How You Can Benefit from the “New Media” Movement

If you think you’d like to own a radio station, just wait a few years, and they might come cheap…

So says Michael Harrison.  Now, Harrison isn’t just some guy shooting off his mouth.  For almost 20 years he has been the Editor and Publisher of “Talkers Magazine”, a magazine devoted to talk radio specifically, and radio and “new media“, in general.

It is his assertion that the traditional way of delivering radio content, by means of that radio in your car or the tuner in your (soon-to-be-obsolete) entertainment center or that dusty old portable you carry around, will be a mere fond remembrance, very soon.

Harrison, by the way, includes all the other forms of “terrestrial” broadcasting, including TV stations, in his prediction of obsolescence. 

What Harrison is talking about is the new platform radio and TV will be using to disseminate content, and the appliances you and I will use to access that content.

And guess what?  That new platform is the internet!

And it makes sense.  Today’s younger generations are completely web oriented.  They use it like they use their right or left hand.  Just about anyone under 40 is completely conversant with web content and how to use it and manipulate it.

So how does this mean you can buy a radio station, or even a TV station on the cheap?  Simply put, it means that while radio station entities will still be providing content, they no longer will be dependent on radio frequencies, antenna towers and all that expensive equipment to deliver it.

Even now, radio stations are finding that many of their listeners are already accessing the web to hear their programming.  The shift may be swifter than we can imagine.

So what’s to become of the radio station?  Harrison thinks collectors will pick them up, and operate them as hobbies (albeit expensive ones), with all the nostalgia of radio listening past, including, perhaps, the static.

This brings me to Harrison’s concept of the “Media Station” which I will address next time.