Mumford and Sons with Dawes. Credit Doug Seymour for WXPN.org

Mumford and Sons and Dawes packed the stage for a performance of When My Time Comes as part of the celebration of World Cafe’s 20th Anniversary.

The show was one of many that occurred over the weekend of October 28, with performers that also included Feist, Tedeschi Trucks Band, John Hiatt, Amos Lee, and more.

Thankfully, cameras were rolling and WXPN has just released a clip of the Mumford and Sons/Dawes collaboration.

Dawes with Mumford & Sons – When My Time Comes from WXPN FM on Vimeo.

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi. Credit Doug Seymour for WXPN.org

You can re-live major portions of the 20thAnniversary celebration, as WXPN and World Cafe have archived performances from Indigo Girls, The Jayhawks, Ani DiFranco, Tedeschi Trucks and more on their streaming player.

There are also plenty of photos that capture the moments.

A good place to start is on the World Cafe Tribute Concerts page, and start browsing from there.

Again, our congratulations to David Dye and all involved in this amazing run of success that has lifted the careers of countless artists.

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Robbie Robertson being interviewed by David Dye for an upcoming episode of The World Cafe

Public Radio stations with Adult Alternative music formats converged on the renovated Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware Thursday for the 11th Annual NON-COMMvention.

The gathering featured business related meetings, conversations with industry luminaries, and nearly a dozen music performances.

Jimmy Carter and The Blind Boys of Alabama kicked off the 11th Annual NON-COMMvention

Among the many highlights was a conversation with music business veteran Cliff Burnstein of QPrime management and the MOM + POP record label, who told backstories about Metallica and reminded the crowd on more than one occasion to look for opportunities where others have passed.

The musical performances kicked off with The Blind Boys of Alabama, and rolled throughout the day and night, including sets from John Popper and the Duskray Troubadours, Givers, Sarah Jarosz, Todd Snider, Matt Nathanson, Keb’ Mo’, Over the Rhine, The Head and the Heart, and Thurston Moore.

John Popper

Weather threw a wrench into G. Love’s expected appearance, as he was stuck on a runway in Boston, but managed to show for a late-night lounge performance that started at 12:30.

Another major highlight was David Dye’s interview with Robbie Robertson for an upcoming episode of The World Café.

Topics ranged from stories about his days with The Band, fascinating background about The Band’s support of Bob Dylan, and the inspiration and creation of his new solo album How to Become Clairvoyant.

Here’s a brief clip from that interview, where Robbie talks about meeting Sonny Boy Williamson — all in reference to David’s question about the famous “I don’t play no rock and roll” quote attributed to Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Here, Robbie suggests the line became was adopted by others, hearing it himself from Sonny Boy…

The complete interview is expected to air on The World Café in July — it’s a must-hear.

The coveted Webby

The Webby Awards has announced the winners of it’s 15th annual celebration of all things good on the web.

Pandora won the Music category ahead of nominees NPR Music, Pitchfork, and the amazing  The Wilderness Downtown — the beautiful interactive website put forth by the Arcade Fire and Google Chrome. Also nominated was the increasingly popular and interesting Soundcloud — which provides TheTop22.com with its Song of the Week player.

Other music related nominees included the amazing JohnnyCashProject, which was nominated in several categories, including NetArt and Best Use of Video or Moving Image. The Wilderness Downtown won that category.

Radio and Podcasts are a combined category, and NPR took honors of two sites from the BBC, TED, and CNN.

I hired Webby Awards creator and founder Tiffany Shlain years ago to be our internet correspondent for the KFOG morning show. A hell of an entrepreneur and increasingly strong film-maker, I thought I was doing her a favor with her little internet awards party. Little did I know at the time I should have been hitching my career wagon to her!

The Webby Awards is an excellent resource for webmasters, or any content creator, for that matter, as the site not only schools us on how it should be done, but offers countless ideas that ignite brainstorming and creativity.

Check out the various categories, such as the Best Home Page winner (Lego.com), and then quitely weep about how lame your own site looks.

More than 70 categories in total, including Weird, which this year featured the very funny Awkward Family Photos and the genius recipe aggregation site What the Fuck Should I Make for Dinner.

Find at least an hour at WebbyAwards.com, and come away amazed and inspired.

Photo by Nathan Bernier, courtesy KUT.org

Last week, from my office in D.C., I got a call from a friend who was at SXSW.

I confessed, “Have of me is jealous, and the other half is thanking God I’m not there.” My friend replied, “Half of me wishes I wasn’t here, too.”

Is this what it has come to? A few weeks ago we wondered if SXSW had become too big to matter. With 2400 official shows and countless free shows, you have to wonder.

A collection of stories:

The New York Times wrote a story about all the festival-goers pissing off their friends with useless Tweets from Austin. This may not mean SXSW is over so much as it may suggest that Twitter is over.

Then there were the stories from both NPR and Paste about the 100 best bands at SX (that stands for South-by, which is the shortened version of SXSW). Really, only 100?

Or how about this story from a heavily invested NPR, which features Adam Cohen wondering why he was there. Listen here.

And then this one from KUT — South By South-Mess.

Whether you attended or not, trips to the excellent KUT site and NPR site will give you a sense of what you missed.

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Second Update 3/9: NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) has resigned.
Update 3/9: Ron Schiller, who was to leave NPR in May, has resigned.

With Congress threatening to eliminate the $531 million subsidy for public broadcasting, stations, networks, and content producers are in overdrive to blunt the attack.

NPR is doing them no favors.

The botched firing of Juan Williams sparked a flame, and now NPR fundraising exec Ron Schiller has poured kerosene on the fire. Schiller was punk’d by right wing comedian James O’Keefe, saying on tape that, among other things, that NPR would not be affected much by the loss of funding and in the long run would “be better off without federal funding.”

It’s mind-boggling that this came from the mouth of a fundraising executive not only because it’s so off-message, but also because it’s completely uninformed. Much of NPR’s budget comes from affiliate fees, so for NPR to blow this off is myopic at best.

NPR seems intent on dragging the CPB, PBS, APTS, local stations, and hundreds of content creators under.

Fact is, there’s considerable loose talk in the system about how federal funding makes up only a fraction of the overall operating budget, and how it won’t be missed.

That’s garbage. Often it’s between six and ten percent and can reach into seven figures for some large market stations. Those who dismiss those dollars as not worth worrying about have never sat in the GM’s chair.

At every station, operating costs go up annually. Salaries, health care, rents, equipment, and on and on. Just to stay “even,” a GM needs to add from anywhere between three and nine percent in revenue every single year.

With this cut, just to stay even, they’ll need to add another six to ten percent? Now you’re talking real money.

Sadly, it looks like CPB funding is coming to an end. Even the President’s budget calls for cutting the subsidy to $451 million — a $80 million haircut.

It’s time to look at real solutions, and an obvious but overlooked solution is to link de-funding of public broadcasting to the elimination of the byzantine rules for underwriting.

Many countries have public broadcasters with a mixed commercial model. CJRT (Jazz 91FM) Toronto, for example, is a public station that is allowed to run four commercial minutes per hour. It’s a common practice elsewhere (BBC anyone?).

It’s a hard-to-deny premise for any free-market thinking lawmaker. If you want to de-fund CPB, take the handcuffs off stations and let them monetize in a way that is acceptable to their local audience. Let the market decide.

The National Association of Broadcasters will blow a gasket at the thought, and that’s just fine — they’ll lobby for the status quo.

It’s not far-fetched to imagine KPCC, KCRW, and Classical KUSC combining to suck a clean $20 million-plus out of the Los Angeles market. Imagine what KQED in San Francisco could do.

Admittedly, this idea doesn’t help producers much, but there are other models available to them as well. Just think.

In a post-CPB world, there are other ways of making up the shortfall — like extending pledge drives. But that idea is hardly a winner, and it isn’t one that fosters competition or wakes up a sleepwalking commercial side of the dial.

-Paul Marszalek

We're still pissed the Bears let these clowns into the playoffs to begin with.

Sunday’s Super Bowl drew an audience of 111 million people. Most ever.

Not bad for a dead medium.

In spite of all the doom and gloom about “old media” like TV, sometimes she can still get it done.

Point is, the argument about the superiority of new media versus old media is a bogus one. The winner will always be the one that invests in content.

Rupert Murdoch built an empire in part by methodically collecting soccer broadcast rights overseas, and took that strategy to Fox in the U.S. by grabbing football and baseball rights.

TBS saw an opportunity in Conan, and CBS is willing to give Charlie Sheen $2 million an episode. Today Keith Olbermann signed on with the also-ran Current television channel.

The Olbermann move will be interesting to watch. Averaging just 23,000 viewers in prime time (MSNBC reached more than a million), the channel is available in about 60 million homes. A “fully distributed” channel tops out at about 85 million homes.

If Olbermann can close that gap, the dividends will be significant. Current is a second-tier cable channel that probably costs customers just a few cents a month. Just for kicks, figure that we pay about 10 cents a month for the channel. Closing another 25 million homes at a dime a month would mean a $30 million annual boost for Current. And then there’s the increased ad revenue.

Looking to radio, one finds more evidence that it’s not about the medium, it’s about the content. Stern saved Sirius from certain destruction — even if it cost $500 million to do so. NPR continues to grow because it invests in content.

So that’s the good news. Any medium can benefit from an investment in exclusive content.

However, the major radio consolidators continue their fire sale. On the music side, out are the morning shows, and talent development is largely non-existent. PPM junkies are doing exactly the opposite of Murdoch, TBS, NPR, and Current, turning their media products into commodities.

It may work for a while, but the comps from last year aren’t that great, considering we had election spending this year, and last year was an unmitigated disaster.

The commodity play is a foolish one. If commercial radio stations want to be around much longer, they need to crack open their wallets and invest in the content.

Photo Credit: Martin Philbey

#1 The Audience

Nobody commands more power in Adult Rock than The Audience. The Audience has demonstrated firmly its capability to get what music it wants, when it wants it, on the platform preferred, and sometimes sadly, at the price point it demands.

And in spite of questionable business models, established media companies and entrepreneurs line up to enable The Audience. Razor thin profit margins be damned; more and more people want in.

Screw with The Audience at your own peril.

Deliver a subpar product at the wrong price point, and The Audience will just move on — just as 20 million bought into Sirius/XM, 50 million into Pandora, and an increasing number to Public Radio.

Many radio programmers think they can still outsmart The Audience, pointing to tools such as “M Scores” — which they use in place of true, statistically sound market research. It’s a severely flawed strategy, turning most music radio stations into little more than commodities that aggregate passive audiences.

The Audience knows when it is being conned.

The Audience punished MySpace for its crappy design and lack of interesting new features — they left in droves. MySpace just furloughed its staff for the holidays and is expected to lay off as much as HALF of its staff this week.

With concert ticket prices having become nothing less than ridiculous, The Audience skipped the typical shed show (think commodity) and sought better value at multi-artist festivals.

Concert ticket sales were off 15% last year, so Live Nation announced that they’ll reduce ticket prices — yet another concession to The Audience.

The Audience has options.

In the past year, I’ve facilitated focus groups with core Adult Rock radio listeners in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

When these radio fans were asked where else they learn about new music, not only did New York and Boston listeners cite out of market stations (mostly KCRW/Santa Monica, KEXP/Seattle, and The Current/Minneapolis), listeners in all three cities offered up an un-aided laundry list of go-to sources, including:

Pandora, Sirius/XM, NPR Music, Radio Paradise, The Alternate Side (A WFUV/New York project), Grooveshark, iTunes, Blip FM, “That David Byrne Radio Station” (and others on Live 365), LastFM, Slacker, Rhapsody, Daytrotter, Paste, and Pitchfork, just to name a few of the biggies.

The Audience gets a seat at the table.

While the music business struggles to find its way, there is a path worth following — just ask The Audience.

-Paul Marszalek

NPR released a cool set of slides showing usage of their content, hour-by-hour, by platform — right down to the iPad.

Initially, there are no real surprises, and this data serves as something of a baseline to compare against in the coming months and years. That’s when these graphs will be really fun to look at — to see the massive growth on the new media side (or not.)

Basically, we get the big NPR newsmags spiking radio numbers in mornings and afternoons, and usage of online spiking in midday as people hit the site while at work.

A couple of things to be aware of here — don’t get fooled by the size of that red line. The red scale is on the left representing the new media piece is fractional when compared to the radio listener scale on the right. For example, in middays, peak NPR.org usage is at about 75,000. Not bad, perhaps. But it’s a mere 5% of the usage NPR is getting through its 1.5 million midday hourly listeners.

And there’s what might be getting overlooked. The buzz on new media is so strong, in some organizations, the attention given to it is completely disproportionate to the return on investment. As noted in each of these slides, the usage of the new media products is in single digits as a percentage compared to the usage of radio.

Now it may not be that way for long, but that’s the snapshot for today. Remember to also view this as usage for each hour — it’s not a total “cume.” The fact is, NPR new media is being consumed by hundreds of thousands of people. But still a fraction of the 20+ million using the radio side weekly.

Seeing this again in 6 months and next year will be more telling.

(Note, if the slides are too small, hit the “view on slideshare” button in the lower right for a larger view.)

Vivian Schiller at All Things Digital, Courtesy allthingsd.com

They don’t call it National Public Radio anymore. Never mind that the medium is responsible for reaching 28 million NPR listeners every week. Radio is “too limiting” according to NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.

Then there’s Schiller’s belief in an apparently inevitable decline for terrestrial radio. According to the All Things Digital liveblog:

“Radio towers are going away within 10 years, and Internet radio will take its place. This is a huge change and we should embrace it. Mobile will play a big part.”

The more I hear Schiller talk, the more I get the vibe that she views NPR affiliates as an afterthought, despite the fact that radio delivers huge audiences and represents the number one revenue source for the network.

Additional examples:

Commenting on multiple distribution platforms: “We’re agnostic about the way they listen to it. All of our revenue streams work equally well with each delivery method. And to the listener’s ear, it’s identical. So why should we care? Forty percent of weekday listening is in the car, which makes sense. When cars are Internet-enabled, that should be the same thing.”

On whether NPR will charge for online content: “Nope. That’s our mission, to provide this stuff for free. We ask our listeners to contribute, and about 10 percent of them do, pretty consistently. That said, on a B2B level, this could change. Our stations don’t pay for our Web programming right now, but that could change. They get it free with the radio license fees they already pay.”

On what “device” is most important to her: “Of course, I need to praise the ‘magical device.’ It’s ‘all things to all people.’ I do wonder if it’s going to obsolete the iPod touch….We’ve had 300,000 downloads of the NPR iPad app. The trick is to create an app that takes particular advantage of the device.”

Now if I were a GM of a public station, I’d be having a serious Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.

Just take those three quotes–

“Why should we care?” — well for one, it directly affects your affiliates, and may, in turn, affect NPR’s bottom line as the current business model is in question.

“Our mission is to provide this stuff for free” — as in, finding money to pay for all this is the affiliate’s problem. Schiller is also confusing “our listeners” with the affiliate’s listeners, assuming that those pledge dollars are due to NPR content, and not possibly based on a local relationship between listener and affiliate.

And the iPad is the most important device? Hello?

You gotta admit, 300,000 downloads of the NPR iPad app when there are only 2 million iPads out there is a pretty amazing number. But Schiller’s answer lays bare the serious problems in NPR’s world view.

They’re reaching 28 million people on radio every week, but the most important device is $600 tablet that, to really operate well, requires at least a $25 per month data subscription?

It is this mentality that prevents NPR from truly expanding its audience. Instead of reaching out to new target audiences, it continues to focus on upper middle class, mostly white, elites.

The fact is, NPR is deploying a direct-to-consumer model, which makes perfect sense — for NPR.

But, as we’ve written before, it spells trouble for affiliates in the nearer term (Would You Give Ira Glass Five Bucks?, Is NPR the New Radiohead?).

Do we really think that those 300,000 early adopters of the iPad app are going to keep writing checks to their local affiliates? We’re betting on some significant erosion there. Second, the mostly younger new media consumers are chilly to the “voluntary tax” membership model that NPR and local affiliates currently employ.

And if Schiller thinks that bigger reach is the answer to the business model, don’t bet the ranch. For the foreseeable future, NPR will be trading analog dollars for digital dimes.

NPR did not hire anyone with experience in radio, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Schiller is a little fuzzy on the public radio vendor/buyer relationship.

The network has shown affiliates the game plan, and it’s up to those local stations to respond accordingly. They’ll either make themselves relevant on a local level, or they’ll fade away.

A video excerpt where Schiller talks more about partnerships with new media journalistic startups than affiliates:

Read the liveblog from the event here.

-Paul Marszalek

Recently I wrote about how my consumption of public radio has drastically changed since my work life changed – splitting my week between New York and D.C.

Out was my loyalty to NYC-based public stations and in was a mix of stations along I-95 and on-demand newscasts from NPR’s mobile app.

Most pronounced was my total switch of non-news programming to time-shifted podcasting, on-demand services, and use of streaming music channels.

Programs like This American Life, RadioLab, Fresh Air, and many others now hit my ears exclusively via my iPhone. If I happen to be driving and want music, it’s KCRW’s Eclectic 24, Classical KUSC, WERS/Boston, or WFUV’s Alternate Side. Again via iPhone plugged into my car stereo.

Sensitive to the plight of affiliates, my radical change in behavior is not lost on me. I’m an Arbitron People Meter Nightmare for what should be my home stations – WNYC, WFUV and now WAMU. I listen to pubradio content all the time, and they get zero credit for it.

Most of my time-shifted shows or services make a little pitch for cash to help pay for streaming – like Ira Glass’s ask for a fiver to help pay for This American Life’s annual six-figure bandwidth bill.

So if my pubradio consumption has changed so much, perhaps my support model should change too.

Get Your Geek On: Radiolab's Jad Albumrad and Robert Krulwich - Best Show on Radio-- By a Mile

In past years, depending on how good a year it was, I’d toss around $300-$500 to a handful of stations in the neighborhood.

That seems very dated now.

I mean, c’mon, am I really gonna turn down Ira’s request to give him a couple of bucks? Shouldn’t I redirect my support for the shows and producers themselves?

Currently, This American Life’s home station, WBEZ/Chicago gets nothing from me. Surely that bums out WBEZ head Torey Malatia. And while RadioLab’s WNYC does, they don’t make that many episodes of the show, which bums me out. (BTW, Radiolab is probably the best radio program in production today—a must listen if you really want to get schooled on how to use the radio medium.)

If I went this route – trying to fund the shows I enjoy, how would I know my dollars would actually go supporting RadioLab?

Since I’m picking off newscasts and All Things Considered stories directly from the NPR app, should I support NPR directly– instead of via the affiliates? Even just writing this idea will likely cause KCRW GM Jennifer Ferro to toss a drink in my face at the next pubradio function.

But of course the good news here is that under my new direct funding model, KCRW would see at least something from me, which they currently don’t.

And therein lies the conundrum. Who to fund, who not to fund? Who are the winners and who are the losers?

The winners and losers are easy to identify. Those who create content win. Those who are simply repeaters for NPR content lose. They’re increasingly unnecessary.

The seeds of this disruption were planted long ago, when stations killed their local lineups on the advice of just a few myopic consultants who valued Arbitron ratings over radio’s last “killer app” – serving the local community.

But that’s another story.

Ira, Torey, Jennifer – the check is in the mail.

-Paul Marszalek