Malkiel

Note to Radio Companies: It's About Innovating More, Not Sucking Less

I can see you're a bright lad full of great ideas, but the radio industry is so bad right now that they just need to get back to their best marketing strategy of the last 90 years, which is to play "top 40" music playlists. Radio was long ago exempted from most royalties on their playlists because they were deemed as offering "free advertising" for the product, so they need to cash in on that advantage. We have entire markets today where not one station is playing current popular music so that music lovers can know what product to buy; instead the airwaves are a wasteland of "best hits of the 40's/50's/60's/70's/an... but today". We also need to recognize that media consolidation has put most of America's radio stations in the hands of Clearchannel, a Republican outfit that seems intent on reconstructing radio as a right-wing political outlet along the lines of Murdoch's News Corp. rather than as a for-profit business...