I woke up this morning with an epiphany: “The math is wrong; Radio chose the wrong equation.”

Recently, my brother Reg and I were discussing where and when the radio industry went south.
My claim is that it happened long before consolidation.

A while back, radio was so powerful that 98% of the population listened, and even though more than 5% of Americans are deaf, some of them were listening.
Back in those days, the radio station with the largest cume was #1, which, of course, made them the top biller.

So what went wrong, you may ask? Well, I think the radio’s demise probably can be traced back to a salesperson.
One of them most likely had a client who asked, “Hey, how many people actually heard my commercial today”?

That’s the moment, I believe, when radio began its downward slide.
Instead of saying, “I don’t know but, probably everybody,” the salesperson said, “I don’t know but, I’ll find out and get back to you.”

What radio did then was mind-boggling! We shrunk this big, beautiful number to a few little digits, called average quarter-hour.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, we shrunk it down to a single-digit rating point. What were we thinking?

Before then, Cume was King, and only a few people knew how to grow it,
Geniuses like Bill Drake, Jim Hilliard, Buzz Bennett Lee Abrams, Jack McCoy, Ron Chapman, and Randy Michaels ruled the airwaves.

But unfortunately, even though most broadcasters were putting 45% to the bottom line, the end was in sight.
(Pictured above, top left, Randy Michaels, Lee Abrams, Jack McCoy. and Jim Hilliard. Bottom left, Buzz Bennett. Chuck Blore, Bill Drake, and Ron Chapman.)

However, I believe what did us in was when a fucking accountant named Sam Zell whispered into Randy Michaels’ ear, “Stop chasing ratings; there ain’t no cheese in that tunnel.”
Shortly thereafter, Randy, who used to be a great product guy, fired the highest-rated morning show in San Diego.

What? C’mon, Man! That makes no sense; you don’t kick Mick out of the Stones, replace Tom Cruise in Top Gun with someone cheaper, or fire the lead in a hit Broadway Musical.
This, in my mind, was the beginning of the end.

Sam may have been right because when Randy fired Jeff and Jer, the radio station’s value increased by 20 million dollars.
However, that same radio station ain’t worth didley squat today.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, radio people think they know how to do everything, like Jeff Smulyn thinking he knew how to run a baseball team.
So even though only a handful of people on our planet have any idea how to make a stock rise, radio went Wall Street anyway. What a fucking disaster!

In the beginning, it all went well because as long as you were buying more radio stations, your stock kept rising.
However, the banks were anxious to hear what your plan was once you reached your ownership limit.

The Broadcasters, of course, didn’t have a plan, so the stock plummeted.
Now, facing huge debt and needing to make interest payments, the best our Radio Czars could come up with was, “Cut it to the bone.”

Unfortunately, that cut-it-to-the-bone attitude prevails today, and except for keeping the senior executives employed, it ain’t working.
So ponder this: what if the value of a radio station was based on a multiple of its gross instead of its net like the rest of the entertainment industry? What do you think radio would be like today?

Even though I’ve never been a big fan of sales folks, I feel sorry for what they must be going through now.
It’s gotta be tough out there trying to sell radio in a digital world.

I think the only way radio can get back in the game is by putting compelling product on the air.
That product not only needs to be local, but it also needs to inspire those it attracts to buy some shit.

As my 10th-grade British History teacher, Mr. Foreman used to say, “Class, the roots of the present lie deep in the past.”
He’s right because some of the stuff I learned back in the day is still relevant.

As my old pal Socrates said, “It’s what’s above the bottom line that causes the bottom line.”
Then, when Jim Hilliard added, “A person is always the answer,” it brought it all together for me.

The product causes an effect called ratings and revenue, and the person who creates that product will also need to figure out how to monetize it.
This programmer of the future should also know how to utilize AI so they can make the product better while cutting even more costs.