SaveKUTAustin

Canned music. Canned music.
Playin’ on the radio.
Canned music. Canned music.
Without a dime it doesn’t go.

—Dan Hicks, “Canned Music”

The visionaries of Clear Channel and other heavy hitters in the radio world once saw HD radio as the next big cash cow—too cheap to meter, as it were. The Chronicle’s Kevin Brass reported (Dec. 2006) on glowing expectations voiced by Kagan Research:

“Kagan Research expects only 200,000 to 300,000 HD receivers will be sold this year. That number should jump to more than 2.5 million in 2007, but sales won’t really start to ramp up until 2008, when 8.5 million will be sold, according to Kagan’s model. From there, sales are expected to almost double every year, to 16 million in 2009 and 27 million in 2010.”

Something happened on the way to the Promised Land. Even iBiquity, lord of HD (which stands, actually, for “hybrid digital” but was labeled “huge debacle” and its overlord “iNiquity”), had to admit this year that fewer than 1,000,000 have been sold after four years. And 100 million radios are sold every year. In contrast, it took Apple 74 days to sell 1,000,000 iPhones.

As noted in an earlier posting (see article here), “With the economy in deep recession, and radio companies desperately looking for ways to curb costs, does it seem prudent for any station manager to sink money into a technology that has yet to provide any tangible returns? This is much different from the wait-and-see approach of most stations—the fact that early-adopters of HD may be bailing can’t be good.”

But the whopper came from the mouth of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps:

“Everybody involved pretty much admitted from the outset that the digital radio initiative is all about giving the broadcast industry more avenues to make money rather than actually improving radio from the perspective of the listener.”

Would it be too much to suggest that one HD station would be enough (to see if it ever pans out), broadcasting news when the mother ship plays music and vice-versa? Would this have been a prudent budget cut, given the state of radio these days? But now we’re hip-deep in the big muddy . . .

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 1:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.