If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
I'm not trying to be controversial, but if you remove profit how can the business continue to exist? And if terminating the business is your goal, why? People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
It's my livelihood. I'm not seeking sympathy, but I am curious.
Here's the thing. In an where ads get the volume cranked up, this seems like the natural blowback to that.
Good, bad, indifferent, adtech has become so hostile that users (myself included) have found ever more measures to excise it, because it feels compelled to show no restraint in its own appetites.
I'm old enough to remember when radio and TV adverts didn't comprise more than 15% of the total media stream, let alone online, where the visual real estate and the mid-stream extortion racket of context-daftness has gone mad (e.g. I want to watch a quiet modal jazz concert, but every 10 minutes a jarringly loud ad for Grammarly or Tide is injected at near earbleed volume) makes it that I pretty much download the media, put it up on my media server to play it, because the ads just make me want to (and actually do in 95%+ of cases) blacklist any brand annoying enough to go this route.
No one wants to moderate because the stakes to get more marketshare/eyeballs 'demand' it, just creates the incentive to avoid it. Google succeeded for years on less intrusive, more directed ads...then they decided to stop 'stop being evil' and took the DoubleClick/Taboola turdscape route along with everyone else. Now there is zero sympathy from listeners/viewers, because I would argue, the advertisers offer them no reason to.
Is that a rationalization? Maybe. But it's also a sincere observation.
I thought I hated ads and that the personal recommendations were creepy. Then Instagram ads crossed the uncanny valley by showing me stuff I actually want to buy. (What a concept!)
Puzzlingly, Google/YouTube should know way more about me than Meta, but most of the ads I get from them suck.
If radio ads weren't full of yelling, car-honking, sirens and overly attention-grabbing things, people wouldn't care as much. Same as websites putting up huge, 5MB-big popup ads and not liking that people want to adblock them. Especially worse, is when the ads are far louder than the content itself.
Some podcasters seem to have have realized this problem and are curating ads better. Also with almost all the ones I listen to, the ads are presented live by the host, not pre-recorded by an annoying voice actor, which makes them a bit more bearable. There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
> There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
Corridor Crew on YouTube does this very well.
They are a lovely gang of VFX people. Highly recommend watching some of their videos to anyone who hasn’t.
Yeah. Some Youtubers have gotten so sly with their integration that once I realize that I'm in an ad I also realize that they started teeing it up 30 seconds earlier. I admire the craft of that type of transition.
And then I skip it. Unless the presentation is compelling and interesting for it's own sake.
It's a social issue and you should petition for the change you'd like to see.
For example in the UK, advertisers must comply with the Advertising Standards Authority code [1], and section 4 includes:
> Radio only – Advertisements must not include sounds that are likely to create a safety hazard, for example, to those listening to the radio while driving.
Which while open to interpretation, this would likely include any sirens likely to be confused with a genuine siren.
Or:
> Television only – Advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident.
( That one might raise an eyebrow to anyone familiar with the long running "Go Compare" campaign! )
Of course these codes are always written in a way that's woolly and often adverts are only banned after complaints have been made.
But the framework is there for standards to be written and upheld. It relies however on people being willing to put in time and effort to complain when standards are broken, and there needs to be effort made to tighten those standards in some areas to stop standards slipping, although in general standards have been tightened rather than loosened over the years.
If your experience is very different, consider that it may be worth spending time organising a campaign group to lobby the FTC (or FCC?) to tighten their rules, or organise a group to put in complaints to organisations which have similar "voluntary" codes such as the BBB and also pressure the BBB to tighten their rules to have guidelines prohibiting such noises.
Change doesn't happen for change sake, it requires organisation and action, but even a handful of people can effect huge change with a concerted effort.
Nice, yup that's a great point. Here in Canada it would be the CRTC. Yeah, I could write them. I've reported spam and related stuff to them before but got no response. Perhaps things are different in the marketing/advertising side of things. Guess I'll just have to find out! :)
Looking at the script, it's just lowering the volume, possibly so it's at or below the average volume of the rest of the content (on a Sonos speaker using TuneIn).
One of the things wrong with our industry, inspired by legislation made by people with no technical background, is that the peak volume of a commercial can not be louder than the peak volume of the surrounding program.
So some in the industry processed the commercials into audio bricks, with the peak audio level at or below what's required. But the average audio of the commercial was much higher than the average audio of the programming. While it's legally lower volume, it's perceived as higher volume.
While this script is made for TuneIn via Sonos, I think the philosophy of louder average volume has migrated as a regular feature in streaming. I also think it's why many artists on ad-supported sales/streaming platforms process their tracks into bricks, so their track is not perceived as lower volume and less energy.
I can't speak for the person who coded this, but I think they are just correcting the legacy exploit, and not trying to outright remove the advertisements. (The example they give lowers the volume to "15", not "0")
Radio is famous for very annoying ads that are often louder than the program's content. Every time I hear that 1800 Cars for Cash song, I turn off the radio. As far as DJs go, around here SF Bay Area, a lot of the stations are part of that male/female first name radio stations (Alice, Dave, Bob, etc) and the "DJ" is some recorded person saying like "How's it going, [fill in city name]. How about those clowns in congress huh. Here's some more music hits of the genre you are listening to."
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
Unless the broadcaster cares about their show and wants people to hear it. If enough people care enough, someone (perhaps the broadcaster themself) will fund the cost of broadcasting.
There are broadcasters that don't have adverts and apply this model successfully. Crucially, the definition of “success” is that the audience and broadcaster can continue to enjoy the show, not that the broadcaster makes a huge profit.
To invert a Rule of Acquisition: “Anything worth doing is worth doing at cost”.
I spent 12 years at KMFB FM on the Mendocino coast (show host & Control Op), and it was a rare commercial station that had specialty shows where the host would have to get their own advertisers to be on the air.
The problem starts when ads are significantly louder than the rest of the content in order to be an "ear catcher"..... Now radio is much better than other forms of media (looking at you cable... and now some streaming services that are on the take from both sides) but its also the fact that ads have become steadily more intrusive over the last decade(+).
My real hope is that there is a movement back to "sponsored content" and more subtle ads... with less ads overall.... i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>, check them out on <insert text>". This is probably never going to happen as there is now a constant need to sell and more expensive ads does push out smaller businesses.
Not sure there is really an answer here but I think moderation can help here
> i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>...
Commercial station KRKQ in Telluride, CO, does this, and it sounds amazing.
WDRE (now WPTY), WLIR-FM and WBON on Long Island, NY, tried it in 2005, and it did not generate the revenue they were expecting. But it's 17 years later-- I think they were trying an idea that was ahead of it's time.
I will remove ads whenever it is technically feasible to do so. If it's not technically feasible to do so, then I'll avoid the ads by simply not engaging with the content at all. There are no circumstances where I find media existing with ads to be superior to the media not existing, so if ad blocking were to kill radio, then I'm perfectly fine with that.
Yeah, there was a YouTube channel I'd watch, but the guy started having sponsored ads in the middle of his videos. I just stopped watching the channel. Oh well, missing out on some cool content, whatever. I'm not going to listen to some propaganda about some VPN or Grammarly or counseling services or whatever other stupid crap I have zero interest in.
I just hit the "L" key a few times and forward by 10 seconds for ads that are part of the content. uBlock origin blocks all of the youtube ads that aren't part of the "broadcast."
I don't want to be advertised to. I think ads are unethical and consider that business model to be unacceptable. I suggest you find a new one because it's become increasingly clear to me that I'm not alone.
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
How is this any different than changing the tv channel (...or radio station) when an ad comes on, which has been the de facto consumer behavior for over half a century?
We process visual and audio data differently. No website or or magazine is going to trick me into thinking someone’s at the door by playing a dry doorbell sample over reverb for the rest of the ad.
Radio (and TV) are uniquely obnoxious in their use of instinctive audio cues to demand attention by making us go on alert.
How is not? There is a commercial I've been seeing a lot during sporting events. I think it's some sort of insurance but I have no idea. All I know is multiple times a day the ad plays the default iPhone text message alert and it pisses me off.
That sort of shit needs to shut down. I think only sirens played on radio ads might be worse.
I thought the claim was that all ads are obnoxious, so singling out radio for ad-killing efforts is, IDK, morally wrong.
My point was that radio ads are uniquely obnoxious because of a combination of the way we process audio signals and radio stations’ apathy about intentionally irritating ads.
I’ll grant it’s not a moral failing on the part of sound waves. It’s 100% the broadcasters who see short term profit from “more effective” ads, who then have no right to complain when people are irritated enough to develop filters for the ads.
Something I'm honestly curious about....I can understand the need for advertising, but why do DJs talk so much? I would much prefer radio to have only music and ads. Living in Japan in the 1990s, I completely gave up on radio because the talking:music ratio was about 2:1.
> Each year, ASCAP processes trillions of performances of ASCAP music. Whenever it makes sense economically, we conduct a census survey, or complete count, of performances in a medium. For media that fall under our census surveys (for example, the large majority of network TV performances and over 2000 broadcast radio stations monitored by Luminate Data, LLC, formerly MRC Data, LLC), ASCAP seeks to pay on every surveyed performance.
> Where a census survey is impractical, we conduct a sample survey, meaning that we pay royalties based on a representative cross-section of the performances on that medium.
This suggests to me that for major radio stations, the strategy of "more talk, less music" will reduce royalties—and that your strategy might only work at a smaller station.
Also, ASCAP seems to govern only the rights to the composition. Most radio stations play from recordings. Do the record labels (or whoever collects for them) also utilize a similar sampling strategy?
I'll be honest I love radio as a medium but I'm either listening to a BBC station like Six Music which are ad-free to begin with or enthusiast-run stations like Radio Caroline which tend to air adverts which are more subtle and pared-back, I genuinely can't enjoy anything with anything more than the bare minimum of adverts in it having enjoyed advertising-free forms of radio.
It wouldn't be as bad if half the ads didn't have all the obnoxious hyperactive qualities of a toddler with a recorder but 'irritate your audience until the fact your ads are irritating becomes a meme among the general public' seems to be the go-to strategy with a lot of radio advertising in my neck of the woods.
It’s been a while since I listened to commercial radio, but it seemed like commercials were at a higher volume than music. Adjusting volume can be useful to keep ads from being jarring.
(Also used to work as a DJ, but not since the nineties…)
If your business model involves annoying us, we'll find a way around it. This is YOUR problem, not ours. Find a better business model or go out of business.
I subscribe to a local community radio which is completely funded by listener subscriptions (but I think they got a nice big injection of cash a couple of decades ago when they sold their 'name' to a commercial station, and they've been able to do a lot with that lump sum over the years).
I actively dislike commercial radio, it just pushes junk music, junk lifestyles, superficial bullshit life distraction. It's worthless and if advertising money dried up and they died it would be a net gain to society. I'm sure, however, some are less gutter trash than what I've described, and I certainly hope yours is too.
The number of people even capable of using this, let alone the number likely to use it, is infinitesimal.
People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
Can't speak for the radio in your area but in mine it's a total waste of spectrum. Terrible audio quality, eaten up with ads or utterly inane bumpers, and playing the same garbage every single day. My choices are rap that sounds the same as it did twenty years ago, rock songs that are literally the same as twenty years ago, the morning show with the two stupidest people I've ever heard, or NPR where I get to learn for an hour about how the new constitution of Nowheristan now has a section on water usage rights vis-a-vis goats vs sheep.
Theoretically - this script doesn't actually impact your ad rev; in fact you'd be more likely to have longer listener time, given the listener isn't switching it off or to a different frequency when the ad roll hits. So, more ads overall.
Technically speaking, I really shouldn't have a problem with ads.
But between the actual psychological tricks that often come across as trashy once you acquire a distaste/realization of them, and the general unenforcement of false advertising law, monopolistic conditions favoring ads campaigns/brand awareness over quality or reputation, refusal of companies to turn down lowest scamming denominator dollars, ads are effectively venom to any average consumer.
One of the major contributing factors to market inefficiency, I'd argue. Advertising shouldn't be such a blatantly untrustworthy, scammy method of extracting wealth from people for questionable valued services/products, but it usually turns out that way.
I think one problem is the known/unknown? practice to lower the overall gain by a few dBs on the broadcasters side when playing music to be able to regain attention for advertisment.
Radio is different due to the safety issues it raises. If they crank up the volume or engage in similar practices in an attempt to get attention, they by definition are distracting the listener. That's not the worst thing if you're watching TV, but much of the audience for radio is driving or working. It should be obvious what's wrong with practices designed to distract drivers in heavy traffic and workers carrying stuff up ladders.
Oh man, I have a story to tell here. Some years ago my favourite radio station started airing a new commercial for a car glass repair shop. Commercial started with a loud tyre screeching noise followed by a loud car honk and finally loud car crash noise. Every effing time I panicked, usually immediately put my foot off of gas pedal and probably once or twice started to brake. Idiots 100%.
If you are the type of person who only does something when it benefits you, I can understand why you would see things this way. Profit and personal gain are not the only motives that other people have for their actions. Sometimes people do things for the sake of enjoying them. Some really crazy people actually do things to help improve the world, at their own personal expense, with no tangible benefit to themselves.
If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money. You are not entitled to a job as a radio broadcaster supported by revenue from advertisements that people find obnoxious. If the market won't support your business model, it's on you to find another business model, it's not on the market to support your failed model.
> If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money.
Yup - This is a result of making the advertisers your true customer rather than me, the listener. In the meantime, that complete willingness to sell me as a product, and the lack of any existing contract, means that I am utterly entitled to remove any/all ads that you might embed in your product. I don't have to listen to the trash - you're yelling into the void, I can choose to cover my ears.
I understand that mass broadcast communication (radio, OTA tv) started going down that route because it's hard to limit the audience of a mass broadcast to charge a fee - but I'm not all that sympathetic to where the industry has ended up.
Frankly... I don't really know that I would mind if most of the commercial stations went out of business. It would be nice to make space for more content outside of the "top hits of [____]" and a blathering DJ. I'd like to see more stations act like NPR or college radio stations.
Do I love the NPR donation campaigns? Nope.
Do I donate? Yup. Because it means I'm still the customer.
Would I throw a couple bucks at a station to play curated playlists in different genres with no ads or interruptions? Probably. I used to throw donations at grooveshark DJs back in college for exactly that - I found a boatload of good music (mostly older titles) that way.
I stopped listening to the radio about 15 years ago because of how obnoxious the ads had gotten. I haven’t started up again. I can get ad-free content in numerous ways (paying, ad blocking, creating it myself, etc.). This reminds me of people in areas where tobacco is grown moaning about how laws limiting public smoking would put them all out of jobs. Yeah, that doesn’t really make the case for why we should keep it.
I subscribe (i.e. pay a yearly fee) to a local community radio station (which has an amazing range of music, and is 80% of my music intake). I generally like the announcers, and the sponsorship announcements are often things I'm interested in. But sometimes I just want music (like when I'm exercising). So there's a use case for you.
CBC Radio doesn’t have ads and it’s just the best ever. But it also doesn’t have expensive hosts or music to license.
I wonder if radio stations can become much cheaper to run if all the expensive hosts become podcasters and music gets played on Spotify or Apple instead.
I recently retired after a 42 year career in broadcast radio (at six different stations), and the two non commercial stations I worked at had "underwriting" which is kind of like a commercial, but legal under FCC rules.
I listen to a station that speaks calmly and carefully. The music is louder and any advertisements are spoken by the DJ without yelling. That is my goal to have more like this. I donate to them.
I was a treasurer for a not for profit radio station. We made the money to cover our costs through other services and we had special licensing arrangements that made it cheaper for us to broadcast.
Of course, when a right wing government got in they halved the number of frequencies available to the community and sold our frequency to a for profit who was marketing to young women and teens.
1) The statement "you matter" (call it X) is not the same as "you deserve a job in radio." (Y)
2) I expect (but do not have proof) that the readers of Hacker News, or a sample of western society generally, would more strongly support X statement than Y.
I did not say, but I will say now: I agree with X and not Y. I also don't believe that you deserve not to have a job in radio.
I initially wrote that out because it seemed to me that you were equating X and Y. You contested someone's apathy towards a threat to your job with a statement that you exist. Because I think that (1) and (2) are distinct, I didn't find your reply convincing. I hoped I would convince you of the same, or that you would respond with some insight I had yet to consider, which might change my own perspective.
If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
I'm not trying to be controversial, but if you remove profit how can the business continue to exist? And if terminating the business is your goal, why? People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
It's my livelihood. I'm not seeking sympathy, but I am curious.