Sad Day For Radio….

Before I created the concept for “Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe” with Treet.tv, I worked as a volunteer Radio Host for nearly 3 years at what most Americans know as a “Public” Radio Station “Community Radio” as it is known over here. I hosted ,to start with, a 2 hr Jazz program with interviews called Jazz@5 on Fridays,(you can still hear some of my interviews on my www.leoniesmith.com website),  then moved into Morning Radio for another 2 shifts. The Station was known for its eclectic tastes in Music, from Jazz, Blues, Soul World ect…FM99.3 had the reputation as one of THE most successful Community Radio Stations in NSW winning various awards ect..but surviving on mostly community good will, sponsorship, some Govt subsidies and volunteers. It had a great community around it. But  new management moved in and decided to broaden its appeal, by stearing away from the music side of it and its Jazz Blues World Music side. My show was axed and a “Drive Time” show was put in place. I declined to host other shows as the Jazz Program was of course my favourite, and the Fri night shift suited my hours. I had stopped hosting the two Morning shows I was doing, when Tonight Live got more and more demanding.

I did think of going back to Bricks and Morter Radio, maybe for money, especially as the kids were now at school, and I had time to do so, and was contacted more than a few times to come back and co-host and Host shows on FM99.3, I had, by that stage good skills and experience, I knew they were finding it tough to find qualified volunteer hosts, but “Tonight Live” was just too interesting and challenging to me. It was fullfilling my creative side in not just interviewing very interesting guests in Second Life and discovering great music and musicians and promoting them, but also the visual side of producing which of course you cannot get in Radio. So after a call earlier this year from another host trying to get me back I decided that I wouldn’t go back at all, not even to fill in, I gave up any ambitions I had of being a paid radio host to concentrate on producing TV in SL, even though I thought our numbers were very small compared to R.L community Radio even.

Up until today I was under the impression that my RL radio job had thousands and thousands of listeners. I was never really told of the listenership, just that my show was “one of the most popular shows on FM99.3″, which is hard to gauge with over-the-air broadcasts, and is usually done by surveys and guess work. The station did not start streaming on the Web until about a year ago. (I nagged and nagged the Station manager and engineers, to get it streaming but was always met with resistance…luddites..)

Today I found out about the demise of the station after some 27 years, it apparently was run into the ground by the same people who felt drive time radio would be more popular than Jazz between 5-7 on a Friday night…I ALSO found out the REAL figures of the listnership. The Director of the station…(who will remain nameless), stupidly left a private powerpoint presentation up on the web…publicly… from this years Annual General Meeting. (I wouldn’t want these figures publicised if I was Station Director, I’m not suprised the station has gone to the wall with such stupidity) I found it easily, by just googling the station Directors name, I wasn’t even looking for it! The numbers of listeners to the station, documented by the management, was gobsmakingly small! Now.. this was no small station, it had the reputation of being the highest profile, most successfull community Radio Station in Sydney, if not NSW, and there are hundreds and hundreds of community radio stations in NSW. The figures on that presentation were- 1000 listeners a week, -less than 100 listeners at any one time, and no more than 500 listeners for a really popular show…(was it mine snort…?)

You could have knocked me down with a feather…here I am, aware that “Tonight Live” gets a global audience from anywhere between 10 thousand and 18 thousand viewers per show! and I’m telling people, that its “like a community Radio Station sized audience!” wow how wrong was my thinking…I thought all this time, that my real life gig was the one with the big audience. Holy Hell! Thank god I jumped! Now, it maybe that the size of the audience for FM99.3 has dropped considerably since I was there..(people cried when I left …well not really but in my imagination they did, they certainly complained..) But its is nowhere near what we are getting on Treet.tv. I don’t have any idea of listener or subscriber-ship numbers on other Community radio stations in Australia, and certainly no idea what Public radio gets in the States…even if you could trust anyones figures! but thats a huge difference. We aint doin so bad!

I have also heard unconfirmed reports of Cable TV getting tiny amounts of viewership much much less than what you would expect compared to Treet.tv shows.

All of this is interesting for me, because of the perception of what I’m doing here in SL when I talk about it  in real life When I try to explain why I left bricks and mortar radio, (which was allways an easy sell, people know what that is, and treated me somewhat as a minor celebrity because I was on Community Radio! for goodness sake,) to do what Im doing now.. !!! he he well you can imagine…”who watches that?” sometimes there is a sort of sad patronising look in peoples eyes…like “poor dear she can’t get back into radio so she’s doing pretend radio..in some weird internet game with pretend listeners”.

I can sort of understand that…I mean if I hadn’t discovered S.L and decided one crazy day to have a go at this, I’m sure I would think the same. But this whole thing has got me thinking…what are the REAL stats out there for viewership and readership?…How can I translate the viewership we have on my three TV shows (Tonight Live, Fabulous Fashion and Live n Kickin) to dollars? how can I present what we are doing, and prove how many people we have watching these shows to real life interested parties, (without Neilson) who might promote us or advertise with us particularly those who are interested in global reach?

Ok.. so compared to commercial Radio, TV, and some major online broadcasts, we are totally small potatoes right now, but where are we really by comparison to other broadcasters? On my shows in RL Radio I used to cue up sometimes 10 to 15 ads a show! (used to drive me insane on a 2 hour shift) It’s astounding to me that FM99.3 got that many advertisers for so little audience!..Its really about credibility isn’t it, and marketing not numbers?…well maybe numbers at the top of this game, but there is definitely misconceptions about success and figures I think.

With more and more broadcasts of many different kinds hitting the internet, and now with Digital Radio and digital TV & Cable, the competition for the listeners and viewers is going to be incredibly intense.

FM99.3 may not have had a patch on the listeners we have on Tonight Live, but 27 years in the community gave them crediblity even if the advertisers were lied to about the listenership…and I bet they were….if the listenership was that small no wonder it was tough to get enough advertisers, (we did a lot of subscription drives!) the advertisers and sponsors they did get would have seen very very little, in fact, almost no increase in sales if the adds went out to so few listeners…yes they played the same adds over and over on all shows, but in March 2009 that was only 1000 listeners a week!…

I suspect that internet broadcasting just doesn’t have the cred that bricks and mortar does…yet…..but it will change. I wonder how long, it will take? I’ts got to be just common sense, if you can spend less to broadcast, reach more people…cater your advertising better..present it better?…surely its got to get some attention.

The lack of credible listenership and viewership stats for lots of internet broadcasts means that  they get bypassed by advertisers.

Interesting times.

thanks for watching

And have a great Thanksgiving all the viewers in North America.

Paisley