Radioǃ

Have you noticed how Clear Channel is going from market to market to either eliminate or cutback expenses on local morning shows? This has been going on under the radar for several months now while President John Hogan is engaging a willing press in the thought they he could be Howard Stern

Radio’s iPad Wake-up Call

President Obama may not have attracted as much interest in his State of the Union speech as Steve Jobs did in his State of Innovation presentation yesterday.

Jobs delivered the new Apple tablet -- iPad -- with almost everything we expected and more.

And he's offering iPads for as low as $499 for the basic model starting in March with tweaked out models coming in April.

As you probably already know, the 9.7-inch LED screen delivers the web, videos, photos, 140,000 apps compatible with your other Apple devices and a book store. The new iPad may kill the Kindle which by comparison is black and white in more ways than&hellip

The Apple Tabletǃ

Today, Steve Jobs will finally tell us what the much anticipated Apple tablet is all about.

A lesson for the advertising community: appreciate the value of silence.

Steve Jobs has gotten millions of dollars worth of free publicity from a product that consumers have imagined. Apple has had help from the media but not since the introduction of the iPhone have consumers been so spellbound.

I have seen some estimate that Jobs has already garnered $40 million worth of free publicity.

Wow!

Of course the radio industry should be taking this product introduction very seriously because what Apple does from now on&hellip

Howard Stern on Clear Channel

You gotta love Howard Stern.

This guy is the shrewdest, smartest radio talent to come along ever! Now you may not like what he does on-the-air

How to Rehire Radio People

For the past two years, the ranks of American radio stations have been reduced by thousands and thousands of people.

Consolidators who found that they could not repay the loans they took out to buy their stations had no other way to cut costs. After all, the biggest expense at a radio station is talent.

Of course, the biggest asset at a radio station is also talent.

So, consolidators like Clear Channel, Cumulus and Citadel devastated their local operations, invented
cheap ways to import networked, syndicated or voice tracked programming and while they were at it -- committed one more act of&hellip

The Tipping Point for Radio

Radio will be left out of Steve Jobs' new mobile tablet device that he is expected to announce next Wednesday.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name defined the tipping points to be "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable".

My friends, we are about to witness history next week when Apple provides the electronics, the infrastructure and the consumer confidence (no small thing) to save traditional media.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal alluded to Apple's goals. No one will know&hellip

The Mad Media Meltdown

The trades are all abuzz with news that radio may, in fact, be headed for another challenging year financially. And when the trades admit it, it must be bad because they like to keep their constituents

The Paid Internet

If you owned a record store ten years ago and I walked in the front door and asked you to give me some of the merchandise you were currently selling, you'd likely throw me out on my butt.

However, at the serious onset of the Internet in 2000, business establishments, retailers, publishers and entertainment companies knowingly cooperated with the emerging free Internet and began to giveaway content for free.

In some cases, businesses resisted and consumers did a workaround. I'm thinking of the record industry where young people found ways to steal music, share it illegally or quasi-legally through bit torrent&hellip

Radioǃ

The New Year has hardly begun and my Repeater Reporter network is back in full swing again reporting abuses and out of this world real stories about the consolidators who are running radio.

They are burning up the phones to 1-800-CALL JD.

Just as in Ripley's Believe It Or Not that inspired this series -- these deals, bizarre events and items are so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims.

As incredible as they may seem, sadly, there is no shortage of bizarre stories like these in the radio industry today.

Here are the latest allegations:

Cumulus Writes Up a Sales Rep for Too Much&hellip

Pissing Away the Audience

There was a real good piece written by Scott Harris for AOL recently that is so scary it ought to make anyone in the media business think seriously about the repercussions of how they are making decisions.

The article reports that television

How the Music Industry Is About To Change

The bad news is in -- as it has been almost every year since 2000.

Album sales in the U.S. are down year to year 13% and that includes digital revenue according to Nielsen SoundScan.

That

Why Failed Radio CEOs Get Contract Renewals

How does a CEO drive a company into bankruptcy and wind up getting rewarded for it?

It happened again late last week.

Let me set the scene.

It becomes public that Regent, the small market radio group, failed to make a loan payment by their December 31st deadline.

But wait

The Leno Lesson

So NBC screwed up.

Programming execs tried to plan for the future five years ago but the future is never predictable. Just try to remember what life was like five years ago and see if you could have predicted the ways things are today.

Ironically, the announcement that Jay Leno

Pandora and Pioneer Together

If you are staying elsewhere for the event and would like to stay on-site at the Westin Kierland Scottsdale, call (800) 354-5892 and request the "social catering rate" for Jerry Del Colliano's Media Solutions Lab. Once you have a Westin confirmation at the $259 rate, you may cancel your offsite reservation.

You always have the option of checking this handy hotel reference site to monitor the best rates and act appropriately --

A Look at Bankrupt Radio’s Playbook

Regent missed a $1,269,125.73 payment to lenders, it was revealed yesterday.

Regent has been working with their lenders since last spring, but now the cash ran dry and Regent could neither pay any of the interest or principal due.

Regent also missed the payment of so-called professional fees and that has got to really irk their lenders. Don't mess with their fees.

What's interesting is that if Regent has been in default for nine months, it doesn't seem like the lenders want the company.

They may have no choice but to take it back, but if someone's not paying you in a timely fashion for that long and you're letting&hellip

Paid Content Is Coming

Are you watching what happened over the holiday between Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp in their battle with Time Warner Cable for rights fees?

Murdoch wanted Time Warner to pay fees for Fox Broadcasting Network to keep the bowl games going and American Idol flowing.

Time Warner huffed and puffed and then gave in to what they later described as a fair deal.

Fair deal?

No problem.

The very next day, Time Warner Cable subscribers got hit with the first of what I think will be many rate increases to absorb the costs of the new deal with News Corp.

This sets a precedent for other television networks and&hellip