(Photo) Blake and Miranda made it all the way to the very end of Country Radio Seminar's latest and very last party. Did you?
This year's Country Radio Seminar was not just the 4oth one, but since I have attended 36 of them I believe I have the right to say that it was also one of the best ever."At the end of the day, what comes out of the speakers is the ONLY thing that COUNTS..." - talent coach Valerie Geller, who along with Mike McVay, Tommy Kramer and Randy Lane gave freely of themselves in order to achieve that for all of us
Jessica Andrews performed at the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum and Rascal Flatts previewed their new video as the Albright & O'Malley Pre-CRS Seminar opened, cosponsored by Country Aircheck and Lyric Street.
Tom Taylor at Radio-Info is putting together a special feature for their CRS-40 issue. He's asking lots of folks two questions, and here are my responses, to get the discussion started:
Kramer will take attendees into "The Coach's Studio." This session idea was actually suggested by Dial Global personality Lia Knight who will introduce Tommy by sharing a bit her feelings when she first decided to accept coaching and about what a big difference having an objective, knowledgeable pro work with her to improve her content and approach has made to her personally and professionally.
Today's economy is teaching each of us that, like it or not, we're all business managers. No one can be trusted to manage your career, future and finances other than you.
Meanwhile, never before has it been so important to know what business you are in and at the same time so difficult to see what the future holds.
For example, while our audience is going up, revenues are going down.
Arbitron's Radar 99 National Radio Listening Report just found that radio reaches more than 234 million persons age 12 and older over the course of a typical week up from 232 million previously.
Meanwhile, BIA Financial Network reports that for the second consecutive year radio revenue is expected to drop 7 percent this year to $16.7 billion, the lowest total in more than five years and next year radio revenue could plummet 10 percent, going as low as $15 billion. Positive growth isn't forecast until 2010 with a very modest 1.5 percent uptick.
The music business is in an even more tenuous position. "While music is more widespread and more easily available than ever in history," well-known marketing thought-leader and author Seth Godin points out that "music and songs and musicians aren't going away, but the business of fairly anonymous labels that have no brand or direct connection directly with listeners, extracting 80%, 90%, even 100% of the profits from the musician, that is clearly going away."
Godin has been accurately predicting the future, guiding business in a series of prescient best-sellers like Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick),and his latest one, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and he'll be sharing his insights with attendees to the Country Radio Seminar this year (click for more info).
The future Godin sees for music and radio, as quoted in researcher Mark Ramsey's Hear 2.0 blog: "You could own 1,000 stations or 10,000 stations, each one of them could be the best in somebody's world. I think 'the win' for the music business is to realize that music is a chance to spread an idea. My fear is that there's too much nostalgia in the music business for them to grab a hold of that quickly."
Godin, about his new book: "So what's missing today is not that we don't have enough tribes, it's that we don't have enough people to lead them, and that is the opportunity I talk about in the book, particularly to people who already have a platform, who already are speaking to numbers of people, who already are trying to make something change.
"The opportunity is to realize that what you do for a living now is not interrupt the masses but instead lead and connect a tribe. The worst enemy of a radio station is the Arbitron ratings (and perhaps a mass appeal hit song for a label or an artist?) because they force you to abandon the tribe."
Take it from me: you need to be at CRS-40 in Nashville to hear Seth Godin’s take on our future, YOUR future. And, of course, please also come to A&O's Annual Pre-CRS Seminar as well.
It has become a twenty-year tradition for A&O clients and friends, some of whom have been attending the "Pre-CRS Seminar" just before the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville for learning, research presentations, dialog on growing Country Music Radio, while sharing new music by emerging artists we're excited about since 1988.
For 39 years the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville has been making thousands of people smarter year after year. As a way of getting you to think differently about coming to CRS whether your employer gives you the time off and pays your expenses or not, I'm going to propose you do what some of the richest people in the world have been doing to make real money while the rest of the world is complaining about a weak economy.
