Rocking at Conclave - and a few notes

It's just over 2 weeks till Conclave in downtown Minneapolis - June 28th - 30th. Still time to register and catch a convention that's really not conventional. Conclave is really a learning conference and fights to stick with that plan. You can learn more here.

For this year's Rock panel Mike Boyle (Rock formats editor for R&R) hosted a number of conference calls with group of Rock Programmers and we came up with a session I hope you will attend. It's on Friday afternoon at 5p so we felt we really had to hit a home run to get you into the room. Here's our plan:

Theme - Rock Radio - Ratings, Revenue and Revolution. The 90 minutes will have 3 20 minutes (or so) devoted to each of the 3 Rs.

• Ratings - Gary Marince from Arbitron will take a close look at PPM and Rock Radio. Considering the differences we've already seen with the Philly Rock stations showing huge gains in shares this will be a very interesting session. Gary will also look at using PPM data and he promises to also include lots of help and news for the Diary Based markets.
• Revenue - Jenny Tsao also from Arbitron will take us on a full qualitative tour of rock listeners from Arbitron's extensive qualitative data banks. Rock listeners are very valuable, but we often see sales teams and buyers fail to recognize their worth. Jenny will give you lots of facts to take back to your sales teams and show them the true value of rock radio.
• Revolution - Jennifer Williams from Greater Media's Internet/new media arena will show us all the fast changing and evolving world of the Web in radio. From streaming to personal networks Jennifer promises to give you tons of tools to take back to your web world.

There will be plenty of time for questions and input from you in the audience. Just make sure you're there. Plenty of time after for a few beers and fun on the town in the twin cities.

Shifting gears a little - 3 items from scanning the news to get the week going:

• New Media conference - They wrapped up in NYC and while New Media might imply an Internet conference it is mostly about talk radio and syndication. Of course the news from the meetings was - Talk Radio Has A Huge Future on FM. It's an idea that's been pushed for the last 10 or 12 years. We've pretty much seen the Free - FM CBS FM talk stations fail and most who have tried the format end up with a huge talent bill and not much for numbers. I don't get what the talk guys see here?

• Zune tops 1 million - WOW - Microsoft with millions to spend and it takes a year to sell a million Zune players. I don't know if I'd be having a party with that news.

• Paul McCartney #1 - Paul's new cd on the 'Starbucks' label with a new distribution system ends up #1. Paul is a legend and there is some good music on the CD, but #1!!! Good for Paul but it does say something. Older consumers will buy new music from established stars - but you are not going to sell it to them in the traditional spots - Radio included.