As a direct result of this redesign, revenues for the site increased 35%.

That's 35%. In a very, very tough year.

Design matters. It isn't about making a pretty website. It's about removing the barriers on your site to what, exactly, you want your visitors to do when they get there. It's a subject I've addressed many times in this space, but nothing beats evidence from the cash register. The vast majority of radio station websites seem to want us to do everything at once, instead of welcoming visitors with something clean and inviting, then sorting out why they came and how we can help them.

Most of radio's digital initiatives have, to date, centered around driving people back to station home pages--but what exactly awaits them when they get there? If you could get your site visitors to do one thing when they landed on your home page, what would it be? How could you address that one thing in a redesign of your site?

To quote Steve Martin, if I could get two wishes this holiday season, the first would be for the stuff about world peace and the kids, but the second would be for the industry to stop building flashy, blinky eyeball bleeders like this, and imagine what design could be like if we first focused on them, not us.

A few years later, Top 40 rebounded and by the late '90s/early '00s, there was a building boom. But a second Top 40 rarely grew the audience by 3-4 shares in the way a second Country had. The new, younger leaning, more rhythmic Clear Channel Top 40s of that era usually cut the incumbent neatly in half, leaving them to tough it out with a 3.5 share or, just as often, get out. The new KAMP (Amp 97.1) Los Angeles is the first sign-on in recent memory that might have conceivably added a few shares to the Top 40 pool.

For a while, it looked like new Hip-Hop/R&B stations were creating new listening. Often, a new Hip-Hop outlet would raid the other Top 40 and leave the Urban relatively untouched. But in recent years, Hip-Hop stations have often shown the effects of fragmentation, even before PPM. Now we've seen Clear Channel's KATZ (the Beat) St. Louis decide that half the Hip-Hop franchise is no longer worth arguing over.

So turn your attention now to Boston, where CBS' new All-Sports station WBZ-FM (the Sports Hub) went 0.6 - 2.5 - 3.6 in the October PPM. Entercom's WEEI, meanwhile, is up 4.5 - 5.2 - 5.3 in that same time. Yes, it was Boston in October. Yes, there was a round of Red Sox playoff games involved. Yes, WEEI might have had an even bigger October without competition. And WBZ-FM began life with Patriots broadcasts. But if any of that growth sustains through the fall, that's a big deal.

And if you're wondering where those shares came from: neither of the Rock stations that might have expected a bump from the departure of the former WBCN have seen one . . . yet. If that sustains through the fall, there are definite shades of Top 40 in 1993 and the only good news is that Top 40 did not fall off the face of the Earth as many then predicted. If both Rock and Sports radio were to go up at some point, we would have a format that not only creates new listening for itself but brings people back to the radio, but for now, creating a few extra shares of listening for one's own format is formidable.

Today, that's correct. Tomorrow, it's not. Tomorrow, when towers and sticks are irrelevant, then a passionate Jimmy Buffet fan with a server in his garage will be vastly more efficient in serving a given audience than any station with overhead could hope to be.

The industry can never forget that its core business is to develop relationships with listeners and advertisers, and use those relationships to promote profitable interactions between the two. Relationships aren't efficient. Human business doesn't scale very well, but I find myself increasingly drawn to companies that act like humans when I spend my hard-earned cash. The things that will set radio stations apart will be an army of dedicated local relationship drivers--sales talent, air talent, technical talent and enthusiastic social media practitioners. More humans, not less--and an investment in entertaining programming to make the pie higher.

Art isn't very efficient--neither is entertainment in general. It's not very efficient to rent a copter and drop a gigantic pumpkin from the sky to watch it splatter on a parking lot, but it's hella funny. It probably isn't very efficient in terms of ROI to send your stunt team to bridges and tunnels to pay people's tolls for an hour, but it sure makes me warm and fuzzy. Seurat, luckily for us, wasn't a very "efficient" painter--surely all those little dots took time. Harper Lee only managed one book, but it was a book to be proud of. I think we'd all like to make things we are proud of. It's a small, good thing.

I'm not knocking efficency, per se--but eventually radio is going to realize that they can never cut their way down to compete with one passionate music lover with an ever-growing list of Twitter followers. The most efficient distribution of Rush Limbaugh will be direct from his house, no towers needed. When that happens, all those stations that cut their way to growth will suddenly be driving empty trucks to nowhere.

And what did the Beat jocks write? "Just want to thank you for all your years of love and support over my radio career!" "I want to THANK everybody for all the kind words and support." "I have no hard feelings and I thank God for the opportunity." Only one former staffer went as far as bemoaning the state of the format: "We were puppets [to] a system. Years and years of non-support (bootlegging, etc.), has finally caught up. Urban radio is suffering all over."

Facebook could, I suppose, make personalities more diplomatic overall; a potential employer is able to see those comments. But it's worth noting that, in any event, these are not exactly the kind of comments that managers worry about when they decide to keep outgoing personalities far away from the mic.

That said . . .

Sophie, for those who will now be able to hear it, fills a need in a market that never got a direct replacement for KYSR (Star 98.7) when that station segued from Modern AC to Alternative. So does bringing WFAN New York to expatriate or wintering sports fans in Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach.

KROQ, on the other hand, will be going against two local Alternative stations of relatively similar stripe. It will be interesting to see how that station's charisma stacks up against the also-world-famous XETRA-FM (91X) and KBZT on their own turf. And there are still CBS markets with no alternative station where KROQ would be welcome.

CBS, by the way, has done a great job of promoting its new Last FM Discover channel, which appears both on-line and on HD-2. To listen to any CBS station on-line (or view its Website) over the last few weeks has been to hear about Last FM Discover--another commendable alternative to the HD throwaways.

I heard a song that I loved instantly because it makes innovative use of a semi-obscure '70s R&B sample, which is always a good attention-getter in my particular case.

Fortunately, they backsold it and I was devastated to find out that . . .

It's a song that has been sitting at arm's length on my desk for at least the last two months.

The song, incidentally, is One eskimO's "Kandi." The sample is Candi Staton's "She Called Me Baby." If I had actually picked up the advance CD and looked at the bio on the back, I would have also known that two months ago.

But the song itself might not have prompted an article. At that moment, I both had greater sympathy for and greater alarm about those program directors who oversee four stations and no longer have the time (or encouragement) to go digging for new music.

So unless you are outrageously happy with the quality of product in your format right now, it's worth asking: Is your next favorite record within arms' reach?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- 2,024,269 -- 0.61%
USA TODAY -- 1,900,116 -- (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES -- 927,851 -- (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES -- 657,467 -- (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST -- 582,844 -- (-6.40%)

DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) -- 544,167 -- (-13.98%)
NEW YORK POST -- 508,042 -- (-18.77%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- 465,892 -- (-9.72%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 384,419 -- (-14.24%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- 361,480 -- N/A

NEWSDAY -- 357,124 -- (-5.40%)
THE DENVER POST -- 340,949 -- N/A
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC -- 316,874 -- (-12.30%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS -- 304,543 -- (-5.53%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES -- 275,641 -- (-11.98%)

The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND -- 271,180 -- (-11.24%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) -- 269,729 -- (-9.56%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE -- 264,105 -- (-18.48%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS -- 263,810 -- (-22.16%)
THE SEATTLE TIMES -- 263,588 -- N/A

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- 251,782 -- (-25.82%)
THE OREGONIAN -- 249,163 -- (-12.06%)
THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK -- 246,006 -- (-22.22%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE -- 242,705 -- (-10.05%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES -- 240,147 -- (-10.70%)

One has to wonder how much of these losses comes from people saying: "Why do I really need the actual physical newspaper any longer? They are giving it away for free online, and I won't have to haul it out to the curb every two weeks anymore."

These disastrous numbers also makes one think of the advantage of "Free" that radio has. In today's environment, discretionary expenses like subscriptions to a newspaper or satellite radio have to be the easiest thing to jettison from the household budget. Meanwhile no one has to consider dropping AM/FM Radio. We also have to consider the strategy newspapers have largely taken with regard to the Internet -- giving away their content for free online, and as the saying goes 'replacing analog dollars with digital pennies."

Meanwhile, what is the one newspaper that is NOT putting its content for free online? Yes, that one paper that didn't shrink, The Journal.

That's because "Hot N Cold" is a top 10 hit at Mainstream AC now, peaking at No. 6 at that format in October, eleven months after it reached No. 1 at Top 40.

Texturally, "Hot N Cold" is envelope-pushing for Mainstream AC -- keyboard-driven female power-pop a few notches hotter than the hits that finally made Pink a regular visitor to the format.

In terms of timing, however, "Hot N Cold" went from Top 40 to AC on a more typical timetable. It took Mainstream AC programmers nearly a year to feel comfortable with it. The AC gatekeepers were a handful of stations that are aggressive on currents, plus any stations that may have thought to put "Hot N Cold" in a library test over the course of the last year.

That's the history of AC, of course: songs take a long time for their familiarity to overcome their edginess and many have taken a decade or two to make the trip. "Hot N Cold" made it a lot faster than "Lights" by Journey or "Jack and Diane." And as a look at Mediabase's AC Top 10 shows below, the lag time between CHR and AC isn't usually quite as extreme.

But at a time when Top 40 is more successful above age 25 than it has been in years in many markets, it's hard to believe that "Hot N Cold" really took a year for adult women to decide they liked it. Just as likely, it was on their radar long before most AC programmers gave it serious consideration.

At this point, some AC PDs are going to glaze over at one more apparent attack on their conservatism. But we're in favor of playing the hits. The only question is what the hits are and where to find them. Are the hits the songs that have finally made it to a handful of AC outlets in other markets? Or are they songs that are being warmed up in your market by stations that you share listening with?

And, of greater concern, without callout and with less regular library testing, how is an AC PD to read the strength of any current?

Here's the AC Top 10 and how long it took each single to travel to the format:

1) Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me" - Still the current single (for a little longer) at Top 40. Peaked in Country in August and in Top 40 in September. In its 14th week on the chart. Practically simultaneous.

2) Miley Cyrus, "The Climb" - One single ago at Top 40, where it peaked in June. In chart week No. 33.

3) Rob Thomas, "Her Diamonds" - Behind Top 40 and Hot AC by one single. Peaked at Top 40 in August. Chart week 24.

4) The Fray, "You Found Me" - One single behind Top 40 and Hot AC. Peaked at Top 40 in March. 37 weeks on the AC chart.

5) Matt Nathansome, "Come On Get Higher" - The follow-up is out at Hot AC, but hasn't gone to Top 40 yet. Peaked at Top 40 in March and at Hot AC in November '08. 35 AC chart weeks.

6) Colbie Caillat, "Falling For You" -- Still a current at all formats. 12 weeks on AC chart.

7) Pink, "Please Don't Leave Me" -- One single behind Top 40, where it peaked in July. 19 weeks on the chart.

8) Michael Bublé, "Haven't Met You Yet" -- "Home" was a rare AC-bred hit of obvious legitimacy and this one is top 10 after seven weeks on the AC chart and ahead of Hot AC (No. 45) and Top 40 (not getting played yet).

9) Katy Perry, "Hot & Cold" -- Two singles behind Top 40 and Hot AC. This peaked at Top 40 in November '08. In fact, "Waking Up In Vegas," the last Top 40 single, peaked in August. "Hot & Cold" is in its 38th week on the AC chart.

10) Daughtry, "No Surprise" -- Still the current single for a few more weeks at Hot AC and Top 40, where it peaked in September. Now at 20 weeks on the AC chart.

There is a conventional wisdom in music radio that news breaks are an "interruption," and few, if any, music stations offer news updates outside of morning drive. When local newspapers disappear as a source for offline community news, however, who's to say that local news wouldn't be welcome--and even expected-as radio redefines its role in the community in the coming years?

I write a lot here about the future of radio, but sometimes that future can be oppressive--so I challenged myself to write a presentation that would help you in the present, no matter where you are, and give you some of the everyday tools I use to positively affect my company, my career, and ultimately my mindset. I lose my voice a bit at the end, but that's really because I am very passionate about this stuff, and I hope that shows. If you weren't able to make the Conclave webinar you missed the chance to join in on the dialogue. However, I've posted the entire presentation here, and I hope you'll take the time to watch it and share your thoughts here with me in the comments section.

BIG thank yous again to the folks at The Conclave and especially Jay Philpott, who handled all the details, and Dave Martin, who graciously offered me the soapbox.

And thank YOU for reading The Infinite Dial. We thrive on your feedback (good, bad and hideous) so keep it coming.

I'm proud to work with Absolute Radio in the UK. Since taking over Virgin Radio in the UK just one year ago, the team at Absolute Radio, led by COO Clive Dickens, has launched an incredible array of digital initiatives which put to shame the efforts of most integrated, consolidated radio operators around the world.

Allow me to list just some of the things they are doing. And think about them in the context of providing unique, non-commodity experiences in exchange for signing up for a master Absolute VIP membership. This squarely puts Absolute in the database game with a whole host of revenue (and relationship) opportunities that may or may not have anything to do with "ratings."

• www.comparemyradio.com is a cross-station search engine that combs through the "now playing" metadata on all UK stations and returns information on what the most popular songs are and what the most played artists on each station are. It allows you to enter an artist or song, see how often it is played on various UK stations, so that you can pick a station that best suits your taste. The engine is "egalitarian" in that it includes both Absolute Radio stations and their competitors, and certainly has a user benefit -- but the really clever bit is that Absolute is capturing all of that search and click-through behavior, instead of their competitors getting it. Learn more from James Cridland's blog post.
• www.songofthedecade.com is a user-generated content site that allows visitors to vote for their favorite song from the past decade and contribute notes about the music. It's a unique joint venture with Spotify and Shortlist and the especially clever bit is that it captures email addresses in an entirely contextual and appropriate manner to drive Absolute VIP membership.
• www.dabbl.co.uk is a completely user-controlled radio experience that broadcasts online and on DAB. Again, it drives Absolute VIP membership by requiring sign-ups to vote for songs, with the added hook that all the songs are special live concert versions from the Absolute archives. Unique content, unique experience. Essentially, they have built their own version of the "Listener Driven Radio" or "Jelli" packages that are being syndicated, with the added benefit of unique content that simply cannot be matched.
• www.onegoldensquare.com/labs. They have developed their own internal development group called One Golden Square Labs. They likely have as many Web and Mobile developers for their one radio station as any American group employs. As with Google Labs, they allow users to see what they are up to, allowing users to act and feel like "insiders" while they experiment with the various new toys OGS is developing.
• Of course, they have a free iPhone app called the iAmp for live streaming, but they also offer a paid app (for about 99 cents) called LiveAmp which offers a richer gateway to live festivals, gigs and concerts by aggregating live videos of bands, interviews, photos of various festivals and even twitter feeds that mention musical acts. A calendar of upcoming shows is also integrated. Listeners can also stream the Absolute stations, but this app really aims to be the "home page" for the UK concertgoer. The iAmp Android app is also up and running with support for Nokia & Blackberry on the way.
• They have developed their own dynamic Podcast channel on the iTunes music store. This helps facilitate even more downloads and they are making podcasting a profitable business, while many American companies are still struggling to figure it all out. Absolute has over 750,000 downloads per month of their unique, non-music content, and it is growing at a fast clip. The new iTunes channel will likely accelerate downloads even more.
• They have 'open' playlist meetings for listeners and advertisers, humanizing the company with behind-the-scenes views of the stations. Tom Webster wrote about this over the summer, and it is an idea Absolute have truly taken to heart.

It's worth mentioning that virtually almost all of these efforts are profitable, or at least paid for. Most podcasts go out with a spot attached. Every site is ad supported. Partnerships abound.

These are just the efforts that have already gone public. A variety of other new approaches to relationship building and digital assets are in the pipeline.

Is Absolute Radio the most innovative radio station in the world? They are certainly the most innovative I've come across. Have other nominees for such a title? What are your nominees for the most innovative radio station in the world? Let us know in the comments!

I point this out not to highlight yet another thing that is going to kill radio, but to remind you all that services like this facilitate the sharing of music--playlists, recommendations, curation--and radio can use them just as well as anyone else. If Google makes sharing and listening to music friction-free, then music radio stations have just as much right to use these services to communicate and share with listeners as anyone else. Look at it this way--Google may be unveiling a potential threat, but they are also probably making sharing music content easier than ever (as they do,) and you can use that to your advantage, if you embrace and do not fear. Revenue trumps Ratings, and Relationships will drive Revenue in radio's digital future.

"£20,000 Says It's You" didn't immediately come to North America. "The Fugitive," another import, got all the publicity. But Canada's Newcap has now done the contest, now known as "Is It Me?" on two stations, Country XL96 Moncton, N.B., and now top 40 CIHT (Hot 89.9) Ottawa. Hot has already had one winner and is now giving clues for the second round, which range from "the subject has a cell phone" and "the subject has short hair" to "the number four is significant for the subject." Contestants have to be the first to call when a new clue is given.

So it should come as no surprise that John Lander, longtime morning host at WBMX (then-Mix 98.5) Boston and KKBQ (93Q) Houston is still doing a morning show . . . .on his Facebook page.

Looking at Lander's Facebook posts for the last three weeks, a handful are snapshots from his life, but there's also a lot of topical material and one-liners. And today, there's impossible trivia: "65% of women say theyhave to do this once per week, even though they don't want to."

I'm a big fan of John Lander as a morning man and a programmer. So I hope someone lets him do this on the radio again in the near future. But as we see smaller percentages of the audience using radio in the morning, it does make one wonder. If an increasing number of people are getting their services from the Internet -- news, sports, weather, entertainment news -- what would happen if the other rituals of the morning show could be codified into a few Tweets or Facebook postings?

Some stations are genuine entertainment sources, others merely provide "services." This particular station provides a service of convenience--rebroadcasting some national shows into the market--but that service is no longer unique in a world where "repeaters" are irrelevant. IP is the new FM. Very, very soon, every iota of programming on this station will be available everywhere, either live or on demand, from sources other than this particular station, wherever mainstream Americans want to hear it. If I have a relationship with Mancow, or Phil Hendrie, then the advertising power of that relationship rests with them, and not with the utility that happens to rebroadcast them in my local market. All of those stations, those "utility" stations, have now essentially been deregulated. To use an airline analogy, these stations are still operating in a hub-and-spoke world, while the post-deregulation startups are eating their lunch point-to-point. Stations like this one, that offer no added value other than a rebroadcasting service, are essentially middlemen. The Internet has not been kind to middlemen.

When the service provided by stations like this becomes irrelevant, they are probably just going to go away. This is not radio's strength. Radio's strength has always been about shared experience, local community. When the relationship rests with the local jock, morning show or other community fixture (on-air or off) then the radio station can use those relationships to put butts in car seats, stores and restaurants. Only that sense of community will empower listeners and make them feel like they are a part of something larger than themselves, and part of something that matters. Then--and only then--can a radio station really deliver results for local advertisers and fill the void left by the cascading failure of the newspaper industry.

Stations that master local relationships will survive. Stations that own unique, strong music positions with passionate communities will survive (that playlist, after all, is also unique content--and most stations don't do enough to capitalize on that online). 10 years ago, stations that did neither would change formats until they did. When IP is the new FM, those stations might just go dark. The market is already making that decision, for some.

Is this 5 years away? 3? 2? Already here? If you knew this was happening, how would you build a station to meet the challenge?

Could you build that station now?