BY STEVE RIVERS
There's a new competitor in town — and she's "babe-a-licious." She's very sexy and she's very hip. She plays close to 8,000 songs in a row, back to back, with absolutely, positively no commercials, and she comes in three different configurations: 10GB, 15GB and now 30 gigabytes of storage space. She's got a fantastic name, and she even does "Windows."

Her name is "iPod."


A viable alternative to radio
Radio Warriors, meet the Apple iPod. This little machine is quickly becoming a viable alternative for young listeners seeking their tunes without the 13, 14, 15, or whatever minutes of commercials that we are cramming into every hour, just to meet revenue expectations each month.

Now, Apple has stepped up to the plate big-time! Apple and four major labels will provide I-Pod users the ability to choose from 200,000 songs that can be downloaded for 99¢ each, with the user friendly name, "i-Tunes." This makes downloading files legal, and means they don't need radio for music. They can have as much as they want, without the commercials.

Meanwhile, radio stations voice-track air talent worldwide... and in the U.S., they have just about put things on "autopilot," hoping for a safe landing in the ratings.

More young listeners are using items like the iPod because they are just not being entertained. Where is excitement and amusement? What happened? While I applaud the efforts of XM and Sirius teams, the pioneers who are building the new satellite radio infrastructure in the U.S., they are still years away from having consumers who really understand what they produce.

The same was true of our pioneering efforts with RadioCentral, the company I helped found along with RadioInk publisher Eric Rhoads.

Two years ago we had 70-plus stations rocking across the Internet at broadband speeds for clients like EarthLink, A&E Television, and Lycos. We had some of the best sounding radio on the Internet with major-market air talent and innovative "neural" audio processing that made the music kick ass, but nobody was listening. Still, we were trying to entertain with a limited amount of commercials as an alternative to terrestrial broadcasting. [See RAIN coverage here.]


Bringing back the "wow"
The point of this little rant is this: we must find a way to make stations become more engaging. It's not that we're not working hard. Some of you have been given additional responsibility overseeing more stations (for the same amount of money!), but when I listen to radio, much of what I hear is frankly, b-o-r-i-n-g!

If you think I'm wrong, show me! Send me your tapes, MP3 me your airchecks. Let me hear some "radio magic" for God's sake.

More and more, I find myself using classic airchecks as a point of reference for what that "magic" used to sound like on the radio. In a time when you can now customize your own personal radio station on a hard drive and carry it in your pocket, who needs radio? One of the guys I used to work with told me, "We're not going to 'rotate' our way out of this one," and he was right. The competitive landscape has changed. We are less able to take a tired, old radio station from worst-to-first in 30 days by just playing hits.

Today, it is critical to make sure that there is a "wow" factor to your product. Morning shows need to work on entertaining more often with real humor. People need to laugh! They want to escape through what futurist Faith Popcorn calls, "Fantasy Adventures," and we need to be their outlet.

We must get back to the business of doing what we do best. This is show business after all. The CFO is not able to reduce your spot loads back to manageable levels, or give you the promotional budgets of the 90s. Once again, you have to do more with less.

Legendary programmer Jerry Clifton once made me do my entire show from a pay phone when I worked for him in Miami. When the 96X van broke down while I was on a "van run," instead of sending someone from the station to pick me up, he made another jock run the board and explain to the audience what was happening. I did my show break-by-break, hitchhiking from pay phone to pay phone all the way back to the station. I was angry at first, but I have to tell you — it was one of the best shows I ever had, on one of the few days where my show actually had the magic!

Exciting radio is not that hard to do -- if you work at it and it's done with an understanding of why certain things will work. You can do it!

Just promise that tomorrow you will take action and make magic come out of the speakers!

Steve Rivers is President of Power Media & Principal at MusicBiz.com. Contact Steve at 1-425-373-5603 or e-mail Srivers@aol.com.

From the L.A. Times: "Like frustrated prosecutors charging an acquitted crime boss with tax evasion, the major record labels are suing the creators of the Morpheus file-sharing network again — not over the software that millions of people use to copy billions of songs for free but over a service that never launched.

"The claims come about a month after the labels, music publishers and Hollywood studios suffered a stunning setback in their first copyright infringement lawsuit against Morpheus' creator, Streamcast Networks Inc...

"Streamcast executives said they were outraged. They said the company tried to develop an online radio service three years ago, abandoning the effort when it couldn't get licenses from the labels. Now, they complained, they're being sued for legitimate steps they took to prepare for the would-be venture...

"The lawsuit alleges that Streamcast acquired CDs with thousands of songs, then converted them into a digital database on hard drives and other storage devices. The company made multiple copies of the songs and the database, all without the permission of the copyright owners, the lawsuit alleges...

"All Internet radio stations convert their discs into an electronic database, and a legitimate station's database shouldn't be grounds for a lawsuit under the 1998 act, said Jonathan Potter of the Digital Media Assn., a trade group for online broadcasters.

"'The questions for Streamcast are: What did they do with it and why, and are the record companies being overaggressive or did Streamcast do something it shouldn't have done?' Potter said.

"The lawsuit accuses Streamcast of distributing songs and copies of its database — without saying how or to whom — as well as transmitting the songs digitally for a commercial purpose. It also alleges that Streamcast withheld critical information about the database and its actions until last year, when the information was disclosed in the industry's first lawsuit."

Read this entire story in today's Los Angeles Times, or online here.