By David Farrell

It’s the time of the season when this scribbler feels obliged to tempt fate, dust off the crystal ball and deliver fatuous prognostications about what the New Year heralds.

Given the rate of change – and taking into account the adage ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, any self-respecting person with a modicum of sense would duck the assignment and, instead, provide a breezy summary of the year in review. Or, imaginatively contract some New Age Nostradamus to titillate and amuse you readers. Readily admitting to not having a shred of common sense, and not having ready access to a wacky New Age Nostradamus, I will venture forth solo and regale you with sophistry and postulation that I’m hopeful will be picked up by world news services and spun as gospel to a global audience.

So, buckle up and let’s get started.

If you are looking for an investment tip, place your money in conventional broadcasting. Radio has taken a drubbing with this repression, but just you watch as advertisers that had been as familiar to radio as grease to a mechanic thunder back in droves like buffalo in the Great Plains. Astral, Corus and Rogers may have replaced personality, experience and localized content with voice-tracking, simulcasts and syndication, but don’t think for a minute that listeners wanting to win free trips, concert tickets, and old-fashioned cash care an iota. It’s not about the voice talent, the hits of today and yesterday, or the six-figure ad buys to position the brand. It’s about the freebies, and don’t forget it. The rebound, when it comes, is going to be huge. Bigger than Kim Jong-il in Cuban heels.

Go on, sit back in the comfort of your ethanol-powered car and listen to traffic reports from Halifax broadcast in Moncton because there is no one in the local control room to monitor what’s going on; amuse yourself listening to voice-tracked intros that are the same in a dozen cities; and bone up on cocktail party chatter from stalker tattlers titillating us with ever-increasing outrageous infotainment ‘news’. With Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Lou Dobbs jockeying for the next Republican presidency, count your blessings where you can, baby!

Yup, it’s true about acres of unwanted real estate replacing golden miles of car dealerships, pizza parlours migrating to the internet, and Lou Myles taking retirement, but what of it?  The popular view is that radio is in a tailspin, that advertisers willing to pay full rate are rarer than boy-loving priests. Well, let me tell you, these know-it-alls have it wrong. Listeners are salivating at the opportunity to tune in to 24-hour hockey news; Ryan Seacrest morning, noon and night; hiss-and-pop vinyl by Foreigner, Journey, and Styx; and Lady Gaga’s latest unfortunate mistake spun faster than the Hadron Collider at full speed.

Forget about the internet, forget satellite radio, forget those smart-ass phones, and the hullabaloo about Moses and the fabled tablet. Technology may be able to wage war without sending a man in the battle field, and replicate the Big Bang, but the tyranny of traffic congestion will continue unabated. Think of the plodders with visions of a freebie holiday for two in some third-rate, off-season Cuban cabana and know these people are your audience. Spend a fortune on market research, but know that free stuff works every time when you want to gain listeners.

Know that the richest corporate executives earn in 12 hours what the average stiff in Canada earns in a year, so heed my advice and try living like your customers. Dispense with the freebies, the custom made shirts and bespoke suits, the Bermudan weekend golf tourneys, the Bejan pied-a-terre, take leave in consorting with those financial advisors that sold your pension fund derivatives and Nortel stock. Leave the beemer in the lot and take a bus to a Wal-Mart, dress down and head to the poor side of town. Get in line for a Metro pass and chat up Fred, Wilma, Ed, Alice, Ralph and Trixie. Know the distinction between your customer and your client.

Get the Sales department out from programming your stations and re-introduce listener requests and dedications. Better still, bring in guests to program shows. Ditch the starch and let the format sway.

I’ll go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that the big media companies will unload the lion’s share of secondary and tertiary market stations in the very near future. The corporations will want to concentrate on the top five or 10 markets.and turn their portfolios into networks as robotically controlled as the regulatory environment will allow. Taking the McDonalds template to radio makes eminent sense if one wants to spin profits like Allens’ Slaight and Waters and Ted Rogers did in their day. Look on the bright side as smaller markets reclaim their identities with localized news and features drawn from bloggers, local cable channels and tweeting field reporters. The potential for elevated professionalism in the outlying markets is huge, given the abundance of displaced journalists and broadcasters ready and willing to get back to work.

The CRTC paved the way for the death of local TV newscasts when it approved a wave of consolidation that led to a small cluster of owners controlling a very large mass of media properties. Sadly, much of the mass has lost its density. What was viewed as a treasury of jewels has turned out to be a load of distressed balance sheets. Those robust projections of profits spun from an ever expanding economy have proven to be as accurate as Elvis sightings.

The forecasts were wrong, so its retrenchment time. Whatever the CRTC does or doesn’t do, terrestrial TV is a goner and short-term cable TV is king. But the internet is where the real action is in the years to come. If Hulu and Vevo and other content rich internet re-broadcasters have their way, ISPs will soon be monetizing everything from House to house music. Just like your bundled cable choices today, the internet will become a pay-for-use medium with users choosing bundled packages mixing entertainment, cloud services and specialty news and information. The anarchy that is collapsing media and entertainment business models today will be tamed, and windfall profits will accrue for content providers in the future. Today’s unsustainable production and distribution costs for TV and newspapers will be spun down. The new model will a tapered, streamlined, cost-efficient hot rod compared with the analogue buggy we now know. Think of the smartphone as your portable office and the tablet as your mobile office and entertainment centre.

Record stores will continue for a short time, but only as romantic attachments to a bygone era.  The smart new way will soft-pedal ownership and hard-sell cloud computing, and streamed subscription services as inexpensive alternatives. Remove ownership and the piracy issue is gone.

Give it a year, two at the max, and governments from Albania to Zambia will require ISPs to enforce copyright laws and put an end to the lawlessness that is the internet today. Pirates will be forced out of business, pushed into extinction like the Polar ice caps and eight-track tapes. Branded audio services will replace the muddle of internet choices we have today and those networked radio stations  owned by Rogers, Astral and Corus will become powerful brands in themselves. That’s what Virgin Radio is hinting at. The next-gen will offer a seamless brand coast-to-coast. Taken to the next logical step and Virgin Radio, the internet brand, will be feeding its terrestrial cousin. For Astral to drop in local news, weather and traffic with a few local retail ads and all the costs associated with main street real estate, studios, technical support staff,  traffic controllers and sales teams will be gone.  It’s just a guess, but why not?

The tablet will become the newspaper of tomorrow, and the crowded news space of today will be rationalized with newfound relationships creating bigger and stronger brands.  Examples we might see in the future could include the LA Times creating a virtual news room with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all supplying content. By example, The Washington Post could become the pre-eminent voice in reporting on the goings on in Washington, the LA Times focusing on the entertainment and Silicon Valley beats. With pay walls in place, news can be monetized as it is streamed to tablets and smart phones in real time, and the daily newspapers will instead become weekend digests brimming with dazzling content that readers will want to read. The dross can be amputated from the news pages and pushed out over the net, leaving pages to be filled with well researched features, guest columns and lengthy investigative reportage.

The concert business is not immune to change. The huge cost in touring for the major acts has become an obstacle to turning a profit. Expect to see major acts offer concert streams online for $5 and $10. The next-gen Coldplay, U2 tours can play 20 cities instead of 100. Tickets for the shows will be $200 and up, the pitch pointing out to the well-heeled that they are in the select few and privy to a unique concert experience that comes with VIP parking, specialty merchandise and whatever else is thrown in. For those who can’t or don’t wish to pay $200 and up for a single ticket, the option is an HD experience in a movie theatre, or a cloud stream to your HD monitor at home.

Where does this leave the small fry? you ask. The way I see it, not much changes. The old way was to roll up one’s sleeves, slave to the music, and find yourself an audience. The same applies today, and in the landscape of tomorrow is my guess. The tools of the trade require some savvy semblance of ability to work the digital landscape, but it’s human contact and relationships that will best help to make you stand out from the fray. EMI is now pushing a boilerplate format offering professional concert mixes that acts can offer fans exiting a show. Be prepared to offer the same service, or next-day delivery using any number of services that provide the technology for bulk streams and or downloads. The small but growing number of indie acts that we are led to believe owe their success to viral marketing and YouTube discovery are suspect. My own impression is that invisible hands are pulling the strings. Record labels are nothing if not marketers and they have slowly, painfully learned to work the new digital landscape. They’ve learned that a full page ad in Rolling Stone magazine, radio buys and flying newspaper critics in to listen to a new record or catch a show is money ill spent. The times have changed, and so have they. But so have we all, for better or worse.

One last speculation, and one that is integral to all new music business models, has to do with music clearances. The patchwork of societies and collectives has become a cumbersome barrier to anyone wanting to obtain clear and unfettered access to music tracks. This has to change. The clearances need to be simplified. And  technology has created too many grey areas of interpretation in our copyright laws. Market forces and government action are needed to bring order and simplicity into these areas.

The status quo today discourages rather than encourages lawful commerce. It’s a fight waiting to happen. Whether Canada falls in line with other territories, or moves to act on its own, changes are necessary and need to be made quickly. When radio tariffs reach a point where they become disincentives to play music, when buskers  are required to pony up $1,500 to sing on street corners, when TV networks can bypass the marketplace and cut unique deals with a single music publisher the message being sent has to be pretty clear. The system’s bust and needs fixing.