Retirement

Outside of radio, not many people would know the name Mel Karmazin.

Inside radio, we know it.  And we know it all too well.

Briefly put, he was the guy who discovered (and ultimately syndicated) Howard Stern, who ruled terrestrial radio for more than two decades before moving to Sirius XM.

Mel, whose claim to fame was WNEW in the 60s, gradually moved up the ranks with Metromedia and Infinity Broadcasting, turning the latter into one of the most profitable radio enterprises in the United States, before leading it into a merger with CBS and Viacom.

His support of longtime shock-jock Stern led him to lock horns repeatedly with the FCC, when the agency tried to levy fines for indecency-related allegations against the company.  Mel successfully appealed every fine, resulting in reduced judgements or negotiated settlements.  Investors fondly looked upon him as someone with a license to print money.

He announced his retirement in early August.  It was the second go-round at such an attempt, as he retired from CBS/Viacom after one too many skirmishes with aging company chief Sumner Redstone.  He then was lured back into the radio business by officials from Sirius Satellite Radio, and led the company through its merger with XM Satellite Radio.  He fought every monopoly-antitrust allegation against him and his new company.

For someone well-positioned to chart a course for radio's future, he may instead be remembered for its demise.

Mel was one of many broadcasting executives who championed relaxing the then-stringent ownership rules for broadcasters.  Until the summer of 1992, no company could own more than one FM and one AM station in a single market, and no more than twelve nationwide.  That restriction was lifted, allowing companies to acquire a third and up to a fourth property, depending on the market's size, and the fourth property had to be equally in line with the other three.  The new rule was called "No More than Four".

Four was just the beginning for Mel.

"I don't see why we can't own more than three FM's in a single market", he was once quoted as saying.

He continued the push for the FCC to relax the rules even further, to the point where a single company was limited to a percentage of market share, which was more abstract and could easily be manipulated by ratings. In short, you could fire a successful program director for doing his job.
Commercial-per-hour limits were all but eliminated.  Especially on fragmented niche-driven formats like decade-based Classic Rock or Pop.  Song. DJ chatter.  Commercials.  More DJ chatter.  More Commercials.  Song.  This was especially prevalent on stations in the nation's Top 10 markets.
As radio turned more and more into commercials with music in between, this gave birth to another market: Satellite radio.
Research showed that people were willing to pay a subscription to hear music without commercial interruptions.  Simply put, it was bringing services delivered to cable television via Digital Music Express and Music Choice, but this time through one's car.
Because I don't spend this much time in my car, I can't justify the expense.  But my own listening habits have changed over the years.  Today I listen to music through my iTunes application on my iPhone, which holds about 800 titles.  Most of the tracks are stuff that were hits back in the day, but are today all but ignored by program directors.
Or I listen to other radio stations from far-away markets that can't be heard over-the-air here in western Pennsylvania.
Enjoy your retirement, Mel.
At least you're a radio guy who has something to depend upon for the future.
I'm not so sure about the rest of us.


NEXT WEEK:  The Hot Seat

AM Radio

"Wanna get down in a cool way?  Picture yourself on a beautiful day...big bell bottoms and groovy long hair, walking in style with a portable CD player...NO!  You would listen to the music on the AM radio...you could hear the music on the AM radio."
Those words were forever immortalized by Art Alexakis, the lead singer of the band Everclear, in the song he penned, released in 2000, entitled "AM Radio".  If you ever want to hear it, it's off the band's album "Songs from an American Movie Vol. 1: Learning how to smile".  It's a great tune.
Alexakis reminisces about growing up in southern California, during the 1970s listening to Top 40 music over an AM radio, which most broadcasters today find blasphemous, if not downright laughable.  The most celebratory note of the song is a jingle from the legendary KHJ, played at the very beginning, followed by a static-ridden sample of 70's soul diva Jean's Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff", which establishes itself into the song.
It didn't seem that long ago when you could still find Top 40 music on an AM station.  You still can find such stations, albeit in smaller markets and in much smaller numbers.
But stations broadcasting over the AM band have been shrinking over the past decade, giving way to FM and other forms of electronic media.
I'm not in favor of giving up on the band.  At least not yet.  Though I now consider myself retired from the business, my career, like those of many others, began on AM radio.
WACB in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, was known as "The Ace of Entertainment" in the late 1980s when I first joined the staff in May 1988.  Satellite-delivered formats were emerging since the first half of the decade, but WACB remained live and local, with jocks on-site playing their music in real time, rather than engaging in the practice today known as 'voice-tracking', often involving jocks from other markets across the country, infamously mispronouncing town names.
We played real records.  You know, the kind that are mostly black vinyl discs that can skip if they're not handled properly.  What wasn't on records was played from cartridges, called 'carts' for short.  They operated on the same principle as an 8-track tape, but without the four program separation.
Records skipped.  Carts wowed or snarled.  Both happened on the air.  And sometimes it even happened during the 'restroom records'.  This was a list of songs that every rock jock knew that were long enough to assure a non-rushed bathroom break.
"Light My Fire" by The Doors.  "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills and Nash.  Anything other than "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin.  "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris.  And there was the granddaddy of them all..."American Pie" by Don McLean.  There's many others, but those are the ones immediately coming to mind as I'm writing this.
Good times.
And we more or less programmed our own music.  We followed the music clock (most of the time), but more often than not, we skipped over song titles we didn't like printed on the 3 x 5" index cards and kept going until we found one we did.
And it didn't matter to the majority of our listeners.
We were allowed to be creative and chatty.  But as the years progressed and FCC ownership and operational rules were relaxed, in came the multiconglomerates swallowing up signals, mostly high-powered FMs, automating them, and any AM's that were included were either switched to syndicated news/talk formats, also automated, or turned off altogether.
The number of AM's has shrunk.  It will continue to shrink.
It has to.
Most of the stations that have disappeared are low-powered with complicated and expensive directional antenna arrays, and are too close to major population centers to really be missed by the overall majority, as broadcast television and city newspaper can provide local news in a much more superior manner, thanks to the advances made in modern technology.
I for one, am not ready to give up on AM radio, but a leaner, trimmer band is necessary to assure the band's survival.  It has become the proving ground for up and coming radio talent.  If these 'farm clubs' are allowed to die, where is the next generation going to go for spring training?
And that's a whole other argument to be featured next week.
Pardon the pun, but stay tuned.


NEXT WEEK:  Retirement from Radio

The Kidd at Heart

Someone once said "Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life."
One person did just that.  He has lately come to be known as "Radio's Biggest Kidd".
To most people outside of Dallas, Texas he was an unknown.

To those in and around Dallas, he was a close friend who helped you get your weekday mornings off to a good start.  He even did so via satellite for a number of stations in about 75 markets nationwide.

To us in the radio industry, including those of us retired from it, he was a brother.  He was out to prove that good morning radio didn't have to be dirty or tasteless, and he did just that.

He published a monthly newsletter called "The Morning Mouth", dedicated to helping morning jocks make their shows better, no matter what size market you were in.

Bit ideas, cheap promotional gimmicks that wouldn't make the GM reach for his antacids, and news that jocks needed to know about the changing facets of the industry, but might have been reluctant to accept.

"This business is changing so much, that a year from now, I don't think we'll recognize it," he said in one issue.  That was shortly after FCC rules were first relaxed that allowed a company to own more than one FM in a single market, thus putting your once mortal enemy right across the hall from you.  Weird.

At that time, the internet was slowly burgeoning.  He encouraged jocks to embrace the evolving technology with "BitBoard" a free show prep sharing service accessed online, where jocks who subscribed agreed to provide a weekly report of what they had planned or had previously done for their shows.  

Though a jock for more than three and a half decades, he was also an astute businessman, later selling both "The 'Mouth" and BitBoard to other broadcasting companies.  

His name was David Peter Cradick, or "Kidd Kraddick" to the scores of listeners he entertained each morning out of the Kiss-FM studio in Dallas, Texas...the native Ohioan's adoptive home base for almost 30 years, having been born in the Toledo area and raised in Florida.

In an industry where shock jocks like Howard Stern, Mancow, and Don Imus gain publicity by what they say or do (negatively), Kidd didn't stoop to such tactics.  He made a name for himself by not engaging in overly high-profile sophomoric on-air stunts, but rather using his position to make the world a better place for the most vulnerable members of society.

Thus, Kidd gained a reputation as the industry's 'good guy'.  Gregarious, engaging, and personable are just a few adjectives to describe his character.

He made time for everyone, without exception.  He valued his listeners, and valued his colleagues. Especially the young, hungry talents still getting their feet wet in small markets.  I know this personally, because I was one of them.

I always called him Dave, never Kidd.  "Hey Pittsburgh!  How's it going?" he would ask when fielding the occasional call from me.  I felt a bit of a personal connection, because as he was having his tenth birthday party, I was coming into this world.

A short 21 years ago, he personified the example of 'giving back' by creating his own charity, The Kraddick Foundation.  The charity is dedicated to helping children with life-threatening illnesses or chronic injury, mostly listener-funded.  You can read more about it at www.kiddskids.com.

He also had his share of personal problems, all of which he successfully overcame.

He was canned from KEGL after eight years in 1992, in favor of a format change and Howard Stern.  Many thought he was finished after a six-month paid vacation by the then-owners.  No one could be more wrong as the new KHKS hit the airwaves as a new Top 40 station after modest success under an NAC format, and quickly hired Kidd to do mornings, sparing no marketing expense.  It all paid off...for he would remain there for the rest of his career, and his life.

His marriage of 21 years to his wife Carol Charette ended in divorce in 2007.  "I was fortunate to meet Dave when he was doing nights and eating 'Beanie Weenies' out of the can," she once said.

They had a daughter together named Caroline, born in 1990, and having just graduated college last year. Despite the parting, Kidd and Carol remained friends. Kidd eventually found love again, with Lissi Mullen, the 32-year-old national sales manager of the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, whom he planned to marry only very recently.
Though his fame was mostly confined to north Texas, Kidd managed to collect some famous friends over the years, including Dr. Phil McGraw, Ryan Seacrest, and Mark Cuban, who all expressed shock over his passing.  Just to name a few.
Two weeks prior to his passing on Saturday, July 27th, 2013, he did a bit on his show about how he'd like to die, complete with a fake memorial service on the air.

He wanted it to be quick.  No terminal illness or prolonged suffering.  

He got his wish, albeit earlier than anyone ever could have imagined.

And the timing of the on-air bit was eerie.  

It happened on a New Orleans golf course, during a charity event for his foundation.  He had fallen ill and was taken to West Jefferson Medical Center, where he died moments later at age 53 of what we now know to have been due to complications arising from heart disease.
We also know now that Kidd did not die a suffering death.  He died at one of his own charity events, doing what he loved.  All things considered, that's not too bad.

"When I die," he told his morning show team during the death bit, "you have permission to take a bunch of creepy pictures of my body."

Whether they took him up on that offer, or whether his family allowed it is anyone's guess.  No pictures have surfaced.  So far, no one of the hundreds who attended his private memorial service a week ago this past Friday has anything to say about it.  Plans for a public memorial service have yet to be announced.

But the truth is this.

The world has lost a kind and generous spirit.  The radio industry has lost a gifted on-air talent.  Lissi has lost her life partner.  Caroline has lost her beloved daddy.

"I will never wrap my brain around my father's passing," she Tweeted.  "Please keep me and my family in your prayers and ask the Lord to watch over my Daddy."

You got it..."Little Kidd."

NEXT WEEK:   Band on the Run

GM's New Deal

For those of you who have been paying attention, you may notice that General Motors has undergone a major facelift of several of its dealerships over the past few years.

It's kind of hard to miss.  The soon-to-be signature blue tiles of Chevrolet dealerships and the silver tile of Buick and GMC dealerships, all complete with new signage.

GM has unfairly received a lot of critical backlash over the past few years.  Whether is was taking government-offered assistance to ensure the brand's survival, or starting this program to facelift its dealership network, with the automaker picking up the majority of the tab for its dealers.

This backlash, to me, is not fair.

I'm a second-generation motorhead.  I not only pay attention to what's under the hood, but what all goes into the production of an automobile.  From its engineering to its purchase.

For a period of 18 months, I worked for Mazda's Flat Rock assembly plant in southeastern Michigan, about 20 miles south of Detroit.  During my tenure, the plant produced the 626 and the MX-6 models, including the Ford Probe through Auto Alliance, a joint endeavor between Ford and Mazda of North America. 

My job was to take cars off the assembly line and either move them into the storage yard or lines for shipping by truck or rail.  Or we pulled cars from the storage yard into the shipping lines. 

Our busiest time of the year was the first quarter, when dealers were replenishing their stock after the year-end closeout sales.  This meant seven-day workweeks and sometimes 10 to 12 hour days...all in sub-freezing temperatures and blizzard-like conditions.

Not always a pleasant place to work.  Nonetheless, I still had fun doing it, and still have many happy memories of the place.  

Thus, it was only natural that I keep an eye on the industry years after leaving it.

I especially paid attention to GM's plight, and how the conservative capitalist purists insisted that the brand be allowed to die.

To do so would have cost not just thousands, but MILLIONS of jobs.  Not just at GM, but the subcontractors that produce parts for the automaker.  The network of approximately 6,000 dealerships nationwide, many of which employed at least 50 people.  

And there would have been the domino effect on the other brands that didn't have to fold, now that consumer confidence had been shattered forever due to the demise of what used to be the largest corporation in the world for decades.
One person still has yet to offer me a plausible solution that would have been an effective alternative to the federal bailout.

Let it die...real smart, huh?

But the brand hasn't died.  It's come back.

And it's done so in a big, big way.

GM has trimmed its dealer network to approximately 4,300, which has allowed it to be administered much more efficiently.  The retail brands have been trimmed from seven to four.  Its new dealership renovation program has the goal of providing uniformity and instant recognition not just with the vehicle's badging, but the 'badging' of its dealerships as well.
It only makes sense.  As a society no longer limited to the geographic borders of its native land, we have had more foreign-born citizens coming to the U.S. than ever before.  Those who were not born with English as their first language.  The common appearance of the dealerships don't require a strong command of the English language to know what can be found at one.  The color and badging do the work for you.
Ever wonder why controls inside vehicles have symbols instead of words these days?

By the way, this is nothing new among the Big Three.  Just a different take on what Chrysler did several years before when many of its dealerships took on a southwestern hacienda-styled motif, and Ford adopted new signage.

And there are rules.

To participate, the dealer can only show it's GM-licensed brands in the showrooms.  Foreign branded new vehicles owned by the same dealer must be located in a separate showroom with its lot separate from the GM vehicles.  

The program is strictly voluntary, but it's hinted that non-participating dealers had better be producing impressive sales numbers if they want to keep their franchises.  Some of those in the program have gone the extra mile and built entirely new facilities according to GM standards.

I heard one man complain recently "all done with (taxpayer) money."  

Read the papers, buddy.

GM paid back every penny they borrowed from the feds.  Its leadership at the time was smart enough to realize that any negative publicity generated by asking for loan forgiveness or an unreasonably long term of repayment, could kill the badly-injured brand.  

And people are buying again.

Many GM dealerships are now reporting that 2013 could be their best year ever, in terms of sales figures. Not only that, but people are buying the larger pick-ups and SUV's, as opposed to the "loss leaders" (aka subcompacts) when the industry's rebound began.

GM has not only regained a foothold in the new car market, but it has worked hard to increase its brand awareness and live within its means.  Unfortunately, it had to learn this lesson the hard way like other companies when the housing market collapse of 2008 created the domino effect that still has our economy healing.

Healing is always better than reeling.

NEXT WEEK:  For Kidd's Sake