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| To survive in to the future, we must step back and observe the past. Radio, especially the musical format and talk/information format to a degree have much in common with what happened not even one hundred years ago with an entertainment genre called vaudeville. Shortly before the turn into the 20th Century vaudeville was the entertainment source for middle and upper class citizens in America. In communities, halls/theaters were constructed for the traveling players of vaudeville to entertain in. Like community radio stations, these theaters/halls entertained the local masses with a variety of acts. Most of them spent the time on the vaudeville circuit perfecting their acts till they played the big time. These smaller venues were avenues for people to break in, to learn the ropes, to become polished (just like it was not long ago with small local community radio stations). Like today we have Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, Tom Joyner, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity to name a few national, Back then it Was Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan. Those vaudevillians I mentioned all did something when technology and the times threatened their very existence/livelihood and that was adapt. See, what killed vaudeville was radio and sound to motion pictures�those two technological advances spelled doom across the county to vaudeville. The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's center, to an exclusively cinema presentation in 1932 is often noted as vaudeville's moment of death. 1932...think about that�radio and �Talking� cinema were not that old and had already caused a major change. Performers who were willing to embrace the new technology and adapt, were able to survive and in most cases became even bigger. What this comparison has to do with the current world of radio is to be aware of what is on the horizon and not be closed minded in thinking something is a threat or an opportunity. Recently, I surfed over the boards of some tech/engineer websites. One of the things that stood out was the downplaying of HD and how many are not perceiving it as an opportunity or a threat. They see things as being slow in development and HD only being available in a few automobiles direct from the manufacturer. When I see and or hear this type of thought, I am instantly reminded of vaudeville and the development of radio and sound to cinema and I am reminded about the MP3 player. Look at how quickly MP3 came to be and partof everyday lives. It was invented and standardized in 1991 by a team of engineers in Erlangen, Germany. This project was financed by the European Union as a part of the EUREKA research program where it was commonly known as EU-147. EU-147 ran from 1987 to 1994. In October 1993, MP2 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2) files appeared on the Internet and were often played back using the Xing MPEG Audio Player, and later in a program for Unix by Tobias Bading called MAPlay, which was initially released on February 22nd, 1994 (MAPlay was also ported to Microsoft Windows). | ||||||
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