Last year Apple sold thirty-nine million iPods. Thirty-nine million. Not all in the United States, I grant you, but I have a hard time finding anyone between the ages of thirteen and thirty with a job or an indulgent parent who doesn’t own one. Riding a New York subway a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the cacophony of low-level chirping. I counted at least twenty people—more than half the car—with ear buds. (Some might have been Zunes; I don’t know.)
I mention this in the context of the proposed merger of the two satellite radio companies XM and Sirius, and a recent column in Advertising Age subtitled, “A Growing Glut of Advertising Clutter Threatens the [Radio] Medium.” I had to do a double take on that last one. Advertising Age pointing out the obvious … that there is waaaay too friggin’ much advertising on radio?
The guy who wrote the column was much more politic than I am inclined to be. But he did admit, “If I were running a radio station today, I’d worry more about XM and Sirius than I would about my direct competitors.” By that he meant the similarly ad-choked classic rock, hot adult contemporary, lite adult contemporary, and yadda yadda stations across town.
“For every ad that radio stations used to run, it now seems they run two. Radio,” he wrote, “in my opinion, has become RadiADo, with an extra ad inserted at every possible point in the programming.” RadiADo. Cute.
The dilemma for radio-station owners is that when you bundle eight, ten, twelve ads together—some thirty seconds, some fifteen (there was even talk of trying to sell one-second ads)—and brand every traffic and weather report, news update, and DJ smoke break with another ad, pretty soon the whole chattering, numbing horde becomes unrecognizable to listeners and therefore of little value to Select Comfort mattresses or your friendly, predatory car dealer.
Compared with those thirty-nine million iPods, satellite radio’s combined audience of roughly fourteen million subscribers isn’t much. (So-called “terrestrial radio”—the ad-choked game we’re talking about here—claims an audience of two hundred million.) But when you add thirty-nine million iPods in one year to fourteen million people paying $12.95 a month for mostly ad-free satellite and throw in the twenty-two million who claim to listen to advertising-free public radio, you’ve got a stark outline of a well-established trend.
Being a cheap bastard, I haven’t popped for satellite (or an iPod) … yet. But I can tell you that my radio consumption these days consists almost entirely of sports (with all those “Snapper Mow ’em Down Innings”), news (ninety-five percent via public radio), and a smattering of sports talk. Music? Forget it. The deck in the car holds ten CDs. I’m good. But if I do want something different, I hit public radio’s (ad-free) The Current. Life is too short to waste another thirty seconds listening to some yob pitch me hair implants, “rare” diamonds, or “fuel-efficient” SUVs.
If you’re thinking, “Screw you. You’re an out-of-touch geezer,” you’re probably right. But you ought to ask yourself if you’re drinking the same Kool-Aid as the radio (and TV) industry.
And if you counter by pointing out that this screed is being published in an ad-supported magazine, you are right again. Not to belabor the fundamental difference between print and broadcast advertising, but there is that funky matter of choice. My eyes might drift over the La Perla lingerie ads in a slick magazine, but they can’t be held captive there for minutes on end. (OK, they can.) Print still offers the possibility for consumer discretion. Broadcast does not. Until the gamut of hucksters have run their course, you’ll get nothing more of what you tuned in to see or hear in the first place (and that’s presuming they’ll eventually get around to playing what you tuned in to hear in the first place).
My first bet is that the FCC and Congress will eventually permit the XM-Sirius merger to go forward. My second is that super-salesman Mel Karmazin, current president of Sirius, former CEO of CBS, and the man who made Howard Stern “king of all media,” will do to satellite radio what he did to broadcast TV, namely, flood it with advertising. (XM and Sirius have something like three billion dollars in debt to deal with, and Stern just received an eighty-three-million-dollar “bonus” from Sirius, even though the company has yet to make a dime.)
Asked by Wall Street analysts to explain how he was going to create profit from the merger, Karmazin explained, “The advertising line is going to contribute significantly in the future.”
Make that thirty-nine million and one iPods.
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