Syndication is the creation of a radio program at one place for broadcast someplace else. Sometimes the syndicator provides client stations with tapes of the programs. But increasingly the programs are transmitted by syndicators –most of them are in Dallas or California–via satellite, then broadcast immediately or taped for later use by the client station.
Syndication is not new in radio. Back in its ”golden age,” radio was dominated by networks–ABC, NBC, CBS and Mutual–which broadcast all over the country from New York, Chicago or Hollywood. These networks still do nationwide programming, most of it news, some of it entertainment.
Today`s syndication is different, though it isn`t all that new, either, having been in use for 15 years or more. In the old days listeners knew they were listening to programs originating from outside their local areas. Today client stations rarely tell their listeners when they are and are not hearing local programming. Sometimes, to be sure, everyone knows anyway or at least should. The ”Top 40” countdowns by Casey Kasem or Dan Ingram or the similar programs featuring country-music hits are obviously canned. But the routine disc-jockey show or call-in program may or may not be. The casual or even the regular listener could easily think the program is originating from his own community. The show, after all, could include local traffic and weather reports, but that could be because every hour or so someone at the station breaks into the program coming in from or pretaped elsewhere and gives the local traffic and weather reports.
”We have fooled an awful lot of people,” says Bill Robinson, according to whom some 83 percent of all radio stations use some syndication. If his company`s experience is typical, 20 percent of all stations get all their programming from somewhere else, minus local news, weather, traffic reports and commercials.
In the syndication world, Bill Robinson`s company is only midsized. One of the biggest is Drake-Chenault, headquartered in Canoga Park, Calif., which brags that its consultants know more about ”adult music listeners” (ages 35-54) than any other consultant. ”Eighty percent of our stations use (our)
whole package,” says Mike Kinosian of Drake-Chenault, who proudly shows just how prepackaged his firm has made radio programming.
”Every segue is as balanced as possible,” he says, running off a copy of a ”Playlist Plus” program guide on a computer. A note on the printout reports, ”In addition to a weekly, song-by-song playlist–completely designed for your market–`Playlist Plus` also includes ongoing aircheck critiques, personnel analysis, promotion recommendations and a weekly music meeting.”
In a program designed for a typical market for the week of April 17,
”Playlist Plus” included 10 songs to be played every hour, with the name of the artist, the song title, the duration time, the year of release, and the total time given over to music for every hour.
For the 9 a.m. slot on Wednesday of that week, for instance, the hour starts with Julian Lennon`s ”Too Late for Goodbyes,” then goes to an oldie, Bette Midler`s ”The Rose.” This is a standard technique: a male vocal followed by a female, a current number followed by a touch of nostalgia. After the Midler song comes Ronnie Milsap. One of the rules of programming is never to have two female vocalists back-to-back.
This arrangement of musical offerings is no accident. According to Drake- Chenault, it is arrived at through ”one of the most extensive music research projects in radio history–involving thousands of participants and more than one million responses. The result is knowing precisely which songs your listeners want to hear.”
Drake-Chenault and other syndicators do this exactly the way other consultants sell soap or congressmen. They use ”focus groups,” randomly selected collections of people who are paid to listen to music and then are interviewed or who listen to music while hooked up to some kind of electronic reaction-tester. All this market research is then fed into computers, with inputs varied depending on whether the audience is teenagers, middle-aged housewives, affluent commuters or combinations thereof. The output is a week`s radio programming, with nothing left for a local station manager to do but run it on his own computer, hire an engineer and then go home to wait for the money to roll in.
All this makes it much easier to run a radio station. ”I can sell a computer that can run an AM and an FM station at the same time, pretty much all by itself,” says Jimmy Laird of Autogram Company, a firm from Plano, Tex. ”The computer costs $18,000, $25,000 full blown with all the extras. All you need is someone to cut the commercials and run the tapes.” This means, says Laird, that someone can start a small radio station with about $50,000 worth of equipment (plus a license from the FCC.
Syndication is also a tremendous boon to already existing stations, especially in smaller and medium-sized markets. ”It makes my day a hell of a lot easier and it`s more profitable,” says Nancy Reynolds, station manager of KOMP-KENO in Las Vegas. ”It`s the difference between baking a cake from scratch and using Betty Crocker ready-mixes. Without it I`d need a spread of disc jockeys I couldn`t afford on this level. If they were good enough to do me any good, they`d leave me. This gives me a midmarket sound at a reasonable price.”
Syndication, according to David Parnigoni of the National Association of Broadcasters, ”gives management excellent control. When you let a personal influence dictate your programming, you lose some of that control. This way you can present the right balance for your listeners. You can buy any kind of music, old dramas, old comedies, specialized programming.”
Not everyone agrees. ”To a certain extent (syndication is) very valuable because it`s very expensive to run a radio station,” says RKO`s Jerry Lyman. ”What you lose is a certain amount of that localism, and localism is the key to radio success.”
If the secret of radio`s current success is its free-wheeling, locally based quality, will the sameness of prepackaged syndication dictated by market research hurt it? No, say most radio experts. ”In a large market it`s not competitive,” says Rick Sklar. Both Sam Holt and Jerry del Colliano, editor of Radio Only and Inside Radio magazines, say the market surveys themselves contain the best ammunition against tyranny by market survey. ”All research shows that radio works best when it`s local,” says Del Colliano.
”Syndication and networking have their places, and in some markets they are a blessing. But there`s no way they could ever take over the nation`s radio stations.”
Del Colliano thinks there is a bigger threat to radio in government deregulation. Now that a single company can own 12 radio stations instead of 7, he says, and now that companies can buy and sell stations without restriction, radio stations are becoming investments like other investments rather than enterprises people bought because they loved radio.
”There will be less commitment than before,” he says. ”People who have not been in radio before are buying big, expensive stations, and they can turn them over for a profit.” The result, he fears, may be less patience on the part of outside owners with programming that does not quickly come up No. 1 in its market. Such owners seek high ratings so they can quickly resell stations at a profit. All this could reduce individual creativity and originality.
Not that there is a whole lot of that now. Asked who in commercial radio was doing anything interesting, radio consultant Capobianco pauses a bit, stumbles a bit, and then says, ”Well, there`s KFRC in San Francisco.”
KFRC is one of Jerry Lyman`s Mutual stations, and its recent history is almost a microcosm of what has happened to AM radio. Once one of the nation`s leading rock stations, KFRC finally lost ground to FM`s superior sound quality. To combat the station`s ratings slide, Mutual has come up with a real innovation–”The 610 KFRC Game Zone.” This ”entirely new programming concept”–six hour-long game shows between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. every weekday
–hit the airways last April 8.
The first one is really a call-in show in which listeners with personal problems call Dave ”The Duke” Sholin, explain their problem and then wait for other listeners to call in with their solutions. Next come a secret-phrase game, a guess-the-celebrity game, a name-that-tune game, a show-biz-trivia game and finally a show called ”Expose Yourself” (This is San Francisco, remember), which allows frustrated performers to sing their songs or tell their jokes over the air via telephone, after which other listeners pick their favorite of the day.
Mutual also has a new wrinkle for its Los Angeles station, which has been converted into a 24-hour-a-day traffic report (This is Los Angeles, remember) interrupted by consumer tips on cars and some music to listen to while stuck in a freeway traffic jam.
There is some creativity of a sort, mainly on the AM stations. In New York, for instance, Capobianco says, WABC has added Soupy Sales to its staff, hoping his cuteness will offset Don Imus, the vile, foolish, insulting talk show host who preceeds him, and Howard Stern, the even viler, more foolish, more insulting disc jockey who follows him.
Like most other entertainment and information media these days, radio is not averse to getting right down to that lowest common denominator. The distinction between boldness and tastelessness, candor and idiocy, is not often respected in radio, especially in the talk show world, the quality of which was amply demonstrated to Chicagoans recently when Warren Freiberg, a talk show host from Lansing, Ill., squirted liquid soap into the eyes of Boston talk show host Jerry Williams when both appeared on ”AM Chicago” on WLS-TV.
Maybe for true radio creativity one has to leave New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and try Woodstock, N.Y., and Lake Wobegon, Minn.
Woodstock is the near-mythical town in Upstate New York for which the most famous rock concert of the 1960s was named even though it wasn`t actually held there. What really is there is WDST-FM. This is a privately owned, independent commercial radio station that plays what it wants to play–jazz and blues, classical and country, news and talk, literary readings and a wacky kids` show. It makes money. Granted, not every area is like Woodstock, full of affluent culture-aficionados from New York City, and the same mix might not make money in Alabama or Nebraska. But perhaps another mix could.
By traditional standards, Lake Wobegon doesn`t exist at all, even though it is listed in the latest American Automobile Association North Central States Tour Book, which dutifully notes the town`s major attractions–Bertha`s Kitty Boutique, the Chatterbox Cafe and Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church.
As millions know, though, Lake Wobegon exists clearly in the fertile mind of Garrison Keillor, who loves radio even more than he hates what is happening to it. ”The consultants have come into radio, and they have their surveys and their data that show that all people want to do is listen to music,” says Keillor. ”But you can`t run radio on the basis of data. If you do, everything that you do will be slightly below average. People don`t know exactly what pleases them, what excites them, what amuses them until it`s right there.”
Keillor`s only consultant is his own creativity and his love of radio`s real ”golden age,” when comedy shows such as ”Fibber McGee and Molly” and live music shows such as ”Grand Ole Opry” ruled the airwaves.
”Prairie Home Companion,” Keillor`s show and perhaps the liveliest program on radio today, was modeled after ”Grand Ole Opry,” though, as he says, ”We`ve gotten quite far from it now.” Some of its live musicians play jazz, others play folk music or show tunes, a few play chamber music. The comedy is also varied, and Keillor`s weekly report from Lake Wobegon, almost always amusing, often rises to the level of true literature.
Probably not even the biggest fans of ”Prairie Home Companion” would argue that all radio programs could thrive simply on the creative imagination of one person. There are few Garrison Keillors around, and though his show reaches a large and heterogeneous audience, it is a small one by commercial radio`s standards.
But the contrast between ”Prairie Home Companion” and ”Playlist Plus” reveals the tensions in today`s radio. Radio survived the television age because it was better able to reflect America`s growing diversity, its increasingly diffuse population, its rising affluence and education and the burgeoning interest in ideas, music, the arts and the off-beat that was fostered by that affluence and education.
All that is still part of America. But so is a tendency to conformity and an intellectually ossified bureaucracy in both government and business. So is the temptation to pigeonhole everybody and everything, to attract audiences by shocking them rather than enlightening them, to build all the buildings and plan all the cities in the same synthetic ugliness, to strive for wealth for its own sake or for the sake of showing it off, and the devil take wisdom or beauty or grace.
Like the country, radio is pulled both ways, and it will probably go the way the country does. Which way that will be nobody knows, but perhaps the best way to figure it out is to flick on the radio, fiddle with the dial, and keep driving.
