The Future, Or Something Like It

What's next?

There are plenty of media observers who will tell you they have the answer. The future, they'll tell you, is in podcasting, or streaming. It's in voice command. No, it's radio, because radio's not dead after all. It's all video -- we all have to pivot to video. Wait, it's none of that, it's Smell-O-Vision! And it'll come through your phone. No, it'll be on your glasses, where you'll get augmented reality beamed into your eyes at all times. Aw, that's silly, we all know that we'll have chips implanted in our brains that will....

You get the idea. We don't know. It could be any of that, some of that, none of that. It could happen overnight or decades from now. We just don't know, and anyone who professes to know isn't telling you the truth.

A good example of that comes every January at CES, where they tell us what the Next Big Thing is, and then scramble when their Next Big Thing isn't that big and something else really does become the Next Big Thing. While the industry was pointing at drones and wearables and connected car dashboards, the Next Big Thing turned out to be smart speakers and voice control, which did not make their debut at CES. The experts were blindsided. The industry had to play catch-up. The next CES after Alexa became huge featured car companies hurriedly announcing that their in-dash systems would incorporate voice control.

Radio -- excuse me, audio entertainment and information -- is going through the same thing. We kind of know that things are going to change, but the pace of change is, well, weird. Podcasts are the overnight success that's taking a decade and counting to be a success; streaming still doesn't reach nearly as many people as broadcast despite the ubiquity of devices capable of serving it up; measurement, ease of use, and discovery continue to be issues and monetization of digital is still embryonic; and radio stubbornly refuses to die but also continues to be a very-limited-growth industry in a world that values growth above all else. The Next Big Thing in our industry is taking a long time to declare itself The Present Big Thing.

The best we can do is guess. My guesses: On-demand audio will become primary when younger generations -- younger than Millennials -- age into adulthood and voice command devices and car systems become ubiquitous. Monetization will take a while because while podcasts get results, the scale is still smaller and advertisers and agencies are still dithering over whether they want to base their marketing on actual sales/clicks/responses or go back to brand awareness campaigns, and whether branded content is as effective as other marketing. Radio will hang in there because it's easy to use and frictionless -- you don't have to pick a playlist or song, you don't have to do any work, it's just there and fine for your drive to the dry cleaners -- but its image will remain what it is, kind of "old media." Ad dollars will be scattered between legacy media and digital, and social media's take will fluctuate as some advertisers decide the venue isn't quite right for all marketing. People won't be watching a lot of video in their autonomous cars, because it'll give them a headache, so they'll listen to audio content there instead and watch the scenery roll by. The general public will never have jetpacks.

I, of course, know nothing. The future will probably be something not yet on anyone's radar. It might not be here before we're all gone. We can only hope that the part of the future that provides us a living will hang around long enough to keep providing that living, and keep a hand in any part of it that seems to be growing; That means not limiting yourself to radio, but keeping a hand in podcasting and video and whatever else you think might turn out to be a way to grow. In the meantime, if someone tells you they have a handle on what's next, they probably don't. Even me.

Especially me.

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It doesn't matter what medium you end up doing in the future; as long as people talk for a living, they'll need stuff to talk about. And that's what Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, is all about. Check it out by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts, too. Plus, this week, there's a great "10 Questions With..." SiriusXM P.O.T.U.S. "Steele and Ungar" co-host Rick Ungar, one of the more fascinating people you'll find in the business, someone who had a very successful career as a lawyer, TV executive, and TV writer/producer (Marvel! He created Biker Mice from Mars!) and segued into political punditry, and is an example of a different kind of talk radio that's less hot-takey than you'll hear elsewhere. Don't miss it.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

My podcast is "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," a quick (two minutes or less) daily thing, and you can get it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Spotify, too. You can also use the RSS feed and the website where you can listen in your browser, or my own website where they're all embedded, too.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

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While I do want to remind you to see me at The Conclave, July 18-20 in Minnesota (register here), I also want to urge you not to wait for the next tragedy to talk about mental health. You saw the news this week, the shock of Kate Spade followed by Anthony Bourdain; it's more than telling people the suicide hotline number, it's talking about the need for mental health care to be available to everyone regardless of economic status, the need for insurance to cover treatment without sticking the patient with impossible bills, the need to erase the stigma that keeps people from seeking help. Radio can and should play a huge role in that. I know the NAB has done PSA campaigns about this, and I hope that your stations and shows will shine some light on this problem as well, and not just when it's in the news. Oh, and that number is 1-800-273-8255.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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