Why Digitizing is Good for Public Radio

(by Craig Meyer, craig@reclaimmedia.com) (All Articles)

When it comes to music programming, public radio stations receive financial support because they offer a greater variety of music than that offered by for-profit stations or music which is easily and cheaply discoverable online. When it comes to music, variety is public radio's product, and any way in which they can preserve and improve that variety constitutes a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, much of pubic radio's music libraries are "locked up" in individual CDs and vinyl records that have become prohibitively expensive in terms of time to research, discover and program. Who has the time to listen to a thousand records and find out what they sound like?

At one time, years ago, every single CD or vinyl record in a radio station's music library had an enthusiastic expert/champion who added it to the library. Once that expert/champion has left the organization, however, that music is effectively lost and the station's variety and uniqueness deteriorates.

As the years pass, the following statement becomes more and more true: What music your station once owned on CD or vinyl it doesn't really own anymore because it has become effectively unavailable to your active programming. Your station's cultural relevance and its importance to your listeners is slowly deteriorating as a result.

Digitizing provides a way out of this cycle. By capturing your CD and vinyl library into a digital audio database, once-vicious cycles are made virtuous:

Your music becomes much easier to search for, discover, audition and program. The "transaction cost" between your listeners, your programmers and your library is drastically reduced. Furthermore, research, auditioning and programming can now be done collaboratively from multiple locations over the internet. Any station that's suffered from a star DJ's move to another city, or just really harsh winters, can appreciate the value in providing instant access to its music library to diverse people and locations.

Your library is now preserved against disaster. The records themselves can be shunted off to affordable deep storage and the digital audio files duplicated affordably across multiple locations. This ability to duplicate a library across multiple locations comes as a great comfort in a world where climate change is only making natural disasters more frequent.

And finally, since your programming can offer maximum variety by actively leveraging the music you already own, your uniqueness and cultural relevance are enhanced and preserved for the future. This variety translates into a hard-to-measure but very real boost to your bottom line.

And finally, thanks to our continuing commitment to fidelity, automation and consistency, Reclaim Media has made mass audio digitization more affordable by an order of magnitude. Our price quote for KCRW, a publicly-supported station in Santa Monica, was for less than a tenth as much money as our nearest competitor (Blue Wave Audio in Hollywood) and for a quarter the timeframe. KCRW was able to fund the project almost entirely through their "Save the Music" fund drive that ran concurrently with the digitizing work in real time.

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