Ryan Adams covering Bob Mould, a Jack White liquid-filled 12″ disc, The Knack Live in Los Angeles 1978 — hell yeah, it’s Record Store Day once again!

This brilliant awareness stunt returns this Saturday, making those of us without a local record store incredibly jealous as the event continues to attract more and more participants from the artist and label world.

Let’s cut right to the chase, with the annual walk-through from Chris Brown of Bull Moose in Maine. BTW, this is just PART ONE…

Chris Brown Record Store Day 2012 Preview Pt.1 from Record Store Day on Vimeo.

And here’s a great related clip about how a record gets made — literally. The Band Preteen Zenith is made up of Tim DeLaughter of Polyphonic Spree and Philip E. Karnats of Secret Machines. They’ll make their debut with a Record Store Day limited release of 500 vinyl copies of Rubble Guts b/w BB Eye…

Download the complete list of offerings (not everything will be at all stores!) here.

Click the Record Store Day icon above to learn more about where you can shop.

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We haven’t been to Restoration Hardware in forever.

Once a regular stop, once our home came together, the store fell off our radar. Out of site, out of mind.

While we forgot about Restoration Hardware, they apparently did not forget about us. A couple of weeks ago, we received perhaps the most impressive piece of direct mail we’ve ever seen.

Restoration Hardware sent us two huge, gorgeous, glossy books — a 654-page Spring catalog, bundled with a 281-page Outdoor catalog.

Combined, the mailing cost alone had to be outrageous. Restoration Hardware put its money where its mouth is in an all-out effort to get us back in the store. And it worked.

Another recent example of a great customer acquisition strategy was from the woman who originally brokered our mortgage.  She recently sent us a soft-sell message notifying us that she had changed banks by sending a large tin of Godiva biscuits. Cost? About $60.

These examples have had me thinking about customer acquisition cost.

Was a time that radio stations would spend significantly to acquire audience, but it has become incredibly rare. Marketing budgets were slashed along with content development and research budgets as Wall Street’s love affair with radio waned, and things only got worse with the recession.

But the fact is, to continue this way is unrealistic. For radio stations, if you’re not doing anything to increase cume, you’re losing cume. It’s no different than any other business – if you’re not working constantly to increase and retain your customer base, you’re not going to be long for this world.

Out of sight, out of mind.

A case in point that we’ve referenced recently is OWN – the Oprah Winfrey Network. In trying to explain what went wrong, it could be that OWN set itself up for a struggle by failing to treat itself as a startup. Instead, it acted as if it was a mature brand. One of the big mistakes startups make is to severely miscalculate customer acquisition costs. Sure OWN had Oprah’s name, but nobody knew what channel it was on, or what shows it had.

But back to radio. I speak regularly with stations that complain about their declining cume.

In almost every case, when I ask about their customer acquisition strategy, there is no plan. It’s as if people will just magically find the radio station and fall in love with it. Just like OWN, no one is entitled to an audience.

Stations, and their brethren in the music business, need a marketing plan. It’s an old saw, but you need to spend money to make money.

They key for radio and the music business is to keep the customer acquisition cost low, considering the small margins. Restoration Hardware is a bit pricey, so they can afford to spend ten or fifteen bucks to get me back in the store. 60 bucks worth of cookies is nothing if I re-finance my mortgage.

But remember, only a fraction of the prospects will come through. My mortgage broker probably spent thousands of dollars re-connecting with her former client base.

Stations that want to increase cume by 10k, 20k, or 50k will have to work backwards with the math — first determining what that cume increase would mean in terms of revenue. Once that estimate is in, stations can then figure out what they can spend to acquire those customers.

For example, if a public radio station wants to acquire 10,000 new listeners, and believes that it can convert 2% of those to $10/month members, those newbies would be worth $24,000 in revenue annually. So it wouldn’t be crazy to spend 25k in search of 10,000 new listeners (noting that many of those 2% will stay members for years to come.)

I regularly get mail and email from WNYC/New York and WFUV/New York in an effort to get me back into the membership fold (customer retention). But rarely do I see any station of any stripe marketing to increase audience, tune-ins, or time spent listening.

It’s worth saying again. If you’re not doing anything to increase your cume, you’re losing cume.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Times writer Joe Levy writes a fun travel section story on a bona fide music business success story — the music cruise.

He boarded this year’s Weezer cruise and filed this report…

Speaking of successful music business stories, here’s a leftover SXSW link from the LA Times’ Pop & Hiss blog that not only wraps up the event, but opines a bit more on the state of the business…

Moshcam.com has been steadily shooting live concerts across the globe for a couple of years.

But last week they released an app that brings these shows to your phone. It’s another potentially great application for music monetization.

It’s a freemium model. Download the free app, and you get a handful of free shows. Then it’s pay per view.

Learn more on their site, and check out The Pretenders below.

Watch The Pretenders and other great gigs on Moshcam.

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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

The Top 22 Alternative Radio Songs for the Week Ending 3-11-12

Copyright 2012 Mediabase. Reprinted with permission.

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The web is full of articles arguing the pros and cons of Spotify from an artist standpoint.

Most recently, legendary U2 manager Paul McGuinness praised the service as a promotional platform. He’s right, it’s a great promotional tool. But that’s where it ends.

For artists, it’s a disaster. And it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to figure it out.

The paltry artist royalties are well known — the fractions of a fraction of a cent per play requires hundreds of thousands of plays, or even millions to make a royalty payment meaningful.

Among the biggest questions batted about is whether or not Spotify cannibalizes sales. Proponents are quick to tell you that it doesn’t.

I’m here to tell you that those folks either haven’t done their homework, or they’re lying.

Or in denial.

While conducting a focus group of radio listeners and heavy music consumers, we went around the table specifically discussing music purchases and methods of musical discovery.

On the new media side, the usual suspects showed up — every single person had a Pandora account, for example.

And then we hit on Spotify. About a quarter of the room had Spotify accounts, only one was a paying subscriber. I asked what they liked about Spotify, and one particularly enthusiastic user mentioned that you could listen to anything you wanted — any artist, any song, any album.

“Album, really?” I asked. He and the others nodded.

Not a Spotify user, I immediately thought that I was behind the legal times, since streaming an album would be a clear violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Or at least I thought.

The enthusiast continued that he had not bought any music since opening his free account. Why would he? The guy was acting like he’d found the Fountain of Youth — or at least found a deal that was too good to be true. Other Spotify users nodded, also noting that they had bought less music.

While this conversation was happening, the rest of the focus group participants were busy writing down S-P-O-T-I-F-Y so as to investigate when they got home.

I too, had my interest piqued. My only question was how the hell they were getting away with streaming albums and artists consecutively?

My grandfather, a grade school educated locomotive engineer for the Rock Island Railroad once told me, “Paul, if there’s ever something you can’t figure out, the answer is always money.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Upon investigation, I learned that Spotify, in order to get those streaming waivers, had sold shares in the company to the record labels. In fact, the labels hold approximately 20% of the company.

Spotify, according to some reports, has shelled as much as $150 million to a single label in exchange for participation.

And so it becomes clearer. Labels, pissed off ever since MTV built a company off of their free content, have been wary about repeat after repeat in the new media space. So along comes a company that gives them a slice from the beginning, and the corporate labels, with their myopic tendencies, jump in.

But two wrongs don’t make a right.

On one hand, Spotify could become a huge hit, go public and possibly bring the labels hundreds of millions or even billions collectively. It might well be worth the gamble in order to save the record label paradigm. Frankly, it’s entirely possible that the labels already believe the gig is up — that a sales-based future is non-existent.

That’s certainly possible, but the deals they’re cutting with Spotify might also make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The near-term problem is, the labels are throwing their artists under the bus in this experiment.

It is very difficult to ascertain exactly what the label/Spotify deals are due to non-disclosure agreements. Even the aforementioned McGuinness noted that there was “insufficient transparency.”

Wow. If U2’s manager can’t get answers, that’s saying something.

The good news is, the clock is ticking. The label/Spotify agreements are reportedly two-year deals. So Spotify will have to prove it, and fast. Label participation won’t come cheap the second time around.

In the meantime, artists need to pressure their labels for bigger pieces of the pie, because the current pay per play scale is a joke — and it’s eating into their sales.

For artists, at present, Spotify is justthismuchbetter than piracy.

- Paul Marszalek

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The Radio Advertising Bureau reported that radio, as a whole, was up $100 million in revenue over last year.

On the surface, this is fantastic news. Just keeping its collective head above water is worth celebrating.

But below the surface, the increase from $17.3 billion to $17.4 billion points to fundamental problems with the business model, and how it’s being executed.

In short, commercial radio was up 1% over last year, and when compared to network television (up 12-15%), cable television (all-time high upfront), and new media up more than 25% depending on the sub-category, a 1% year-over-year looks a little scarier.

What isn’t available in the initial numbers, as reported by Miller, Kaplan, Arase, and Co., are breakouts that might tease where sever problems lie. For example, has AM become a boat anchor that’s dragging down more respectable FM increases, etc.

However, here’s a chart worth looking at — Q4 breakouts that show where growth is really coming from. And it isn’t spot revenue, which actually declined 1% year-over-year.

As noted above, there are nice increases in the Network, Digital, and Off-Air categories. However, those pieces of the overall pie are relatively small, so the increases really need to be in double digits to re-invigorate the medium –especially in digital and off-air.

Terrifying are the spot numbers. Other trades have blamed the lack of political dollars infused into radio in 2011. While that may be the case, it really isn’t the problem. And neither is the soft economy.

What nobody wants to talk about is the fact that advertisers are turning away from radio. Check our January 29 story citing STRATA data.

Or the implications. Remember that station values are pegged to cash flow. Increases of 1% won’t even overcome inflation, so, arguably, everyone’s radio station is worth less than last year.

We’ve previously argued that commercial radio is simply getting it wrong — trimming, cutting, nationalizing, and otherwise failing to connect with the audience on a more local, intimate, or even social level.

The revenue and other research numbers are supporting our position. It’s bad business.

Radio cannot become a commodity– like flour, sugar, or gasoline — purchased simply on price or convenience.

While the rest of the world is methodically heading in a more socially connected world, commercial radio is running in the other direction. Disconnected and passionless. Advertisers have noticed and are re-thinking their options.

It’s time for commercial radio broadcasters to turn around and act more like their public radio brethren — building communities, and growing.

On August 30, 2009 I wrote that radio was blaming all of its problems on the recession, and once the economy bounced back, everything would be fine.

In short, I called bullshit.

Instead, I argued that commercial radio’s business model was on fire well before the recession, and everything big radio companies have done since has simply fed that fire.

I pointed out Bob Garfield’s excellent observations in his book The Chaos Scenario. Among other things, Bob noted that media’s expansion was seriously outpacing the ad dollars that supported it.

The result would be sinking CPMs and a greater proportion of the ad dollars going into digital.

Big Radio’s response to all this has been to circle the wagons, cut costs, and turn the content into a commodity. Arbitron’s Personal People Meter handed over more data, which was immediately misused by managers and consultants who didn’t understand how to use it.

In the almost two and a half years since I wrote that piece, commercial radio has gone literally nowhere. On the other hand, Broadcast TV, Cable, Digital, and Mobile are up big across the board — regardless of the economy. Only print has fared worse.

With commercial radio having just announced another flat month (December year-over-year), Strata’s fourth quarter survey sums it up.

(Strata, by the way, is a software company in Chicago that supports around 1000 ad agencies.)

Check this unfortunate finding…

The top medium of choice for clients in Q4 2011:

* Spot TV (Broadcast and Cable) 51%
* Digital 31%
* Spot Radio 8%

As bad as the 8% is, it’s down from 16% last year.

As Bob Garfield correctly predicted, not enough dollars being spread too thin across too many new forms of advertising.

And if you’re wondering where the next trough of money is going to go, look at your phone. Ad Age reports that mobile advertising will be up 80% in 2012 to $2.6 billion.

If you’re curious as to why Clear Channel dropped radio from its name, the answer lies in this chart:

Mobile Advertising Projection: Ad Age

I’ve said it before and will say it again — it’s not the medium, it’s how the medium is being programmed. Pubradio is hanging in there and in many places, growing. Commercial radio is just plain getting it wrong with a game plan that may provide audience, but that audience is less and less desirable to advertisers.

And that’s all that matters.

The dashboard of the 2013 Chevrolet Sonic, sans CD player.

News out of the Consumer Electronics Show has GM announcing that the 2013 Chevy Sonic RS will not have an in-dash CD player. And the reason is not because the Sonic is a stripped down cheapo.

It’s inevitable that CD players will disappear, but it comes as a bit of a shock — and has implications for music lovers, record labels, radio stations, and the car companies.

For music lovers, it’s a miserable development.

We have two cars in our household, and both have in-dash CD players. However, only one has an auxiliary input for my iPhone. Guess which car I prefer.

But a dashboard without the CD player will suck for one simple reason – most MP3s, satellite, and all streaming music sounds like ass. If you’re serious about rocking out in your car, it has to be on CD.

For labels, the message is clear: physical goods are one step closer to being manufactured for superfans only. Everyone else will tolerate lower grade digital copies.

For radio stations, the auto industry’s hyper-focus on high tech entertainment systems is only bad news — particularly if that radio station has reduced itself to a nationally distributed jukebox. Music-stations-as-commodities are dead men walking.

And speaking of commoditization, that’s the exact reason why the auto industry is so hot for connected dashboards that can provide Pandora and so much more. In short, so many cars are so well made by so many companies, they’re desperate for product differentiation. They’ll innovate to make the product more desirable wherever they can.

Radio stations would do well to follow their lead.

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Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite

If you think I’m about to compare many radio operators – especially those on the commercial side – to a UFO cult, well, you’d basically be right.

From a behavioral standpoint, there are increasing similarities. And it’s those related behavioral quirks – Cognitive Dissonance, True Believer Syndrome, and Cognitive Inertia – that combine to take the #1 spot on our Top 22 Players in AAA and Adult Rock for 2011.

Cognitive dissonance is defined as a discomfort held by having two conflicting cognitions — ideas, beliefs, values, etc. The theory holds that when people experience cognitive dissonance, they will try to reduce the discomfort by altering one of the cognitions — often using some level of rationalization to do so.

For example, in Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Grapes, the fox wants to eat the grapes — but they’re hanging too high and he fails to reach them. To resolve the discomfort, he tells himself that the grapes probably weren’t worth it anyway — they were probably sour. Hence “sour grapes.”

A related concept is True Believer Syndrome.

An example of this type of behavior is the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult.

In 1997, 39 members of this San Diego based cult committed suicide, all wearing brand new purple Nike high-tops, as they believed that there was a UFO trailing comet Hale-Bopp that was going to pick them up, then wipe the Earth clean.

When the world didn’t end, the two surviving members of the cult had an explanation: Wrong Comet.

Trailing comet Hale-Bopp was Arbitron's Personal People Meter, which promised great things for radio.

Starting to sound like anyone you know?

For radio owners, managers, program directors and the consultants and researchers who enable them, the rubber hits the road with Cognitive Inertia.

The idea holds that once a set of beliefs are formed, there is a strong tendency to rely on those familiar assumptions and a refusal or inability to revise or adjust the assumptions as new information becomes available. Ultimately, cognitive inertia becomes a psychological barrier that prevents organizational change.

This is where the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult and radio’s “cult of the Personal People Meter” show their similarities.

Commercial Radio has so bought into Arbitron’s Personal People Meter, it is collectively unable to think beyond it — even as new information becomes available that shows its shortcomings.

Instead, radio operators have convinced themselves that PPM is the Answer, changing formats, firing more staffers, killing off local programming, tightening playlists, and more — all with the aim of transforming radio into a “reach medium” that values commodity-level mass audiences above all else.

While social media rages forward, showing that relationships and communities are of upmost importance, Commercial Radio guys, and they are almost all guys, make more sacrifices to the People Meter god.

Heck, some true believers even use statistically-unsupportable PPM data as music research, showing how far they’ll go in drinking the Kool-aid.

But it’s not just the radio owners and programmers. Consultants and trade mags such as Inside Radio have become cheerleaders and apologists for a series of strategies that have flat-out failed. They’re basically willing to say anything to get paid in a shrinking economy.

Public Radio sometimes suffers from cognitive inertia, failing to update its sound as the market changes or failing to accept audience feedback. But there is one major difference between Public and Commercial Radio: Public Radio is a growth story.

In 2011, Commercial Radio stumbled along – using a tired, failed playbook that earned the industry revenue increases in the low single digits — likely lower than the rate of inflation.

Meanwhile, in the same lousy economy, broadcast television is up 12%-15%, cable television set an all-time revenue high, and new media continues to eat more of the advertising pie.

You’d think that an inability to grow the business would be enough to get radio operators to change course.

You’d be wrong.

Instead, they’re lacing up their Nikes.

-Paul Marszalek

Related Articles:

Memo To Commercial Broadcasters: It’s Not Working

Death of WYSP Proves Our Point: Commercial Radio is Getting it Wrong

New STRATA Survey Shows Potential Triple Whammy for Radio

Mike Henry to Radio: Walk From Arbitron

I’m rethinking my relationship with Amazon.

I’m a heavy user. Almost not a single day goes by without a UPS truck delivering something to the house from Amazon.

Using Amazon Prime, the membership that offers free shipping, I constantly use the service to deliver otherwise hard-to-find items. I figured, that UPS truck would be on the road anyway, so it might even be green for me to use Amazon rather than get in the car and start driving all over creation.

My family uses Amazon streaming services for movies via our Roku box, and the sister-site to TheTop22, TheBluesMobile.com is an Amazon affiliate. We make only loose change on our referral fees, instead seeing it as a great way to get more blues CDs and downloads sold in an environment where physical blues titles are hard to get your hands on.

But I’m starting to think very differently about Amazon these days, and the promotion they’ve unleashed for Saturday, December 10, is only adding fuel my new line of thinking.

On Saturday, Amazon is encouraging people to head to retail, snap pictures or scan bar codes with its price comparing mobile app, then walk out — in exchange for $5 off as many as three different products.

That’s right, Amazon will pay you to spy for them.

It’s no secret that Amazon has been at war with retail since it crushed booksellers. In addition to massive volume discounts, the online retailer makes no bones about selling things below cost — from Lady Gaga to the Kindle Fire. But that’s just business. People have used loss-leaders forever.

But Amazon has a patently unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores by not having to charge sales tax in most areas.

Saturday’s promotion goes too far. It’s not about price comparison so much as it’s about flipping your local retailer the bird — and they want you to do it for them.

Think of it this way: the local retailer invests in the facility, personnel (your neighbors), expertise, and the community — all things that cost money. Not to mention they pay local taxes. Yet Amazon wants you to take advantage of that — literally take advantage of them — by viewing and touching the product, getting your questions answered etc.

And then walk out and buy the product from Amazon. This feels sleazy.

This is Walmart all over again. The big box retailer was punished repeatedly for killing Main Street, but for some reason, Amazon has escaped the same fate.

Amazon is in court all over America — even trying to re-write California’s tax code — in order to keep their sales tax exemptions. Meanwhile, our Main Streets are increasingly deserted, jobs are hard to find, and local governments start looking for ways to make up shortfalls.

And that’s the connection people are failing to make. They think they’re saving money by shaving off a few bucks off products by evading sales tax. But then, as your kids’ school lays off teachers, you get hit with a a nice property tax hike.

Amazon is on the wrong end of this argument. Tactics like this will result in sales-killing negative PR and perhaps start turning the tide in favor of local retailers.If this story were to get picked up by national news, think of the value of that negative press.

Amazon has enough going for it to win on service, extraordinary variety, and convenience. The company should suck it up and start collecting sales taxes.

Fair is fair.

Special thanks to Michael Bunnell of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, who actually has a dog in this fight, for getting me thinking on this topic. His email was as follows:

Today I was sent a link to a story about an Amazon promotion to encourage use of their bar code scanning application. They are offering a $5 incentive to their customers to go into physical stores, scan bar codes, and supply Amazon with the store’s pricing information and then buy the item from them. Of course the promotion is being sold as a consumer friendly option that allows them to beat every other retailer’s prices. Now let’s face facts here–this is nothing more than an attempt to steal local customers and steer them to online sales from what amounts to the biggest box store of all. It is an attack upon physical retailers everywhere. Retailers who pay local taxes and who pay rent to local landlords and hire local workers, who in turn spend their wages to support the local economy, providing support for schools, police departments, roads, libraries, fire departments–everything we all take for granted. Prompting consumers to spy on other retailers with the promise of a monetary incentive is underhanded and amounts to industrial spying. It uses modern technology to the advantage of a single entity and to the disadvantage of the rest of the retail businesses who actually pay the bills that support the communities we all live in.

It’s just wrong.

You’ve undoubtedly started seeing those “so and so is listening to” blurbs showing up on your Facebook pages — as if you needed any more information blasted your way.

But in terms of viral marketing, the integration of Facebook with streaming music sites like Spotify, Mog, Rdio and Slacker could prove significant.

In fact, in just the past six weeks, users have shared their songs 1.5 billion times.

Mashable has more on the marriage of Facebook with streaming sites.

Movie studios have paid close attention to what the web has done to the music industry. And they don’t like what they see.

Digital has crushed physical sales for the studios, with last year’s DVD revenue down 46% from the 2006 high.

And while they’ve embraced on-demand, the studios know that the money that they will get from streaming is a fraction of what they used to get in actual sales — even digital sales.

The latest effort to encourage buying over renting? Read about it in the New York Times.

By now we all know that EMI has been split up and sold, with Universal and Sony the winners.

So what happens next? What will it mean to have just two majors?

Is Warner Brothers still a major? And after losing out on an acquisition they’ve dreamed about for years, what might they do with the $1.5 billion they were willing to spend?

Lots of questions, and very few answers so far. But you can at least get caught up with coverage on The New York Times.

Maybe it’s a case of hubris. After all, CNBC and Bloomberg already had a pretty good handle on the business angle. Maybe there just isn’t room for a third.

Maybe it’s a case of lousy programming — too much political fodder mixed in with what’s supposed to be business news.

Or maybe it’s just another case of just how hard it is to break through in a 500-channel cable universe. After all, if Oprah is struggling, it must be tough out there.

But the numbers put up by Fox Business are so staggeringly bad, they’re almost incomprehensible.

Fox Business Channel averages just 65,000 viewers a day — and only 10,000 25-54. Radio’s Don Imus, who the channel hoped would re-boot its morning numbers, pulls only 5,000 daily viewers in the demo.

It’s amazing to know that these huge brands pull in smaller audiences than a single small to mid-market radio station. It also reaffirms the Fox brand as the home of the 70+ set.

Fox can play this game because of the business model: Parent News Corp. can literally force Fox Business Channel onto your monthly cable bill by leveraging its more popular channels.

FBN is in more than 50 million homes. Even if each household only pays 5 cents per month, that puts the channel revenue north of $30 million in carriage fees alone. It still likely bleeds cash, but that’s what you can do when you have multiple revenue streams- and when the consumer has little choice regarding cable channel tiers.

Adweek has great perspective on the story…

Last month, in a couple of different posts, we made the case that radio is getting it wrong. The strategy is not working. And now a new STRATA survey of more than 900 agencies supports our thesis.

We argued that old school radio guys (they are almost ALL guys) and the consultants who enable them have swallowed lousy research (PPM) whole, and created game plans that turned radio stations into little more than lowest common denominator jukeboxes.

To recap, we wrote:

Television, with sagging shares and the same lousy economy, managed nearly a 15% year-over-year increase at the advertising sales upfront. Digital media has romanced the auto industry, among many others, and continues to eat more of the pie. Even Public Radio shows growth.

But not commercial radio. Defensive, fear-based programming tactics rack up passive cume, but continue to strip radio of any meaningful sales story and the advertisers are hip to it. The result of all this “work” is anemic, 1% year-over-year “growth”.

With radio’s cash register failing to ring, advertisers are either not sharing commercial radio’s enthusiasm for big, passive cume, or those  advertisers can easily reach those same people through other mediums (television for wide reach, digital for targeted reach).

The STRATA survey data delivers a potential triple-whammy for radio.

Among the unfortunate bullet points:
* The number of agencies reporting radio-focused clients is down.
* The number of agencies who plan to spend less on radio is at a two-year high.
* The two categories agencies most expect to cut spending are auto and entertainment — both are big for radio.

37% of agencies said they’re less focused on radio than a year ago. And no, don’t read that to suggest that 63% are more focused on radio.

In response to the same question, 85% said they were more focused on digital than a year ago, local cable was up 31%, and network TV was up 12% year over year (but up 86% since Q3 2010).

Overall, agencies report that they’re most focused on local television and digital.

The one-two punch of television and digital has crushed print, and radio is flat — for now.

We’ll make the suggestion again — time to re-think. Time to clean house. Time to get back to research, development, and talent acquisition.

Remember, agencies can actually hear your radio station. These pros know the difference between a passive, jukebox-cume-machine, and a station that’s actually exciting, active, and engaged with the audience.

Read also the previous post: Memo to Commercial Radio: It’s Not Working

When Arbitron first announced its Portable People Meter, the methodology behind it, the length of panelist stays, and the small sample sizes, we suggested that stations were nuts to pay for it.

It was kind of like paying for a gun, handing over to someone, and saying, “OK, now shoot me.”

And now several years into the project, more broadcasters are starting to see it our way.

The PPM system has changed radio’s focus from serving and engaging audiences to a focus on body count — cranking up masses to sell on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis.

And while it’s worked for a few, it’s mostly been a disaster for stations. And we argue that, with 1% year-over-year gains (again) while other media makes huge increases, PPM and the corresponding programming tactics have been a near disaster for commercial radio overall.

(See our “Memo to Commercial Broadcasters: It’s Not Working” and the corresponding WYSP/WIP case study.)

CPMs will be driven lower and lower as new media expands offering more and more options for advertisers. It’s loser of a business model.

At the NAB, Henry suggested that stations that don’t make the top tier in a PPM world should just walk away, and invest the money elsewhere.

We agree.

While we think Mike actually goes light on Arbitron, focusing just on the small sample issue, we’ll go one step further, citing the difficulty in recruiting panelists, and retaining the same panelists entirely too long (years?). The lack of variation and turnover in the panel is just as crucial as the sample size. In the diary days, a station could have a bad month due to sample. With PPM, a station could have a bad year based on sample. That usually means that the station goes away.

Money talks, and when Arbitron feels heat from enough disgruntled customers, they’ll adjust. Not before then.

Read Mike Henry’s post here.

The Top 22 Tastemaker Songs for the Week Ending 9-18-11

Panel includes the following hand-picked stations monitored by Mediaguide:

Commercial Alternative: KBZT, KNRK, WEQX, WWCD
College Alternative/Eclectic: KEXP, KCRW, KDHX, WDET, WSGE
Commercial AAA: KBCO, KFOG, KGSR, KINK, KMTT, KPIG, WMMM, WRLT, WRNR, WTTS, WWMM, WXRT
Non-commercial AAA: KCMP, KUT, WERS, WFPK, WFUV, WNKU, WTMD, WXPN, WYEP, WYMS

Download The Top 100 here.