Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio 
 Spring 2001

     Tucson is a fascinating town, the University Marriott is a superior hotel with excellent food and service, and the Music Personnel Conference is a good chance to meet and mingle with peers as well as an opportunity to participate in a wide range of sessions. Again this year, the quality of the musical performances offered was superb—Karuna and Sanjeev, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, violinist James Ehnes, vocalist and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, guitarist Christopher Parkening, pianist Lang Lang, violinist John Holloway with chamber organist Aloysia Assenbaum, pianist Chiu-Tze Lin, to name just a few. If some of these names are unfamiliar, don’t worry; all the musicians were top quality. You’ll soon know their work.
     If anyone wonders how important this conference is to the creators and purveyors of the music we play, it is interesting to note that Constantine Orbelian and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra flew to Tucson from a gig in Alaska and returned to Alaska after the conference. One of their soloists flew in from Milan just for the conference. 
     At the closing banquet, Summit Records highlighted some of their artists, including the Capitol Quartet, tubist Patrick Sheridan, and clarinetist Robert Spring.
     There were a number of informational sessions as well as a range of practical ones. The following is a summary of some of the sessions.

Thursday, February 15

  Marilyn Horne spoke to us during the opening continental breakfast, representing the Marilyn Horne Foundation which she and others founded to sponsor development and growth of vocal recitalists. To her, she said, the advantage of radio is that it reaches more places than TV—in the car or in the pool, for example. She is bothered by the compression of music becoming the norm in some places—the “just-the-one-movement” school of broadcasting. Don’t talk down to your audience, don’t underestimate them, she admonished. She feels that vocal music is important and that listeners shouldn’t be deprived of the human voice.
     The keynote speaker was Murray Horwitz, NPR Vice President of Cultural Affairs. His title: “Who Let the Dogs Out? Virgil Thomson, the Swine Flu Vaccine, and Public Radio in America.”
     He contends that a local public radio station is defined by and helps to define the cultural character of its community. What? Community? Don’t you mean “Marketing Demographic?” Not originally. The word broadcast comes from agriculture, designating the spreading of seed. It was a unifying force behind the community, a shared and nourishing experience. An example would be the Top 40 radio of the 1950s and 1960s, where the week’s top hit list was posted at the record store. You might hear Buddy Holly and Dean Martin on the same station; even if you tuned to another station when the Dean Martin recording came on, you at least knew his music had some importance in the community.   The contrary is the approach today. Each station seeks its niche—the “golden oldies, but only the golden oldies from July 12, 1977, through October 19 of that year” is about how bad it’s getting, he said. This is the antithesis of the Federalist Papers, which tried to keep factionalism in check and avoid the “tyranny of the minority.” This “toxic culture” will get worse before it gets better. 
     What happens when we lose common ground? Twenty-five years ago, a hit television show had over 50 percent of the market. People could easily share conversation about last night’s programming. Today, a hit show reaches only 20 percent of its market. When President Ford decided to call the country together for a Swine Flu inoculation, he was on most of the channels in the market; today, if the President addresses the nation, he may not even be on three of the networks represented on the 150-plus channel cable or satellite distribution. 
      Virgil Thomson spoke of the “vast commercial machine,” moving forward only by eliminating some forms, not because they don’t sell but because they don’t sell enough. Contrast that with the long-running Ed Sullivan show. Here were variety, lion tamers, Bulgarian dancers, Elvis, ventriloquists, the Beatles—even if you didn’t know anything about the Beatles, you saw the teenage girls screaming and knew these guys were a force to someone in your community.
     It is those significant audiences being left behind that public radio can serve, Horwitz feels. A program like “Car Talk” lets people know that “there are others there who share my interests and sense of humor.”
     Music works the same way. If a station does “eat-your-spinach-radio,” top-down and dictatorial, it won’t work. But just as bad is playing only the music we think people like. “If I play what I know you’ll like, I’m dishonest. I have to play what I know is good.”
     Radio TSL is down 14 percent since 1990, but public radio is holding its own despite those figures. If you go popular, Horwitz feels, you’ll get cume, but it will be temporary; and after a year or two, the audience will move to more substantial programming.
     Style coach Marilyn Pittman did a strong presentation about on-air delivery, including demonstrations. She stressed the need for air-checks and the need for a common language between the reviewer and the reviewed to avoid confusion and disaffection. She made the point that a critique cannot be meant as or seen as denigration but must be seen in the light of making the good better.
  Joyce Schreiber of NPR’s Station Development Services presented data from NPR’s Profile 2000, representing data collected in 1999 by Mediamark Research, Inc., for the first time breaking listeners out into classical, jazz, and news categories. There is a lot of food for thought here. Both news and classical listeners are more likely than the “average American” to go to a sporting event, to watch golf on television, or to jog. Classical listeners are more likely to have a cell phone than news listeners. Neither is likely to have a Sears credit card, but both are more likely than average to have shopped at The Gap than at Macys in the last three months. How does one use the data? 
     Schreiber says the usefulness of the data to any station is up to the station. Brainstorming brought out several ideas. Remember not to try fundraising on Super Bowl Sunday or on a day when the local favorite college team is playing football. Remember that a premium from The Gap may have a good pull. Remember that both classical and news listeners have only a slightly-better-than-average likelihood of reading Time or Newsweek but are far more likely than “Joe Blow” to own stocks—might they consider a tax-deductible donation of an appreciated stock to the station? There are many pages available on the nprstations.org web site, the whole report in fact—plenty of information for development and marketing personnel to peruse. 
     The first full day of the conference ended with a loving and respectful tribute from friends, relatives and colleagues to AMPPRite and long-time actor and public radio personality Robert J. Lurtsema, who died in the past year. 

Friday,  February 16

     Management consultant Shelbra Brinkman, in the first of a projected series of sessions on this subject for the Public Radio Professional Training Coalition (prptc.org) at major conferences in 2001, spoke about managing organizational change, which she identified as a six-stage process, moving from a feeling of loss and denial in stage one through doubt and resistance to change in stage two. As enough information is gleaned to see parts of the general structure clearly, one moves into stage three. 
     At this stage there is some understanding of what is needed, but there also is an overwhelming feeling of confusion and overwork. It is here in stage three that care must be taken to avoid the “danger zone,” where there is so much confusion and powerlessness in the face of mounting work pressure and concomitant lack of productivity that morale is at the lowest in the cycle. It is often at this point that management decides there is something wrong in the process and wants to make another change, which is counterproductive and merely starts the change process over.
     What is needed in stage three is recognition that guidance is needed: what are the primary goals to be accomplished, what can be dropped? After all, the instigators/facilitators have gone through the matter and reached general conclusions that the changes are beneficial to the organization, even if each individual doesn’t see how his or her job relates to those of the others. This is where the process can bog down and eventually fail. But then comes a moment of recognition, a breakthrough of sorts, where things start falling into place; and one has passed into stage four with feelings of anticipation, looking for ways to improve the job being done. 
     Stage five follows, in which the improvement in the organization can be seen. One becomes confident in the movement and enters stage six with satisfaction. Here one sees the benefits to be reaped from the change—for example, increased work experience, another line for the resume. One has internalized the change process.
  “Lend Me Your EARS” was the title of a full-scale, real-time, hands-on demonstration of the Electronic Attitude Research Systems from FMR Associates by Bruce Fohr, showing just how audience research focus groups can be  studied quickly and data quantified. Examples were played, and the conference audience was able to respond in real time, dialing higher or lower approval to any event. Results were tallied once per second; and five minutes after the end of the test, the results were available for playback—broken down in this case by age, though many other difference parameters were also available and might have been chosen. 
     With the permission of PRI, we were able to see audience response to part of a “Marketplace” program. A normal EARS session takes about two hours and generates a wealth of information, such as listener income, gender, education, age, and each individual’s second-by-second response to the music, the host, and the information presented. The data are then presented to the station in both raw form and with interpretive graphs in packet form.
  Peter Dominowski and Eric Nuzum presented the study, “Listeners React to Public Radio on the Web.” The basics had already been presented at PRPD and AMPPR conferences, but the data here were updated with more attention to music listening. The study by Market Trends Research is titled “Public Internet Consumer Insight Study” (PICIS) and is ongoing. Nuzum and Dominowski stressed that this is a work in progress, but Nuzum feels that the current rush to the internet is perhaps premature: “We’re rushing down the tracks at full speed, but we can’t be sure there are still tracks around the next bend.”
     The study divides a public radio station’s approach to the internet into several sections— Online content, Online integrity, Online advertising, E-commerce, and Online positioning. One thing the survey found was that there are hard-core public radio listeners but no hard-core public radio web listeners. In all focus groups the participants found the internet of interest for additional information, but the radio was still their main focus. Whatever else a station decides to do on the web, having a search capability was considered essential. Whether it is an arts calendar or an adjunct to a news story, the visitor needs to be able to search it.
     Also demanded was integrity. The focus groups complained about animated or flashing ads because “public radio is above all that.” The station could sell items as reviewed on “All Things Considered,” for example; but when the same book was presented without the program tie-in, the respondents complained about “blatant commercialism.” Ads were tolerated for Time and Newsweek and for travel centers, the kinds of things one might hear about on public radio anyway, but not for low-cost long distance companies. 
     Nuzum and Dominowski feel that a station’s web site is seen as a utility for buying CDs and books and participating in auctions, for example. A station’s web site is also viewed as a utility to obtain additional information about what was on the air. “I look at it as a support service; the mission is radio.”
     Similarly, e-commerce is tolerated as a replacement for on-air fundraising, not as an adjunct. If a person wants to buy a book from a station, he wants to know not only who the fulfillment house is, how secure the transaction is, and what the return and exchange privileges are, but also how much the station is actually making on the transaction so he can reduce his annual membership by that amount.
     What would Nuzum and Dominowski recommend as good music-related tactics for a web presence?
     Publish information: an online program guide, for example (save trees and postage), and an arts calendar. Tell the audience to check the web site for all the great things happening around town this week.
     Publish links for more music information on the recording or the piece or the featured birthday composer, and include archives of data links. 
     Sell program-related CDs and books.
     Judicious and tasteful underwriting-style e-commerce is worth a try.
     Above all, collect e-mail addresses because they will be of use. If people have had enough interest to contact the station, they might just be interested in a direct appeal for contributors or volunteers. 
     The survey, the data, the results, the PowerPoint presentation we saw are all available at http://www.wksu.org/picis.

Saturday, February 17

[Note: According to news items on March 24, after this article was written, 3Com will discontinue Kerbango Internet Radio in June, along with its entire internet appliance division. It will continue to make home networking products.]

  “Tomorrow’s Radio Today” featured presentations by John Felt of Kerbango and Michelle Miller of Sirius Satellite Radio. The former is a very interesting concept, joining AM, FM, and internet radio all in one box. Due on the market in a few weeks, the Kerbango Radio is scheduled to appear in several designs; currently it supports only broadband connections, but later versions are expected to be dial-up-connection friendly. 
     Kerbango, the company owned by 3Com, makes money by selling the radio ($299), by licensing the technology (RCA has already bought), and by taking a referral fee from sales made through the set. It will be interactive, and one doesn’t need a computer to use it. Because it will connect to the web, it will be able to report back when it’s on, what station it’s tuned to, and at what point the listener tuned away.
     Still in planning stages is a mechanism for allowing a station to pay to be among the first listed in the Kerbango web menu—an additional source of income for Kerbango. Felt stressed that the company is selling radios, not programming, and therefore is not to be seen as a threat to current content-delivery systems.
     Sirius is a different matter altogether. Satellites are already in orbit (launched by Proton rockets from a base in Kazakhstan). The technology is being deployed first in the automotive market, because the concept is to be able to provide programming that doesn’t fade as one leaves the transmitter vicinity. 
     Sirius will have 50 commercial-free music channels and 50 commercial talk channels; after buying the radio, a $9.95 monthly fee for the service will be charged. Because the coverage area is the entire United States, Sirius feels it will be possible to find an audience even for niche genres. At the moment a number of auto manufacturers have signed on to the idea, and Sirius radios will begin appearing in upscale vehicles later this year. The satellite capability is viewed simply as a third state of the radio—AM, FM, or satellite. 
     Initially, radios with the Sirius system will be incompatible with the XM satellite service; but in the second generation, radios will be able to receive both of the competitive formats. Miller left open the door for future expansion into other markets, such as household radios. 
     Her presentation left me feeling that the company is aggressive and will do what it takes to build business. One of the company’s slogans is “Niche the masses and amass the niches,” relating directly to the idea of serving the smaller groups left behind as mass marketing carves out smaller demographics of interest—precisely the same direction Murray Horwitz referred to as one for public radio. 
     The session “Getting from Beck to Bach on the Information Superhighway” was hosted by representatives of three types of business looking forward to the changes in store with the increasing presence of the internet in day-to-day life. The speakers represented a record company, a record distributor, and a digital music provider.
  Randy Barnard of CBC Records pointed out that on the Radio Canada site, 50 percent of the visitors do not listen to the Radio Canada programs on air; in fact, 10 percent are not even in Canada. But even with the number of visitors available, and even with links taking listeners from Radio Canada to the CBC Records site, the company cannot amass enough listenership to make the web site successful. Barnard said that it is today impossible to generate sales of new performances of standard repertoire through normal retail channels without major name artists. What to do on these counts? For CBC Records, the answer was to join forces with RadioMOI.com.
     This thought was echoed by Dave Osenberg of Qualiton, a distributor for over 100 different labels, who pointed out that the old way of sending out 120 new titles per month and relying on company representatives to put them on shelves doesn’t work anymore. “I’m always happy to see on station playlists that a station is playing a 1989 Bis release, but a distributor or a record company survives through new releases; sales of our back catalog are virtually nil.”
  Phil Lubman gave an enthusiastic demonstration of RadioMOI.com. He remarked that the name had been changed from Radiomoi.com because Texans can’t pronounce the French moi. It’s just luck, he said, that the same spelling could stand for Music On the Internet. 
     The purpose of RadioMOI.com is to serve as a conduit for others’ programming. This is the company behind CBC Records’ web presence, as well as those of Tweeter, Time, “Sesame Street,” and many more. His company designs a custom software web player for the station, network, or other entity, and that entity provides the programming—archived audio on demand, or live streaming, or both, as I understood it. The terrestrial signal isn’t the only thing to put out on the web; listeners demand choice. Lubman commented that when a major label delivers content on the web, it wants tracking data: where the listener was, what he played, where he skipped forward in the tune to get to the next track, where he lost interest, what his demographics are—the same kind of information mentioned in regard to the web functionality of the Kerbango Radio.
     Both Barnard of CBC records and Osenberg of Qualiton feel that major changes in audio distribution are rapidly approaching. Barnard commented that public radio is a main tool for getting his product out, and he does not see that situation changing; but the company could save the cost of packaging and of shipping by allowing a station—or a consumer—to download the datafile directly to his hard drive. He said that the Virgin megastore in Paris already has all its CDs on hard drive. A store visitor can simply pick up the disc and walk to any listening station, scan the barcode, and be presented with the option of which tracks to listen to.
  Susan Hammond, the producer of the Toronto-based series “Classical Kids,” ended the conference sessions with a passionate presentation that focused on the role of storytelling in radio. She talked about the universal attraction of stories and the way people have always told tales to communicate ideas and to entertain. She demonstrated storytelling using music by reciting poetry and prose accented by music and using music as background. This combination usually is not used to best advantage in radio presentations, she said. It is overlooked or downplayed as an effective use of the medium and should be reconsidered, even though it involves research and production work beyond the usual preparation for cultural presentations. She urged programmers to consider the value of extending their efforts in this direction.

Summary:

     I spoke with a number of people who agreed with me that it would be nice to be able to shut the station down long enough to bring all the music staff to this conference. If you haven’t attended a Music Personnel Conference, put it on the agenda for next year if you can. Everyone involved in music programming should have a chance to get the reinvigoration and support that comes from one of these events.

Howard Cornelsen is operations manager at KUHF in Houston, Texas <hcornelsen@kuhf.org>