It's a no passion all repeat Tuesday

By way of the International Herald Tribune

For Jonathan Marks, the state of traditional radio is summed up in a despairing T-shirt slogan colored in neon pink and black: "Something's wrong with my radio It plays the same five songs over and over. "Long ago, he stopped tuning in commercial music stations in his native Netherlands because of general fatigue with prerecorded loops of songs that are as familiar as Christmas carols. "No wonder people are looking for alternatives to machine-playing radio," said Marks, a former Radio Netherlands producer who is now a media consultant there. "No passion. Just repeats." One hundred years after the first crackly broadcast of a human voice from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, to a shipboard wireless operator, the once staid and mature industry of radio is facing severe competition and major technological and structural changes to a business model established in the 1920s and 1930s. Strangely enough, though, it is the public broadcasters, like the British Broadcasting Corp., Radio France Internationale, Deutsche Welle or National Public Radio in the United States, that are flourishing by embracing new technology and strategies, while commercial radio operators are losing out to iPods, MP3 players and digital and satellite alternatives. In Britain, the BBC has increased its market share to 55.1 percent, according to surveys, taking its lead over commercial radio to its widest point in three years. The same trends are taking hold in the Netherlands and in Germany. Youth-oriented commercial rock stations - once a standard teenage emblem of identity and rebellion - are facing a revolt themselves. In France, where three rock stations lost a total of about one million listeners in surveys in the last quarter of 2005, L'Actu, a youth newspaper, published a front-page article in January about falling audience levels with a cartoon of tearful radio executives clutching the wayward heels of a listener with dangling ear buds. Youthful disaffection has had an effect in the United States, too. In New York in January, Infinity Broadcasting transformed K-Rock from an alternative rock format to talk radio, saying the station had been losing too many listeners to music downloads and Internet radio. It is trends like these that have convinced media analysts at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, the consulting firm, that the days of radio as a single broadcast product are ending and that stations will have to adapt to the digital world and alternative forms of distribution to reach a dispersed audience. "Historically, the commercial stations were focused on essentially music stations and a limited number of genres and songs and artists, because that was the way to get the advertising dollar," said Ed Shedd, a media partner with Deloitte in London. "The converging world really suits talk and chat and discussion, and that really plays into the hand of the public-service broadcasters that are more invested in talk services." The solution, Shedd said, is to sharpen strategies because "if you've got a tired old format, people run away from you in droves." Most commercial stations are already offering their programming on the Web in the form of audio "streaming," and some, like Clear Channel, the top U.S. radio station operator, have reduced advertising. Under its "less is more" policy, designed to address listener complaints about commercial clutter, Clear Channel is reducing advertising by an average of 20 percent across all its stations and increasing advertising rates. But public broadcasters are moving more boldly to increase their engagement with listeners - or "customers," as the broadcasters now often call them - in unlikely ways. Late last December, the public broadcaster Radio France Internationale revamped its news Web site, which includes podcasts and streaming. Podcasting allows listeners to subscribe to radio shows, with their music players downloading the latest episodes from the computer. Computer users without portable players can "stream" a specific program to their computer speakers. RFI offered a new bilingual crime serial on the adventures of a British journalist who awakens in a Paris hotel with a headache, breakfast and a parcel containing €20,000, or $23,700. RFI also created Web sites aimed at people learning French as a second language with slow-speed newscasts and archived items like Victor Hugo on the death penalty or Sidonie Gabrielle Colette's affectionate letters to her daughter. One site is aimed at French students, with exercises and quizzes, while another focuses on teachers, with current-events lessons and guides. "I love having these articles and exercises available," said Nikki McDonald, a high school French teacher at Duchesne Academy in Omaha, Nebraska, who added, "working with the transcripts improves their reading comprehension as well as their sense of French syntax. And as I am not a native speaker, listening to the broadcasts gives them a chance to hear accents other than mine." The new Web site for language training was a revelation for RFI, which plans to develop it further. Most visitors to their standard news site come from French-speaking countries, said Mathilde Landier, who is part of the team creating the new language learning site. That site is drawing in visitors from a new set of countries like the United States, Spain, China and Japan. "This made RFI realize that the French language-learning Web site was quite important," she said, because it is a "gate for new visitors." Radio Netherlands, a public international broadcaster with roots that date to 1947, is also seeking ways to engage with its broad audience, estimated at a weekly average of 30 million to 50 million, according to its director general, Jan Hoek, who expects the number of users to rise. "Nowadays what we do is being consumed not only through audio devices but consumed through the Internet and mobile devices, so that the word 'radio' is basically becoming outdated," Hoek said. In September, Radio Netherlands started a radio program aimed entirely at truck drivers, who can pick up the two-hour "On the Road" show throughout Europe in a variety of forms, from traditional radio to online streaming. Today, the giant of international broadcasting remains the BBC World Service, with a total audience that grew to an average of 149 million a week last year, up from 146 million a year earlier. But the nomenclature is changing for the BBC too. In his public statements, Nigel Chapman, BBC World Service director, describes a transformation of a "short wave radio broadcaster into a leading international multimedia network." Within Britain, the BBC has established a distinctive style, with live concerts and broadcasting of new music and unsigned bands. "Public broadcasters can have an advantage, as they can experiment and gain experience with new technology without the same financial constraints as commercial broadcasters," said Colin Donald, editor of Live Net Music, which tracks and lists the times when independent rock bands perform live through online radio. Just this month, the BBC stepped up its podcasting program to 50 shows for a trial period through the summer of 2006. But one of the issues is that this new media category remains elusive to quantify since podcasts may be downloaded but never listened to, particularly when people automatically "subscribe" to them. The BBC does not know how many people really listen to what is automatically downloaded, and it is not clear to the "multimedia" caster whether podcasts will turn into a commercial activity or will remain a giveaway. For Marks, the radio gadfly, podcasts are a form of a conversation that engage listeners. "The best type of radio," he said, "is one that shares emotions."