A Word of Advice from FMQB

Friday Morning Quaterback's Bob Quick declares in his latest article that music is no longer content for radio.  As he sees it, the generational changes have led to a generation simply uninterested in music as it comes from the radio.  As a member of this generation, I completely agree; it's simply way easier and more fun (and yes, even 'cooler') to steal it or download it from the internet.  I shouldn't have to detail the history of this, but the end result of radio's evolution in the past two decades has left the music content subpar, and clearly radio managers can't even afford to focus on it.  Quick seems to think, and probably correctly so, that radio is coming full circle by returning to a focus on personalities.

Personalities have been unique to radio since its inception, and with the removal of the Fairness Doctrine, personalities became the ideal item to get listeners.  And with music radio losing its grip, the only thing that it's got left is the unique personalities, which stations are constantly trying to steal from one another.  It makes perfect sense that this is the last stand of radio, but....who cares?

If radio does collectively decide to leave behind any musical focus, it will simply put the last nail in the coffin that contains my commercial-radio-self.  Quick is really just voicing something that has been happening forever, and if he thinks that personalities can save radio, good luck to him.  Radio really still holds a lot that has yet to be tapped, namely in news formats, where NPR and other public radio shows continue to experiment.  Maybe music radio has reached its pinnacle, and we're simply in the denouement of pop and mass-produced crap.  With all the music out there, there's still an opportunity for radio to be the place to discover music, to be the cutting edge.  But instead, radio continues to be about money, and money has only killed every genre, artists and personality in the music industry.  Quick is probably right that music is unimportant to radio, but that's only because radio decided that with its "gold rush."