Same Menu, Different Customers

This is how good businesses react to changes in their industries and their target audiences: they actually react. If you find yourself with a business that decides to stick with its old ways even though things are quite obviously changing all around, that decides to go down with that ship under the assumption that it's going to be a while before the entire ship is submerged, that really doesn't have a clue as to how to pivot to keep up with the times, you might want to look for the lifeboats.

Hi, talk radio. Your feet are getting wetter every day.

Things are indeed changing, but talk radio today is what it was twenty years ago, even if a few of the names are different. On Thursday, the census figures showed that the diversification of the American population has accelerated, something we've seen happening for years, yet it seems as if 99% of talk radio continues to target the part of that population which represents a decreasing percentage of the whole, and is now actually shrinking in real numbers. Gotta admit, it's a unique industry that decides as a whole that the proper play is to superserve a rapidly dying-off segment of the audience and ride that until there's nothing, but here we are. And before you say, well, talk stations still have some ratings, take a look at the cume to see where this is headed. Those shares are based on intense loyalty from an increasingly smaller, older audience.

As an industry, talk radio did nothing over the years to address how the audience was changing, and it still really isn't; a younger version of the same old thing isn't diversification, nor is having a female or minority host say the same things. That's not a conservative-vs.-liberal thing or a Democrat-vs.-Republican thing. It's that on any talk station, you get one viewpoint, hammered home all day and night, and that appeals only to like-minded listeners. One perspective, all the time. The fear is that introducing something different, someone who isn't spouting the Official Talking Points, will drive those precious core listeners away.

How much does that core have to shrink before talk radio programmers and managers realize that perhaps it's time to do something different before corporate takes a look at diminishing revenue and, if it's an AM, sells the land under the towers and hands the license back to the FCC, or if it's an FM, loads a Classic Hits playlist into a computer and lets it roll. Unfortunately, I fear that this might be the fate of a lot of talk radio stations within the next decade. Maybe not, if the dying off of that core audience slows down a little, but the reckoning is here and talk radio hasn't changed to deal with it.

Yes, podcasting has picked up some of that slack. You can find all kinds of viewpoints there, including some you'll wish you hadn't. And that's another way talk radio largely missed the boat, with some notable exceptions. Some shows that embraced the podcast form early on have prospered. Dave Ramsey is one. Dan Le Batard is another. A lot of listeners don't even think of their shows as radio anymore. In an on-demand world, linear, live programming isn't as appealing. It has its place, but that place is smaller than it used to be.

Talk radio's best defense against people like me pining for new and different things is that its audience craves familiarity. It's the Olive Garden defense: Practically every town in America has a better Italian restaurant, but people just want those familiar breadsticks and salad. It's comforting. But nobody wants to eat every meal at Olive Garden. (Insert Applebee's or Red Lobster joke here.) It wouldn't be a long-term problem if talk radio wasn't the equivalent of there being ONLY Olive Garden and no other choices. You'll eat the Neverending Pasta Bowl and you'll LIKE it. Not feeling pasta today? You want spoken word entertainment, but you want something different from standard-issue talk radio? We'll drive you clear to another entirely different medium.

Enough of the tortured analogies. The bottom line is, we've seen demographic changes happening for decades, yet talk radio insists on speaking to one segment of the audience and one segment only. The exceptions, the handful of stations aiming elsewhere, are largely falling into the same trap, single-minded and not really diverse in their own way. And it's probably too late to change that, which is why podcasts are where non-music audio entertainment and information are headed. Now, if only the money would go there faster....

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It doesn't matter, by the way, if you do a talk radio show or a podcast or just like to sit outside Starbucks haranguing customers as they leave the store; you'll find plenty of material at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep section, which you'll find by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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By the way, in the wake of Podcast Movement and Morning Show Boot Camp, and with the NAB Show/Radio Show coming up in October, I'm wondering if any of you went to PM or MSBC or are planning to go to Vegas for the NAB with the variants still raging and some cities reverting to restrictions and mask mandates. I'm debating whether to attend the NAB (or CES in January), and I'd love some other perspectives on the matter. Something is telling me that Vegas is not the place to go for a while, but I'm not there and I'm interested in hearing from anyone who's made the decision one way or the other. This is the longest I've gone without having to wear a convention badge since the 1980s.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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