Aging Demographics

From www.theblaze.com

I've seen a lot of radio music formats come and go over the decades.   Easy listening instrumentals, big band standards, '50s/'60s oldies, mellow '70s rock and a few others have either disappeared or barely exist as vastly updated versions of their former selves.   These once lucrative formats vanished from the radio dial well before their listeners had abandoned them.   Major advertisers simply did not want to reach an audience that was aging over 55, with more set buying habits that didn't change much through hearing advertisements.   The fact that they may still be active adults, loyal listeners and potential spenders didn't matter enough to the folks who sell and buy radio time.

 

Now the same thing has been unfolding on the talk radio side.   Liberal talk never took off, thanks to being on inferior AM market signals, a more diverse potential audience, NPR's appeal to liberal intellectuals and a somewhat half-hearted attempt to syndicate it by big conservative media corporations.   I never subscribed to the idea that liberals were less compelling or entertaining than their conservative counterparts.   The Stephanie Miller Show, for one, thankfully lives on through cable, satellite and streaming.  

 

Now these same big conglomerates who eagerly hitched their wagons to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck and countless other right wing voices are now struggling to downsize them to less potent signals while scratching their heads over who (or what) can replace them.   AM syndicated talk has few options while the shift to FM talk has been almost totally stopped in its tracks.   Sports talk on FM gets a younger adult audience, so that migration from older-skewing AM works; conservative talk doesn't.   Rush and company face the same issue on radio as Fox News does on TV with its median 68.1 year old audience.   I believe conservative talk has also been beating a dead horse to all but the most strident Obama bashers.   Cumulus Media is now trying to convert the angry, one-sided political narrative to more "lifestyle" topics.   Good luck with that, Mr. Savage.   I have serious doubts it will work while Cumulus' locally oriented station in Providence, WPRO,  clobbers the right wing syndicated shows competing against them.    Rush may have singlehandedly saved AM radio 25 years ago.   Those days are gone.   I hope AM can  find a way out of this mess.   It won't be through rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.