Recently let go WIP Operations Manager Andy Bloom – can I call him Andrew? – did a Q & A with Jeff Blumenthal of the Philly Business Journal, the publication you do Q & As with when you badly need a job. Bloom talked a bit about his career, how sports talk radio has changed over the years, and explained why he didn’t always discipline hosts for saying something that was just stupid but not spiteful. It’s not incredibly long or in-depth (it seems like Bloom just wants to sharpen his interview answers), but there is this part where Bloom, a former radio executive in a major market, displayed a fundamental misunderstanding for the medium slowly encroaching on his chosen field– podcasts:
Are podcasting and satellite radio existential threats to terrestrial talk radio, like the stations you ran at WPHT and WIP?
“There are all sorts of alternatives now. It doesn’t mean that radio is dead. If radio dies, it will be because of suicide. It has to respond by being platform agnostic and trying to deliver the product in the way people are using it. On-demand is a way of life for TV. The measurement of how much programming is being DVR’d is a big issue for TV right now. They want total viewership to include DVR and there will be the same issue with radio and streaming. I think eventually they will be counted together.”
Do you think podcasting can become a really profitable business model?
“Serial, the podcast on NPR, is very successful, though I am not sure how they monetize it or if it would work for a company like CBS or one of the other major networks. Adam Carolla also has become very successful with it.
I would say very few of them are making significant amount of money because there are so many of them and the cost to buy them is so little. So I think they need to figure out a better business model.
But people want to listen to what they want to listen to when they want to listen. And podcasting can micro-target, where radio is largely macro-target. Overall what it’s doing to radio is essentially death by a thousand little cuts. It’s siphoning away listeners because there are so many of them now.”
Few things:
Read the full thing here.