folks vs the man

In this month's Wired magazine, the article The Resurrection of Indie Radio offers some good news for fans of good old radio. Clear Channel, the company who probably killed good old radio, is starting to re-introduce local programming in some markets. And for these shows the DJ s actually pick the music and play their own stuff -- imagine that! The future promise is HD Radio, which promises both better signal quality AND more radio stations over the same bandwidth. You will need to buy a new type of radio to receive these broadcasts, but at least your old radio will continue to work, although limited to the old broadcast band.

I wonder though, will this really fly? Sure it sounds good to have 5 stations where we only have one now, more choice, and so forth. But will we really get innovative programming, or more of the same old crap. The way I see it these big radio stations are built on maximizing revenue and minimizing expense. These additional stations may build the overall listening audience, but each individual one will have less than the one station does now. But they'll need to be paying to produce 5 times as much programming. Can they really do this creatively?

The problem is that as a commercial producer tries to respond to greater choices, the complexity grows quickly, and outstrips their ability to keep up and still stay profitable. Eric Raymond, speaking of Linux, described exactly this problem with operating systems. They are getting very complex these days, and its tough for the commercial software companies to catch all the bugs -- there's just so much code. In contract the open source software, like Linux, has an army of programmers all over the world working on it. And as more features are added, they have more volunteer programmers.

Cory Ondrejka, creator of the on line game Second Life, made a similar point about video game programming. He sees the future of games in virtual worlds, like Second Life and the SIMS. Int these environments the players actively contribute to the game environment -- in fact you could say the other players are the game. Traditional video games, where the programmers create all elements of the environment, can't add new story lines and features fast enough to keep players engaged. The strategy as Cory sees it is to create a compelling experience and lest the users provide the creative force.

Which leads me back to the radio model. More stations controlled by a corporate giant will be better. But they can't compete with the user-driven, crazy, creative world of the new radio, Pod casting. In pod casting anyone can have a radio show, and anyone can be a listener, when they want, where they want, and what they want. I don't see how commercial radio can keep up.