FMQB: Year-End Special Feature: The dawn of a new era…Where is it all heading?


Guy Zapoleon, President, Zapoleon Media Strategies writes in the year end issue of FMQB concerning the question: "The dawn of a new era…Where is it all heading?"

It is hard to believe but we are close to the end of the first decade of the new Millennium. As we look at the business of both radio and records we see much of the old models of what made these businesses successful are breaking down as the way people are receiving the raw material (music), and the creations (radio formats etc) have changed forever driven by new technology like the I-pod and the ever changing medium of the Internet.

Over the past decade with consolidation and the devaluation of the dollar, radio companies haven’t been able to do what is needed for radio to remain a dominant force. This is a problem because as an industry we must be willing to reinvest back into the product with a plan to adapt and evolve our medium into a newer more relevant version.

Looking back it is easy to see why radio is hesitant about the Internet. Always on the cutting edge radio (and many other businesses) jumped into establishing a presence on the Internet during the Dot Com Boom of the late ’90s. While radio benefited from all these new companies advertising on radio, it soon became a Dot Com Bust as everyone realized that all these companies arrived on the Internet long before the masses did so the real ability to generate revenue didn’t materialize for several years. Radio’s Internet initiative was basically planting a flag on the moon with stations building Web sites but doing little with it. What remained were radio station Web site shells with very little content. What has followed was radio companies that created Internet divisions and for the most part have closed them down.

Over the past few years, it has become clearly evident we were all right a decade ago, and the Internet really is the “future” where every successful entertainment (and other) product will be viewed first and where the world would be spending most of their entertainment time.

It is critical now that we get a clear vision of radio’s future in order to lay out steps to secure our place in the future. Over a decade has gone by with our business not training the future broadcasters and talent that will keep radio a viable medium. Nearly a decade has gone by while we’ve allowed other mediums and competing technology to come along and push us to the brink of extinction or at least irrelevance. You can’t find more than a handful of teens today that spend a lot of time with radio let alone going to radio first to hear music.