Radio is your friend

I couldn't put it any better. Radio has always been the music promotion machine, and has a future to continue to do so, alongside the internet and online music services. Radio is as collaborative as online community portals. Radio is clever. Radio gives you free stuff, it's live and topical. Radio starts and follows trends. Radio is a culture tracker and developer.

I've always thought that radio will take a smaller slice of our 'media pie', and perhaps a more accurate way to decipher how, is to consider content. We have more content than we are able to work with. We need the internet to manage this. New media like the internet has become another 'staple', alongside old media like radio, television and newsprint. The content is forever growing - we just have more pages to pick from.

That's why we have 'mediums' like radio, to deliver the best and worst of it all.

Now a separate argument, is the music industry, and how radio has been presented (quite ridiculously I might add) as a medium that has hurt the music industry!??

This is far from true. Radio has been instrumental for the last 60 or so years, in developing a record industry. Radio has been the ultimate promotional tool. How we "digest the music" beyond radio, should be the music industry's concern, not that of radio. Radio needs to be separated from any equations relating to sales. Radio is PROMO! Listeners/Consumers are SALES!

Steven Van Zandt wrote a great piece about this recently. He reacts to the US economical slide, and how all forms of logic have started to slide with it:

The latest evidence of this sad loss of logic, pride and integrity comes in the form of a feverish obsession by virtually everyone to make all those greedy, evil radio stations pay for the privilege of playing our precious records.

How dare they!

The free dance is over, buddy, it's time to pay the piper!

It's perfectly obvious that this has been the problem with the record industry all along.

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