Features
Pollstar Live! Radio Is Not Extinct
With the ever-growing field of social media being used to promote concerts, is radio still a viable option to sell tickets? The answer is yes, in more ways than one.
Richard Palmese of Palmese Entertainment, who spearheaded breaking
See Also: Extended Pollstar Live! Coverage as well as Pollstar Live! Facebook and Twitter
“Obviously radio doesn’t have the impact it once had, but the impact of radio is still major. Without a doubt, you reach more people through radio than any medium when it comes to delivering music,” Palmese said. “In a given week … you’re getting numbers like 100 million a week.
“[With] The Lumineers, a folk band, we broke it first at Alternative, then Triple A, then we took a risk and took it to Pop. It worked and their audience now sits at [about] 114 million – right up there with some of the biggest stars like
He added that artists including
John Sykes of Clear Channel Media Holdings/iHeart Radio agreed.
“I’ve been on both sides of the fence, active in the recording industry, working at MTV and VH1, [seeing] the way an artist cuts through. We all know the consumer is the eventual decider,” he said. “It really is about letting these artists get their music out there.
“For [Clear Channel], we just thought, historically, that radio did a bad job selling itself [but] radio is still the juggernaut. It still comes up in surveys as the No. 1 way an artist’s career is broken. It’s about 98 percent of our revenues even though we have a beautiful digital platform. It’s still about a focused dedication to breaking artists.
Ken Lane of CORE Media Group, the company that owns “American Idol,” “So You Think You Can Dance” and more, said the best thing is to partner radio and an artist.
“Everyone knows ‘American Idol’ has a huge audience, [even though] dipping in the last few years. We’ve seen artists like
Broadcast icon Art Laboe, a 2012 Radio Hall of Fame inductee who hosts “The Art Laboe Connection,” a nightly old-school, listener-request show on iHeart radio and promotes and hosts concerts such as “Art Laboe Show LIVE,” said his audience demographics vary.
“On my program, people call in and I talk to them briefly – maybe 30 seconds or so – about music and what they want to hear. It’s kind of an old-fashioned request show,” Laboe said. “On iHeart Radio, I keep the dedications that come in. All of sudden, they got on iHeart Radio and I’m getting requests from all over the country.
“I asked a young lady from Houston [what station] she listens to, and she said iHeart Radio. I said, ‘There are at least 30 or 40 stations in Houston. Why are you listening to my show on iHeart Radio?’ She said, ‘Because there’s nothing exactly like this in Houston where I can get on the radio, ask for a song and actually hear it.’
When an audience member asked the panel if services like Spotify or Pandora are any threat to radio, Sykes said he doesn’t think so.
“There’s two ways we listen to music. If you look at Pandora, and there’s a custom feature on iHeart as well, where you can build a list, that’s kind of like your record collection. No one really talks in between, no one is helping you discover new things,” he said. “Radio is about ‘Here’s this, discover this, this is our favorite.’ The talk in between, as much as people debate about that, is almost as important as the music because they’re curating it [and] telling you what it’s all about.”
Moderator Billy Brill of
“The No. 1 mistake we make as concert promoters is we don’t think like fans. We over-analyze it,” Brill said. “And when we negotiate a deal … go to that local radio station, bring them to the venue and ask them, ‘What can you do to sell a concert ticket?’ We forget to do that.
“It’s very simple. Radio sells concert tickets. They want to be your partners, they want you coming back with those 15 or 20 shows a year.”