Will Podcasts Kill the Radio Star?

The Buggles’ song “Video killed the radio star” has certainly been disproved in the years since it was written.  Whereas music videos and MTV undoubtedly took some listening-time from radio, radio has hardly suffered and New Zealand now has a better range of stations than ever before.

Perhaps the Buggles’ song was as sensible as their name – but amidst the technological revolution in which we are currently living, grandiose predictions of the future are still commonplace.  Writing today, this writer is tempted to predict that “Podcasts will kill the radio star” (or at least cause GBH).  Why such a prediction?  After all, despite all the new developments we are seeing, there are still newspapers, books, television, magazines and radio stations, and they are adapting well for the most part.  Consumers now can find media choices covering an enormous range of interests, even when the internet is excluded from the mix.

But Podcasting stands to threaten radio to a considerably larger degree than anything the medium has faced before, and this is because people are inherently self-absorbed, impatient and lazy.  This is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years in market research, studying people’s behaviour in regards to an enormous range of services, products and issues, supported by tertiary degrees in sociology and psychology. 

Such a statement about people is not meant to be derisory or negative.  Put simply, it explains why our consumer lives are obsessed with buying additional convenience, speed, status, and self-affirmation.  All the successful media developments of the last twenty years have fed off this – Walkman cassette-players, video-recorders, the internet, DVD recorders, MP3 players, TIVO and MySky all promise perfection to today’s consumer – the ability to have exactly what is wanted, when one wants it, without the interruption of advertising.  The concept of “appointment television” is quaint and outdated.  Fancy having to wait for when some programmer decides you’re allowed to watch a TV programme! 

If Podcasting’s threat to radio seems an extreme position, think of the main media shifts of the last century:

• Radio provided greater convenience over gramophones, and wider variety of music (records being comparatively expensive then);
• Television provided greater convenience and variety than the movies;
• Video players provided greater convenience and variety than free-to-air TV;
• Pay-TV provided greater variety and fewer commercials than free-to-air TV;
• CDs and DVDs provided greater convenience than their analogue predecessors;
• The Internet provides near infinite variety and a degree of convenience that is increasingly exponentially.

In keeping with these developments, Podcasting threatens to be to radio what videos were to television, only moreso.  The size of the video / DVD rental industry and success of TiVo in the US confirms peoples’ desire to watch what they want to view, when they want to see it – and they’re prepared to pay for the privilege.

Add this degree of personalization to radio, along with the variety provided by the internet, in a commercial-free environment and at little or no cost, and it’s easy to see why Podcasting is set to turn radio on its head.  With over 20,000 Podcast ‘channels’ to choose from, and the ability to have chosen Podcasts downloaded automatically, one can have a personalized radio station in one’s MP3 player or iPodm, and thus also one’s home entertainment system.  In fact, the very term ‘radio’ stands to become outdated, referring as it does to a one-way, inadaptable channel for delivering audio entertainment.

What radio does offer is a local, live, interactive format, which pre-recorded Podcasts cannot offer  – and it is this relevance that radio must emphasise in future if it is to survive.

Jonathan Dodd