15 Months of Fame Lifecycles on the Web

Doesn't it seem like in the WWW world big things only last around 15 months or so? It seems to take 15 months to watch a new application or web thing develop, then it spends 15 months as the big thing, and another 15 months winding down. Myspace is a great example starting in late 2003 and building till the sale to Murdoch in mid 2005. As 2007 began we started to see a migration of the innovators and early adaptors to Facebook. By the middle of 2008 Facebook will probably blow by Myspace.



Look at YouTube which started in 2005 and was sold in 4th quarter 2006 to Google. By the early months of 2008 we'll probably see YouTube start winding down on the 'cool meter'. Something else will replace YouTube as the next cool thing.



While not everything seems to follow the 15 Month stages brought out in these examples there is clearly a very fast moving and volatile life cycle on the web. Look at it from an advertisers side. First you went with simple banner ads on big web sites only to find that your consumer wasn't there, then to pop-ups which we all blocked completely, into email boxes where you became spam, now to Google Adwords in a complex mess of bidding and placement. Advertisers seem to be constantly running to the next big thing on the web only to find a confusing mess when they spend the dollars. Things are changing fast and will probably even change much faster.



Recently Mark Cuban was discussing the slowness of the INTERNET and suggesting that we will probably see more INTRANETS that are more limited so we can actually navigate at the speeds our computers are capable of, instead of the slow, messy, way overcrowded, constantly crashing, WWW world - read it here I bet Mark is right that we will soon out grow the old Internet and find it just too slow to handle all the video, high end audio, animation, gaming, and interactivity we will likely demand from interacting with our computers. What happens when we try to download movies in high def formats? How far can we compress audio and when do we realize how much better things can sound? Mark's speculation on the answer to the ever increasing demand on throughput to get more and more complex aplications and content on to your screens and speakers is to close down the scope of the network. Go from an INTERNET to a more smaller and more controlled INTRANET - perhaps one that is all interactive through your cable provider with it's own You Tube like sharing site and a smaller personal network that can be monitored and controlled. Take off some of the 'freedom' and open to anyone side of the web and suddenly the experience might be the next logical evolution.


How does this relate to radio? Are advertisers, marketers and clients accomplishing anything towards building their brands and business growth in an environment where things are moving so fast your message disappears in front of you. Is this like the elusive task of trying to catch a chipmunk as it darts around your garage or yard with just your hands? It's so fast and so small and has so many holes to dive into.


It seems like everywhere we go radio gets the 'old fashioned' tag on it. While it may be tempting to be betting your marketing dollars on the latest web craze and find yourself chasing that chipmunk all over the garage. Meanwhile Radio still reaches 90% of the population or more, can be bought for lifestyle and specific demographics, and still delivers a very healthy TSL compared to other media. While it may be old fashioned it's also reliable, fairly easy to craft a quality message on (you don't need hours of HTML code or complex bidding systems), local to your community and still pretty affordable.

New Ideas For Your Web Site

Every day your web site becomes more important to interacting with the audience. One of the BIG differences in the web and the new media competition it represents is that the audience can interact with it. They can customize it, broadcast themselves on it, custom search it, and with all the video, audio, text and animation toys all connected to the whole world. It's become both competition for us and also a huge opportunity for us to interact and build stronger P1 relationships with the audience.

Maybe its because we are trained in broadcasting - where we have the transmitter and send out the entertainment. In the web world the audience can become their own entertainment and can broadcast their signals and receive signals from nearly anyone else on the web. We have to get used to this new world and start to use it wisely.

There are so many opportunities to take our brands and the entertainment we already produce and use it to stand out in the new web world. Here's some new ideas you should be considering built around WIDGETS. Look to you left and you will see a widget with the 'Star Trek Cube' which you can control by clicking on it and moving it around. It's a little html code that was just pasted into the blog and you can get tons of them on http://www.kickapps.com/ or http://www.widgetbox.com/ . There are plenty of ideas in the widgets you could use on your site:

• Music Players - Many of the widgets are linked to music players which you could load up with songs - perhaps your top 10 at 10 every night. Maybe you could also set up a social network type page where the listeners could post their top 5 songs and allow anyone to hear all the songs streamed on the player. Maybe you could also cue up the top morning show bits and play them. The list is endless.
• Games - From Asteroids to Sudoku puzzles they have tons already to download.
• Video Players - Some link to You Tube and other sites and you have to post the videos there or pick from what they have but they also have ones that automatically pick the top viewed videos.
• RSS Feeds - Want to get the latest music news, gossip, or sports in a unique display with cool graphics - widgets have them.
• Countdown Clocks - Only 15 days, 12 hours and 45 minutes till the A-Z weekend starts on Rock 101.
• Pick Slide shows - There are widgets that could display recent picks from the morning show stunts or the recent 'big concert.'

I'm sure you can find a lot more uses for widgets and it might also be fun to find out how to make one of these just for the station. For example create a spinning logo with some graphics that people could insert on their myspace pages that links back to the station's site to build traffic. Or make up a really cool looking video or audio player branded with your station that they could steal for their site.

Hopefully you do have control of your site. In my visits I often run into sites where most of the layout and access is either handled by an outside party working on trade or there's one IT person at the station and unless they are 'into' doing it the site just sits there. It's not that hard to do lots of stuff yourself. Look at the creativity on the myspace sites with all the special skins, layout templates, widgets and tricks. The pages are so filled with content, but most of the time people are adding feeds, widgets, and layout templates that do a lot of the work automatically. You can do the same with your site.

Rap Music - Is it Dead?

Recently while attending the Canadian Music Week meetings I wandered into a session called - Is Hip Hop Dead? An interesting panel headed by Guy Routee from the 90s' group Aftershock who now manages artists and others from the world of Hip-Hop. Of course they were keying on the statement from artist Nas who recently declared Hip Hop dead. Sales fell over 20% in 2006 for the first time in 20 years and no Rap artists pulled off a top 10 album in 2006.

The panel concluded that Hip Hop is really the 'culture' here and Rap was a music trend within the culture. Of course the culture isn't dead, but Rap as a music form is not the force it was just a few years ago. As Rap moved from the authentic street movements in N.Y. and L.A. to the glitter and excess of success it lost its roots. Once McDonalds decided to re-make its image a few years ago with rap infused TV campaigns the writing was on the wall. Suddenly it was all about the 'bling.' Now the original appeal was watered down and the Hip factor was fading fast.

Music styles are clearly cyclical. In Rock we can go back to the 70s and watch the supergroups emerge in the early part of the decade with Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, the Stones and many others. The rebellion factor with longer hair, longer songs, and the rock lifestyle grew into the corporate rock days of Foreigner, Boston, Bad Company and others. In the mid-80s we began to see the decline - ever watched some of the Whitesnake videos? Suddenly it was all about hot cars, lots of babes, and being stars - not artists. Look further back to the Motown days which started out with an authentic sound from the streets of Detroit, but by the 70s it had become a glitzy show that had largely moved to L.A.

What's next? Indie rock will likely be the new 'authentic' music form from the streets of MySpace with a sound that's pretty much a 180 from the Rap style. Pop songs with bit of a folk side from small independent bands that are more geared to building themselves instead of being built by a big label machine. While some might label it as an extension of the Alternative sound of the 90s Indie bands are emerging quickly in the 16-21 age group. There's even a movement within the Afro American community for Indie bands with the Blipsters.

How will radio respond? Hopefully we will - MySpace is already way ahead of us in leading the charge here. Internet radio is also ahead of us. It's also a tough landscape with lots of bands, very little formal infrastructure (like the record labels). We may need to put down the charts, stash the research for a while, and find a way to connect with the streets again - only in this case the street may likely be on the Internet in the social networking world.

We also face little interest in non 25-54 formats and right now this movement is a lot more 18-34.