points that you made, and together we will figure this out. But uh, this has been a near and dear subject to my heart for going on 40 years now. And I'm so thankful that I got to where I am now. It was worth everything that I went through, even though I would never go back to terrestrial radio. And people say all the time, well, you know, money talks. Yeah, well, no, there's not enough money in the world that would get me to go back to terrestrial radio right now. It's not about the money, it's about quality of life, and it's about doing what you love. And what I love is talking to people and communicating with people. So that's this episode called Autopsy: The Death of Local Terrestrial Radio. Thank you again for your time. Click the send fan mail, however, you are getting this podcast, and you should be able to get a message to me, and I will be more than happy to respond. And of course, next week we will have a new edition of The Truth Behind the Truth. I'm Jonathan Prell. We'll see you next time.