Dave Benson
Dave Benson began his radio career 35-years ago, coming up during the AOR days of FM, growing through the ’90s with the part of AOR that morphed into Triple A. The beginning of this decade saw Benson closing out the chapter of his career where he programmed seminal Triple A powerhouse KBCO/Denver-Boulder, moving west to take the reins of another format stalwart, KFOG/San Francisco. Benson remains at KFOG to this day, further developing the highly respected outlet into a Triple A that maintains its long-term listeners while making Triple A relevant to a younger adult audience.
Benson recently talked with FMQB about a lot of issues facing radio today, and in this e-QB interview, the FMQB Hall of Fame Triple A PD addresses the changes that radio has faced in recent times and how radio can keep its audience emotionally invested in this time-tested media.
After starting out in radio, you took some different paths but came back to radio. Why?
I was lucky enough to be a tour manager for the Pat Metheny Group for a couple of years. That was a great break and an incredible opportunity to see another side of the business and to go on the road. It was an experience I would never trade for anything else. It gives me a lot of empathy for how hard the people in that part of the business work.
The other break I took was about ten years into it. I just took a year-and-a-half off after I left The Loop (WLUP/Chicago). I was crispy and took a break, and was lucky enough at the end of that to be invited to work at SBR [Creative Media]. I will say that Dave Rahn and John Bradley helped revive my passion for the business, and I owe them a lot for that.
What was it that revived your passion?
The Triple A thing had gotten quantified in that time. The first Gavin Triple A Summit happened in that time period, and there was a growing realization that there was a format here among all these like-minded programmers and radio stations. And being lucky enough to go to work with SBR, who were right in the middle of that whole new movement, I saw a place for the kind of radio I had always wanted to do, and that in some ways had been doing at ’XRT, The Loop and other places. But now there was a bonafide format and we were all working to solidify the idea and to move the format forward. And it was a lot of fun!
From your standpoint as a 35-year industry veteran, how does the industry develop new, relatable talent when small market stations tend to run on skeleton crews and the “training” dayparts in major markets (overnights and weekends) are being covered by the hard drive? I know what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree with the premise of the question. It’s really rough to find good talent in the tape and resume business, but I don’t think it’s any better or worse today, maybe just a little bit more sparse. But it was never easy and there never seemed to be a surplus of great opportunities for a radio station. I’ve been very lucky and haven’t had to re-staff a lot of stations, but you find the good people or the good people find you. A good manager and programmer’s job is to hear the potential in whatever you hear.
When the voice tracking issue became more of a public debate a few years ago, my contention has been that there were always one or two people on most stations that shouldn’t have been on anyway. In a lot of ways we’ve decreased the number of bodies at radio stations, and increased the quality.
However, what’s happened in the last few years is out of control. What Clear Channel is doing across the country verges on necrophilia. They are decimating the quality of radio stations in all size markets by reducing staff to a frighteningly small size, all in service of stock market pressure.
It’s often said that radio stations use to compete with each other, now they’re competing with other entertainment outlets. How can radio win that battle?
I don’t know anybody who can give you a quick answer as to how radio succeeds in the current environment and in the coming years. We’re really experiencing an almost “perfect storm” of conditions that are rocking the radio industry hard, one of which is the continuing mortgaging of the property values of radio stations to the point where successful stations producing unbelievable margins of 40 and 50 percent are being treated as if they’re failing. There’s a nationwide feeling that radio is in big financial trouble, and that puts a lot of pressure on programmers and managers to do difficult and exacting, and sometimes crazy, things. That distracts us from entertaining and succeeding.
Part of the storm is the current technological revolution. At the same time that we’re trying to do more and more with less and less at a specific station, the Internet world is exploding and, within a year or so, will be pushing radio and marginalizing radio on the dashboard. And the public’s perception of what they’re entitled to in the entertainment and media world is changing everyday. They’re like kids in a candy store. There are so many new bright and shiny objects out there that radio is under a lot of pressure to be super entertaining and super contemporary at a time when we’re being extremely restricted financially, technologically and creatively.
On top of that, you’ve got the whole world economy changing so rapidly that it’s just harder and harder to bring the ad dollars in the front door. So radio’s fighting a battle on three or four different fronts right now, and it’s got a lot of us back on our heels. I, for one, am looking for leaders in the industry, on a national level, who aren’t afraid to invest in the ideas they talk about. Radio is at areally, really critical juncture right now. I think it has a lot to do with your core question, which is, “How do we compete?” It’s not as simple as “bring back a live night jock.” It’s really not that simple. There’s a lot going on.
Is there a way that we can re-instill the kind of passion listeners had for radio as recently as 15-years-ago, but especially going back to the “golden” days of 30-years ago, when they had a sense of “ownership” for their favorite station?
I absolutely believe there is passion for good radio, and I don’t think it’s any less than before. There is a cultural shift going on and, as I said before, the listener has an unbelievable amount of choices and distractions. But people who love radio still listen to radio on an incredible scale everyday. There’s a cultural myth that radio is losing listeners at an incredible rate. Well, yes and no. Radio is still an incredibly vital and popular medium, but we are no longer all alone in the end zone. We share the field now with many, many different devices and distractions, but we’re still highly regarded as a highly effective modern medium, and we have to continue to evolve and use the technologies available to us. But stations across the country have huge audiences who are daily users of those stations, and that is passion.
If you’ve got radio listeners, they have decided to user your radio station in the face of an incredible array of options. So I don’t know if I buy that there’s less passion than there was before. In some ways, anybody who is listening to your station today is telling you something incredibly important, and you better hear it, and that is that they’re still listening. We really ought to be celebrating those people.
If you were asked to speak to a college class covering the music and radio industries, what advice would you give to those considering a career in one or both of those businesses?
Good ideas well presented, and good entertainment, will survive any technological format. And that, as other people have said, it’s not that music is in trouble today, it’s that the business model of the music industry is in trouble and, by extension, so is radio. If you want to be a programmer an entertainer or a journalist, it’s the quality of your content. It doesn’t really matter, after you speak into the microphone, where it goes; it’s what you say.
** QB Content by Jack Barton **
