With a career spanning over 40 years, Dennis Constantine has established himself as one of the stalwarts of our industry. After spending the last two decades-plus in Triple A as both a consultant and PD, including stints at KBCO/Denver-Boulder, KINK/Portland and KFOG/San Francisco, Constantine recently became an in-house consultant at Internet broadcaster Live365. In this FMQB interview Constantine talks about why he chose to leave traditional radio and what his future holds at Live365.
Dennis Constantine
By Jack Barton
With a career spanning over four decades and multiple Rock formats, Dennis Constantinehas established himself as one of the stalwarts of our industry. From his professional birth in Baltimore’s Top 40 radioscape in the ’60s, through the launch of Denver-Boulder’s KBCO, consulting key Triple A stations during the format’s formative years, the market dominance ofKINK/Portland and his tenure leading KFOG/San Francisco, Constantine played a hand in radio history while contributing to the success of more music careers than you can count. So when Constantine parted ways with Cumulus’ Bay Area cluster earlier this year, it would have been safe to assume he would quickly land at another Triple A outlet and continue doing what he’s always done. But instead, he felt like challenging his comfort zone and learning new things, leading Constantine to take an in-house consultancy at Internet broadcasterLive365.
Live365 has been around since 1999, taking a decidedly different approach to Internet broadcasting than just putting one station on the platform and looking for ways to monetize it. Instead, Live365 partners with both professional and amateur broadcasters offering a platform and services to help everyone – from the most experienced professional to the novice who just wants to reflect their own taste on “the radio” – not only to get their products into cyberspace, but also to do it in the best ways possible. Here is where Constantine comes in.
In this FMQB interview, Constantine talks about why he chose to leave traditional radio and formats behind to join Live365, plus how Live365 helps thousands of “alternative” programmers get their messages to the masses.
You had a number of options after leaving Cumulus; why did you choose to become an in-house consultant for Live365?
I could have gone to another radio station and continued doing the same thing I’ve been doing, but I wanted to branch out and learn new things. I wanted to explore the world of Internet broadcasting. I really think it’s the future and I want to be a part of that.
Live365 is a platform for over 5,000 radio stations that are programmed by individuals. We do carry some commercial and non-commercial stations on Live365, but the majority of the stations are created by people in their bedrooms, or in their dens, and it’s their own personal music tastes, so they create these stations that express their love of music in their own way. So for listeners, instead of being programmed by a computer with algorithms and calculations, it’s actually programmed by individuals who are expressing their own style and taste in music.
With such a broad platform and individuals programming their own stations, what is the consultant’s role?
Live365 started in 1999 and was the first destination on the Internet where you could listen to music. Since then, all these other companies – such as Pandora and Spotify – have created places where you can go listen to music online. Live365 has really not re-invented itself in all these years, so I’m here as sort of a brain trust to come up with new ideas, new thoughts and new ways of doing things, just to keep it fresh and exciting and also to re-invigorate it.
I am working with individual stations and calling them and giving them some thoughts about things they could do, and also working internally re-doing systems making them more appealing for people to come here and broadcast, and also for people to listen.
What sets Live365 apart from the competitors you mentioned?
The experience right now, when you go to many of our competitors’ front pages, is you can start listening to music right away. With ours, you come to the front page and you need to choose what style of music you want to hear and go through a couple of little steps. It takes a little while, so we want to make it streamlined so that somebody can come here and start listening to the kind of music they want to hear immediately. If you know where you’re going, it’s very easy. But if you’re really not sure what you want, you start scrolling through all the stations until you find one that looks kind of interesting, and then you click on it. We want to make it a much easier process, so you can come in and be guided to exactly what you want. That’s the experience we want people who are listeners to have, just come in and it’s easy to find immediately.
It seems like you have a large cross-section of programmers, from people who do this as a hobby to those who are in it as commerce. How do you bring all of these together into a revenue-producing business model?
We have three sources of revenue. We have ads we sell, so some listeners who want to listen for free will get some ads in their listening experience, and then there are subscriptions. Subscriptions take the ads out of the mix, so if you want to pay $5 per month, then you can listen without the ads.
The third revenue source is from the broadcasters that want to do it as a hobby. They pay us a monthly fee to stream their broadcast on our platform and for us to cover all their licensing and we pay all the BMI/ASCAP/SESAC and Sound Exchangefees for them. So we have a soup to nuts package where we’ll cover everything for you or we let you use the platform to broadcast if you’re paying your own fees.
So as the consultant talking to all these programmers, what are you talking to them about?
Well we have a lot of tools available. We have the like button and the dislike button, and all those kind of things. And there are ways you can look at the data from your listeners to see what is working to find out what songs your listeners like or dislike so we can help you fine tune your mix to be more appealing and you’ll have more listeners, because the broadcasters can make money by having more listeners. The more listeners they have, the more they get paid.
I have a station on there called Boulder Mountain Sound. I put the station on the air a few days ago and so far I’ve made 11 cents from people listening to it. If I started publicizing it on my FaceBook page and started telling people about it and people started listening more and more I’d get bigger checks every month. Ultimately I think that’s what people want to do. Especially in this time when so many out of work jocks are looking for something to do. This is an opportunity for them to create their own branded radio station and make a little money doing it. One of the things I do is help broadcasters maximize their revenue potential and their listenership potential. I’m also going to go around to colleges and help them start getting radio stations off the ground for their students. Maybe they don’t have an on-air station, but they could have an online station for the students. There are a lot of things we want to do for people.
So you mentioned Spotify and Pandora; how does Live365 fit in to the mix for new music discovery for the person who doesn’t know where they want to go?
We actually have a product currently in development that’s going to be all about music discovery where people can actually hear new music, save it and buy it. They can save a list of what new music they like and they can click right there on the page and buy it. It’s an opportunity for new artists and for record companies to expose their new music and get people to listen to it and buy it.
Are there opportunities traditional radio is squandering that you can take advantage of on the Internet side?
I think what they’re squandering is the creativity and ideas. The things we did so well in radio is we created imaginative and interesting things to do in our local communities, whether it’s raise money for charities or creating locally oriented programming; things that would connect the station with listeners. Because of all the cutbacks that are happening at stations, it’s hard for people inside the radio stations to continue that level of interaction with listeners because there’s just not enough people and time to do it.
So how can Internet broadcasters take advantage of that?
Let’s say an advertiser wants to reach women 18-34 in Chicago. We can find them by using IP addresses and information we have about our listeners and deliver messages directly to them that only they are going to hear, because the spots and information will be targeted to them. So there are things we can do on the Internet where we make it really localized. I believe that’s the key: localization.
What is the practical future of each form or platform of radio?
The old days of selling commercials and running long strings of commercials is being replaced by the new model which is delivering commercials in shorter, more concise breaks. I love the way Pandora does ads. They don’t play jingles, they don’t have screaming announcers, they just have a man or a woman talking about something and then they go back to music. It’s not insulting to the intelligence of the listener, and I think it’s gotten to the point where commercial radio stations have become so dependent on this old model of advertising and agencies, that they’ve lost sight of the original purpose of the ads, which was to deliver results for the advertiser. If Joe’s Diner or Bob’s Car Lot advertised on the air, the goal was for people to come down and buy something, whether it was lunch, or a car to take a test drive or whatever. It’s gotten so far away from that. It’s all about cost per point and of course the cost per point keeps going down, so the agencies try to get better deals and the revenue goes down. So the stations have to add more commercials just to stay even with where they were last year. As long as those comparisons are in place it’s going to be a losing battle for radio. What they need to do is blow it all up and say, “We’re building something for the future,” and maybe that means you sell an hour or a day to an advertiser. I read today that Pepsi Cola still believes in radio, but the thing that works for them is the personal endorsements. It’s like somebody getting on the air and opening a Pepsi and taking a sip and saying “Ah man, that’s great, just really refreshing.” It’s something from the heart and has meaning, and then you go back and play an hour of music, and you’ve just sold yourself a bunch of Pepsi.
When I first got into radio you didn’t play two ads in a row, and most of the ads were the jock talking about it. You’d have your live copy book and you’d flip the page to what the ad was and then you’d just talk about the advertiser and then go back to the next song. And that was the deejay’s job. Now it’s at the point where the jocks are told to talk over the intros of the songs and keep the breaks short; any kind of talk is a tune-out. You’ve basically got to be a personality and get out of the way and then do that four times an hour. It’s crazy; it’s stripped away everything that made radio special.
[eQB Content By Jack Barton]
