Grace Potter at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia

The 12th Annual NON-COMMvention, hosted by Philly pubradio station WXPN, is well underway.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals kicked things off with a Wednesday night performance at World Cafe Live, adjacent to the XPN studios.

Attendance is strong, with radio station and music industry executives selling out both the main and overflow hotels. A full slate of meetings and performances continues through Saturday afternoon.

Updates will occur on TheTop22.com in the coming days.

Walk Up registration is still available. Learn more by navigating from our NON-COMMvention home page.

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Commercial Radio was already entering slash and burn mode before the recession hit.

Consolidation was driving out the researchers, marketers, programmers, and talent. Once the recession hit, things got considerably worse, and radio company leaders all but abandoned radio’s killer apps such as localism for a generic, sound-alike approach — positioning itself as a “reach” medium.

The results were predictable.

Commercial radio was up fractionally last year to $14.1 billion in revenue — well below pre-recession levels, according to the NAB. Even this week, radio companies are reporting first quarters that trailed last year’s numbers.

Contrast that with cable television, which poured millions into the development of creative programming directed at specialized audiences.

Again, the results were predictable.

New Neilsen data shows that cable, forever a backwater in the media world, has caught up to its broadcast counterparts. In 2011, cable collectively billed $21 billion, just shy of the broadcast networks’ $21.1 billion. (Note that TV’s total haul, which includes syndication, etc. is almost $72 billion, more than all other platforms conbined.)

For longtime watchers, it’s an amazing milestone for cable to catch the big 5 broadcasters.

But perhaps more amazing is the growth that came during the recession. In 2007, cable pulled in $14.8 billion — so we’re looking at nearly 50% revenue growth while facing the worst economic headwinds in the history of the medium.

Over the same period, broadcast television slimmed by just shy of $2 billion. So cable not only poached broadcast dollars, but more importantly, it grew the business.

Radio stagnates while cable experiences massive growth. Same recession for both.

Cable did it by investing in the product — something commercial radio simply has not done.

Michael “Iron Man” Burks died Sunday in Atlanta of an apparent heart attack. He was 54.

Burks was returning from a European tour to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport when he collapsed.

Burks earned the nickname “Iron Man” from his intense, hours-long performances. The Arkansas native self-released his debut in ‘97 and recorded for Alligator since 2001.

Learn more about Michael at our sister-site TheBluesMobile.com, including this exclusive archive interview.

On a lighter note, The New York Times recently published two interesting articles on breakthrough businesses that are directly helping musicians in a Web 2.0 world.

First, they profiled Kickstarter, a company we’ve written about before. The Times noted Kickstarter’s benchmark — having funded 50,000 projects to the tune of $200 million. $38 million of that went to music projects. All in just three years – amazing. Check out their very cool graphic presentation of the crowdsourced projects.

Also worth reading is a profile of Jeff Price and his company Tunecore. Jeff ran spinArt Records, but moved into digital delivery, helping countless bands get their stuff on the major download sites. Tunecore currently delivers 4% of all digital downloads. And they do it for an artist-friendly fee.

Check the story here.

Chart by Harvard Business Review

Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the Georgia Institute of Technology asked nearly 1500 Twitter users to rank more than 43,000 tweets.

They found, to no one’s surprise, that a most aren’t worth reading. But finding that only about a third are worth reading was a bit of a surprise.

Better, the team, in an article published for Harvard Business Review, the team categorized different types of tweets — eight different subsets.

The team flagged three specific ways to better your chances for getting read:

* No insider language — be clear
* Beware of hastag overuse
* Don’t retweet conversations (Hello!)

None of the above are rocket science, but it’s interesting to see some proof that hastags, as suspected by many, are often confusing or problematic for some.

The best types of Tweets?
* “Random Thoughts” that are funny or exciting
* “Self Promotion” — particularly if they provide useful links
* Questions to Followers
* Information sharing

The Worst?

* Opinions/Complaints
* “Me Now” (answering the unasked question about what you’re doing)
* Conversations
* “Presence Maintenance” (ex. Hello, world!)

See more in the Harvard Business Review and this excellent larger infographic.

You can also download the actual study, but it’s pretty mind-numbing in researcher-speak.

We’ll be honest, overall, the 2012 batch of Webby Award winners left us a little underwhelmed. Lots of usual suspects – TED, BBC, NASA (100 Best Planets in the Galaxy!), ESPN. NPR nominated but not much in terms of wins. They’re all great, but we’ve seen the movie.

And Pinterest, sorry, we don’t get it.

In past years, the Webby Awards turned us on to a host of innovative or otherwise “oh wow” designs, ideas, and functions. Much less so this year.

Perhaps that’s predictable — maybe the web has come of age and there are simply fewer “new” things that can be done. It’s also possible that the number of highly functional, off-the-shelf templates are saving everyone money, but leaving us wanting in terms of design. Everything sort of looks the same.

That said, there were some great things that happened on the web in 2012. The Webby’s honored Louis C.K. as their Person of the Year for his $5 direct-to-fan concert download. Bjork was named Artist of the Year for her Biophilia album, which had apps that accompanied the songs.

Notable for their creativity were the Muppets and a guy in New York who leaves money around the city for people to find. And then there’s a hilarious homage to the late Kim Jong-Il.

Radio? Well, they eliminated the radio/podcast category this year. Thanks.

A roundup of categories that relate to the media and music biz, plus other winners — and that’s where the real creativity comes out…

Music

Pitchfork (Webby Award Winner)
Pandora (People’s Voice Winner)

Best Visual Design Aesthetic

Kinetic Fanzine Vol. 1 (Webby Award Winner)
Google Music (People’s Voice Winner)

Television

HBO Connect (Webby Award Winner)
Hulu (People’s Voice Winner)

Celebrity/Fan

MTV O Music Awards (Webby Award Winner)
Team Coco (People’s Voice Winner)

Weird

I Found Money Today (Webby Award Winner)
Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things (People’s Voice Winner)

Other Winners

The Muppets Mahna Mahna
VW Beetle
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Cultural Institution Winner)
Foodily (Food and Beverage)
The Work of Robert Jaso (Self Promotion/Portfolio)

Vevo, the joint venture between Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media, launched an “upfront” last week, attempting to attract advertisers with new, original content.

It’s an interesting idea, as several new media companies are now imitating the television upfront process.

While garnering a lot of press with the announcement, what may have gone unreported are the amazing numbers the company has been putting up.

Globally, the service racks up 250 million visits per month, and forecasts 36 billion views this year. In short, it dominates music video, and one has to wonder how much better it would do if the Warner Group participated in Vevo.

Read more about the original content slate in AdAge.

Last week we reported numbers out of the NAB that an HD Radio-equipped car is sold every fifteen seconds.

Now comes a JD Power and Associates report from more than 17,000 vehicle owners this past March. The survey was an “Emerging Technologies” study seeking to gauge consumer interest in various options.

There was good news for HD Radio, as 70% of those surveyed said they’d pay extra for HD Radio. Learn more in MediaPost’s Marketing Daily.

Marshall Crenshaw’s Kickstarter Project has been funded.

As previously reported, the singer-songwriter aims to release six EPs over a two year period thanks to the crowdsourced funding model.

It looked a bit scary for the project, with Crenshaw sitting at $23,000 of the $32,000 goal with one day to go. But he must have had a few major donors sandbagged as he ultimately came in at nearly $34,000. With $200 of that coming from us, we’re looking forward to our beer with Marshall at a future show.

See more about his project.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals will play Wednesday, May 16 at 10 pm

Last minute cancellations have tweaked the musical lineup of the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention as two veterans drop out.

Paul Weller has canceled his Wednesday night performance, and Sinead O’Connor has announced the cancellation of her entire tour citing doctor’s orders. O’Connor stated on her website that she has been suffering a bout of mental illness, and she will follow her doctor’s wishes that she stay off the road.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals will grab the open slot on Wednesday night at 10 p.m., and The Walkmen have been added to Friday night’s lineup.

Also just announced is the addition of legend Dr. John, who will be interviewed by David Dye for a future episode of World Café.

The interview will take place Thursday afternoon right after Dye’s interview with Joe Jackson.

The complete lineup, including artist set times, is now posted on our NON-COMMvention schedule page.

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HD Radio equipped cars displayed outside the NAB Convention

We’ve always been fans of the idea of HD Radio. The opportunity for niche and ethnic programmers is significant.

If only big radio could get out of its own way.

The report from the 2012 NAB Convention is Las Vegas is as follows: In the face of a small army of hostile engineers, consultants who’d prefer to play it safe and get paid, and a station ownership situation that amounts to herding cats, HD Radio continues to knock down barriers in a slow but methodical march to the market.

With a reported 7 million radios in the market and an HD Radio equipped car selling every 15 seconds, it won’t be long before ten million radios will be deployed. Will that number, combined with the approved power increase, be enough to finally get owners to invest in the product and content? Let’s hope.

142 auto models offer HD Radio, 64 are standard equipment.

Beyond auto, iBiquity rolled out working prototypes of mobile phones with an embedded HD Radio chipset — one that is apparently both affordable and does not suck the battery dry.

The phone is part of Emmis Radio chief Jeff Smulyan’s seemingly Quixotic quest to force phone manufacturers to embed FM chipsets. While his wish for federal mandate will never happen, a test drive of the HD Radio equipped phone proved impressive — they sounded great, offered album cover art and artist information, music purchase buttons, and an equally impressive sales solution featuring couponing, QR codes, and other options that would be of interest to sales teams.

The working prototype HD Radio equipped phone. Sounded and looked great.

The “back end” interface was developed by Emmis Interactive, and it’s an add-on that’s worth a look for mobile manufacturers and carriers alike. Kudos to Smulyan for R&D efforts that are simply too rare in radio these days. Ultimately, he may have created a very significant innovation for radio. His international experience no doubt showed him that in many countries, listening to broadcast FM on equipped mobile phones can be quite high.

Among the current arguments for the embedded chip is the same argument one hears from across the convention hallway at the mobile television kiosks.

Interestingly, broadcast television is rolling out a new digital mobile platform that will beam live television into mobile phones and tablets via a solution called an ATSC tuner.

Both HD Radio and ATSC (Mobile TV) advocates argue that the ability to listen and watch (free) local broadcasts on phones and tablets will help relieve bandwidth pressure for both consumers and carriers, perhaps easing the need for throttling as a result of all the streaming.

Think of this offer: Would you be interested in an aftermarket dongle or an embedded chip that would enable your iPad to receive television? We sure are.

These two new digital players ought to team up in a big way to bring free local broadcasting seamlessly to handheld  devices.

-Paul Marszalek

Royalty Deal

Big players in the music industry including the RIAA, National Music Publishers Association, and the Digital Media Association have agreed on mechanical royalties for digital media — as well as new types of business models such as music storage lockers and genre-specific specialty streams.

The deal must be approved by the Copyright Royalty Board. Check the full story in The Hollywood Reporter.

Multiple Screens Mean Kids Have the Attention Span of a Gnat – and that’s Important.

Neilsen reports, to no one’s surprise, that 88% of Americans with tablets use them while they’re watching TV. See the graph below and the story in Paid Content.

But the ramifications of the above point are extremely important for marketers, as a new study suggests that adults in their 20s change media 27 times per (non-working) hour. Frankly, that sounds insane. But all you need to do is look at PPM data to feel that it’s true. So how do you break through that kind of clutter? Interesting thoughts in AdvertisingAge.

Who Wants a Job?

Scrappy up-and-coming AAA NON-COMM WXPN is looking for a diginative interested in handling social media duties at the station as well as editing the station’s local music blog, The Key.

Details here.

Chrysler's Sergio Marchionne

All businesses need revitalization at some point in their lifespan. Some need complete reinvention.

Regardless of the type of business, often the problems struggling businesses face are very similar.

With that in mind, we thought we’d share this piece profiling Sergio Marchionne, who first turned around Fiat, then salvaged Chrysler.

To manage the latter, he took a high interest, $6 billion loan from the government. Amazingly, not only is Chrysler already in the black, they repaid the loan early.

Take some time out to watch this profile of Marchionne on CBS’ 60 Minutes — and think about the issues he faced and how he dealt with them — and how similar some of those issues are to our own…

John Mayer will be interviewed by David Dye for World Cafe.

The 12th Annual NON-COMMvention is excited to announce John Mayer as an addition to the conference lineup.

Mayer, sidelined from performing due to granuloma — essentially an inflammation affecting his vocal chords — will instead tape a conversation with David Dye for an upcoming episode of World Cafe.

The session will take place Friday afternoon, May 18.

Other important developments include the expiration of Early Bird rates Friday, April 6 at 5pm Eastern. Radio personnel can take advantage of rates as low as $50.

Also noteworthy is that the primary hotel, the Inn at Penn, is sold out. There are rooms available at the overflow hotel, Club Quarters, for the favorable rate of $126/night.

Club Quarters standard room. Looks nice, no?

And if that’s not enough news, the musical lineup has gotten even bigger.

Just added are Philly act Good Old War, Quebec’s Barr Brothers, and Brooklyn’s Elle King (fun fact: she’s the daughter of SNL’s Rob Schneider).

All necessary links for registration, phone numbers for hotel reservations, and the emerging schedule can be found here at TheTop22.com.

Just start at the top nav bar and work your way around.

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Ulysses S. Grant. Why is he on the fifty dollar bill?

Because he was a badass general in the Civil War — managing to finally end the thing after Lincoln’s previous leaders failed to act.

Think General George McClellan. The dude could have ended the War years earlier — ultimately saving tens of thousands of lives– if he only would attack. But no, he basically sat on his hands as events developed around him. Sounds like a deer in the headlights commercial radio guy (relax, it’s a joke and we’re talking about your boss.)

Grant? He got shit done. He beat the rebel army, got reconstruction underway, and then kicked the collective ass of the Ku Klux Klan in 1871.

That’s how you get on the fifty.

And that’s why it may cost you as little as fifty dollars to attend the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention.

In honor of U.S. Grant, all additional attendees from the same radio station can attend for 50 bucks. So the first station employee pays an Early Bird rate of $95, and everyone else just $50.

There are conditions: First, all radio employees must register at the same time to get the special rate. Second, the rate expires at 5pm EASTERN this Friday, April 6.

$200 Early Bird rates for music industry employees also expire at the same time.

So you need to ask yourself, are you McClellan or Grant?

Thought so. Follow this link to sign up.

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The Pauly spinoff we're getting...

There’s carnage in the offices of certain cable television channels — many of which are owned by Viacom.

Let’s start with Nickelodeon, which is off a staggering 35% in the first quarter. Then there’s Comedy Central and MTV, off 15% and 19% respectively. MTV is down 24% in prime time, 18-34. BET is also off double digits at 12%.

In TV, missing audience projections means lots of make-goods for advertisers who didn’t get the eyeballs they were promised.

It’s not just pain at Viacom, though. FX is off, but it may just be a come-down from an extremely strong 2011. TNT is down double digits, and USA – which blew out NBC hitmakers when Comcast took over — is off 9%.

And then there’s OWN. The Oprah Winfrey Network disaster continued last week when the layoffs started –  canceling of Rosie O’Donnell’s show before it ever had a chance to succeed. OWN will reportedly lose $143 million this year.

Winners include Viacom’s VH1, but some speculate it’s at the expense of sister-network BET. TBS is up as is AMC with zombie programming.

...the Pauly spinoff we actually want.

Another stat worth noting is that cable TV viewing is off 2.7% since September. It’s not necessarily a small number — especially if it’s the start of a trend caused by cord cutters, Netflix, and Hulu adopters.

How to prevent that trend? Five thoughts:

1) Know When to Say When

MTV’s Jersey Shore is now in season #6, and the ratings fatigue is evident. The show that once set records and pulled in 8 million viewers last week pulled in fewer than 6 million. Still, that was good enough to win the night on cable.

A ratings slide like that is natural. MTV will reach the saturation point by launching Jersey Shore spinoffs that, even if they only reach 2 million viewers, will still be hits — buying the network time to find replacements.

2) Sameness Hurts Everybody

As one pundit put it, “how much time can we spend watching rednecks roll around in the mud?” Apparently, less.

Copycat programming abounds — cake shops gave way to pawn brokers, pickers, and diggers. All basically spinoffs of PBS’ Antique Roadshow (a show they passed on for years, before finally producing it).

The result? Fewer people using not just the channel, but the medium.

3) You Can Kill a Golden Goose

Comedy Central’s outrageous Daniel Tosh and his show Tosh.O was a ratings goldmine — until the Tuesday night mini marathon of stacked programs was burned out through lazy programming– making it easy pickings for repeats of the brilliant Big Bang Theory on TBS. Tosh should have been a launchpad for other hits. Instead, Comedy Central still tries to milk increasingly ancient Chappelle reruns. But we do miss Chappelle.

4) You Are Not Entitled to an Audience

Cue the OWN logo. Oh, that’s right, no one knows what it looks like.

In what will someday be a Harvard Business School case study, the can’t-miss idea of taking Oprah off network TV, giving her a cable channel that she didn’t really have to appear on, and hiring executives with little television programming experience has delivered Discovery Networks the mother of all migraines.

Everyone involved in the deal assumed it was a slam dunk. Everyone not involved in the deal assumed it was a slam dunk. In retrospect, this one had chutzpah written all over it. But we were all blinded by the power of Oprah.

The channel’s first president, Christina Norman, came up from the design/promo shop at MTV where she was excellent. She was then given the reigns to a flailing VH1 — at exactly the same time that programming wiz Michael Hirschorn and his strong team was inventing the celeb-reality that would pull the channel out of its nosedive. Her timing could not have been better at VH1, and could not have been worse at OWN.

OWN’s current president, Eric Logan, is the guy who helped sign Oprah to a $55 million deal at XM Satellite Radio. He now has to try to navigate a way out for this channel. And it’s in a deep hole.

When this much starpower and brainpower fails, it’s a testament to just how hard it is to launch anything in an incredibly crowded media universe.

We’re not entitled to an audience.

5) Great Content Will Win the Day

Yes, there will always be those shows known as “brilliant but canceled.” But new distribution systems may even save a few of those.

Viacom’s CEO Phillippe Dauman knows this. Viacom will spend $3 billion on content this year. Yes, B.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

-Paul Marszalek

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At the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention, we’ll start the discussions with a session on The Digital State of the Union.

We’ll look at the landscape, and try to make sense of it.

When you see the numbers, it’s hard to think that we could possibly make sense of it.

For starters, take a look at this infographic from MBAonline.com, and think about what you’re doing to compete with this, or at least, be a part of it.

Brandi Carlile. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The 12 Annual NON-COMMvention, ,which already appeared to be busting at the seams, has added additional music performers and announced the schedule of sessions.

Confirming are Brandi Carlile, Twin Cities newcomers Poliça, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jonathan Wilson, formerly of Eisley.

They join a star-studded lineup that includes veterans Willie Nelson, Sinead O’Connor, Norah Jones, Joe Jackson, and many more May 17 – 19 at World Cafe Live next to the WXPN studios in Philadelphia.

The schedule of events is taking shape, kicking off earlier than usual with a special Wednesday night performance for early arrivals featuring rock legend Paul Weller on May 16. Weller’s set will start at 10 p.m.

In addition to the musical performances, attendees will enjoy an array of sessions that kick off Thursday morning, including:

* The Digital State of the Union with Media Mechanics/TheTop22.com’s Paul Marszalek
* The NON-COMMversation with WXPN’s Dan Reed featuring pundit Bob Lefsetz
* A David Dye-hosted World Cafe taping with Joe Jackson
* Widening Your Circle of Influence — a guide on how to get the most for your station
* Competition, Partners, or Both
* Community Radio Roundtable
* Local, Local, Local, and
* The Music Meeting with Songlines’ Sean Coakley

Registration is now open, with early bird rates in effect until 5pm April 6.

The complete musical lineup can be found an the NON-COMMvention Artist Lineup Page and schedule details will be posted as they become available in the NON-COMMvention Schedule Page.

Complete details on the event, including hotel and registration can be found by navigating from the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention tab above.

Sharon Van Etten and WFUV's Rita Houston at SXSW, courtesy WFUV.org

There were some great strides in the reporting from SXSW this year, a festival so cool that the name has been shortened to just SX.

Gone are the days of the complete boondoggle that left listeners back home wondering why they were footing the bill for sending station employees to a party in Texas. But there is still a ways to go.

There was more reporting this year, but too little journalism.

Station management needs to realize that, without actual coaching and some journalism training, they’re very likely to get the kind of disconnected-from-the-audience, stream-of-consciousness, inside-baseball talk-a-thons we’ve become used to from music announcers given free reign to describe the party that is SX — the kind of reporting that WXPN discovered was actually driving down ratings during their coverage of the event a few years back.

Before sending the troops out next year, a good day-long session covering J-school 101 and a discussion of deliverables would go a long way.

KCRW's Jason Bentley working SX. Courtesy KCRW.org.

But let’s stop there, because this article is called Worth Watching. Improved station websites offer big opportunities for content of all stripes, and many are starting to exploit those opportunities. Here are some of the winning moments…

KCRW smartly tossed up an off-the-shelf Tumblr page (read: Free!) to showcase its work, which consisted primarily of photos, picks, and previews via Soundcloud. But KCRW’s Avishay Artsy created one of the best pieces of music journalism we found — a well -produced radio piece covering Bruce Springsteen’s keynote.

WFUV had a strong performance this year, with some excellent video of JD McPherson and Alabama Shakes among others. And Rita Houston got her interview on and gets a lot out of Brendan Benson in a piece that works on-air and online as a two-camera shoot…

And here’s a clip from Alabama Shakes that really gives one a feel for the event — not slick — but a street party…

But the winners of the music journalism crown are the folks at hometown KUT. Music journalism is a discipline there, and it shows. Five full pages of videos and reports from their stage at the Four Seasons — a controlled environment that lent itself to strong, but basic shoots and good sound. Clips include James Mercer, Trampled by Turtles, Sons of Fathers, Justin Townes Earle, and many more.

Check out the Punch Brothers…

Lastly, in case you hadn’t yet thought that SXSW had jumped the shark, some douche thought that an Angry Birds flash mob dance was a good idea. Oy…