There Is No Cat

The right prescription for what ails radio?

Doc Searls has a lucid explanation of how soil conductivity affects daytime reception of AM radio signals, plus how signals travel farther at night due to a completely different mechanism involving the ionosphere. I read this shortly after reading an article in the New York Times about how the Earth’s magnetic field is fading, possibly in preparation for a reversal that would place the magnetic North Pole roughly where the magnetic South Pole is today and vice-versa. The Times article says that there’s really nothing to worry about regarding the changes in the magnetic field, but I’m not so sure. That ionospheric reflection that Doc talks about is dependent on the magnetic field functioning as it has; if it disappears, is it possible that you wouldn’t be able to receive distant AM (and shortwave) signals any more? I’m going to have to ask some friends of mine who understand this a bit better than me.

Doc uses his musings to exercise one of his recurring hobby horses, the idea that the net is "radio"’s natural habitat and that old school radio is a dinosaur. It’s an intriguing thought, but I can think of at least one major problem with it, at least in the short- and medium-term. Net radio doesn’t scale well. The sunk costs that you need to spend to get started may be low, but every single listener you get costs you money. Become successful with a mass audience and it may kill you, just as a web site can be killed by the costs involved in being Slashdotted (and I know about this one first hand). Traditional radio, on the other hand, costs a lot to get started in (land, transmitter, antenna towers, etc.), plus some ongoing costs like electricity for the transmitter, but once you’re on the air, your costs are fixed. It doesn’t matter whether you have one listener or one million. If you can manage to cover your fixed costs (something that most radio stations manage one way or another), you can grow as large as possible within your service area without incurring extra costs. That’s something that’s not possible for net radio, and may never be possible (unless bandwidth becomes too cheap to meter, which I don’t think will ever happen; it’s possible to disagree on this count, which is why I say this argument holds in the short- and medium-term rather than forever). Net radio is a neat idea, and I love the possibility of having a virtually unlimited number of stations, not to mention stations that target audiences solely by interest rather than by geography, but I don’t see it taking over from traditional radio any time soon. The economics dictate otherwise. I think it’s much more likely that the current situation will continue, where traditionally-delivered radio dominates mass audience programming, while net radio evolves to serve small niche audiences that don’t cost too much to support.

Posted at 10:27 AM