The other shows include Torres vs. Zombies, a zombie-survival podcast, Dork Trek, a “Star Trek: The Next Generation themed” podcast, and a mother-oriented podcast titled Get Mommy a Drink. The latter podcast consists of Frantz’s wife Stephanie and her friend, Sarah LeClaire Heisler, both of whom developed a program devoted to mothers who hate the idea that they should talk about their kids 24-hours a day. Launching in the summer of 2011, the podcast quickly became the network’s most popular offering. Foul- mouthed, obsessed with Duran Duran, and simply unlike any other “mommy cast” offered at the time, Get Mommy a Drink appeared as a recommended comedy podcast on iTunes. It found itself as one of the top comedy podcasts for a number of months, placing them in the company of comedy podcast celebrities such as Adam Carolla, Marc Maron, and Kevin Smith. After an initial stint of podcast fame, Get Mommy a Drink found its core audience of around 10,000 downloads a month and connected with an audience of spirited and dispirited mothers, women who never wanted to have kids, and self-identified gay men.

Get Mommy a Drink‘s success taught Frantz and his colleague’s two lessons. First, the power of finding and filling an niche at the national level. As far as podcasts goes, there was nothing like this in the “mommycast” universe. Secondly, it affirmed what Frantz began to suspect: the idea of turning a “local comedy program” into a “hit” may have to be abandoned. Even though the original Bob’s Boneyard flagship podcast is still the most popular in terms of downloads per month (close to 15,000 a month), Bob’s Boneyard posts three podcasts a week as opposed to Get Mommy a Drink‘s one and came with pre-existing audience from The Mike and Bob Show. In other words, Frantz discovered that his other niche-oriented podcasts, had “more room for growth”. Frantz predicts that “in two years Bob’s Boneyard may have the smallest number of listeners because the other shows are so niche.” As an extension of a local comedy radio show, the podcast lacks a focused topic and is competing nationally not only with all those other local comedy teams from across the nation that are no longer on radio and are now on podcasts, but with fellow podcasters. Frantz understands that he is at a severe disadvantage competing with many of them: “Dana Gould and Marc Maron live in LA and have been in the business for years. They are national performers that use their casts to promote their acts. They can leverage their celebrity and call someone famous to come on their cast. Guys like Adam Carolla has these connections. Even then someone like Kevin Smith is a huge podcaster and has just started making money at this.”

That question – “How to make money at podcasting?” – is a problem that plagues Boneyard Industries and will be explored soon in the third and final post on this topic.

If you are interested in listening to these podcasts, search for them on iTunes or click on the links above.

Indeed, in 2011, Hampton Roads, the portion of Southeastern Virginia where I live, suffered a significant media loss when a 10-year radio drive time show and career came to an abrupt end. Bob Frantz, aka Bob Fresh of Hampton Road’s The Mike and Bob Show on 96XFM, found his show cancelled. Ten years of any media project is exceptional, but in the fickle arena of local broadcasting, shows like The Mike and Bob Show were the rarest of birds in a post-1996 Telecommunications Act context. As a staple among the region’s testosterone-fueled audience of military workers, beach bums, and working-class commuters, The Mike and Bob Show was in and about the local. Local guys doing dumb local guy stuff that other local guys talked about. Like most drive-time shows, this included stunts at the beach, appearances at local bars and restaurants, interviews when comedians came to town, and, of course, giveaways to concerts and sporting events. Describing the program to me in an interview this April, Bob characterized it as “just guys ‘dicking around’ with no real format, working with no real clock. It was just friends hanging out and being stupid breaking balls, mainly just a lot of fun with Mike and I patrolling and delegating the chaos around us as complained about our bosses, friends, wives, girlfriends.” Immature, silly, and full of dick jokes – lots of dick jokes – it was the kind of program that most of my media studies colleagues wouldn’t bother with, let alone know much about. And if they did know about it most of my colleagues would either find it repulsive or kept silently embarrassed about their enjoyment.

Yet all it took to produce some eye-opening results that would seal the show’s fate was a less publicized but important analogue-to-digital media move, Arbitron’s shift from diaries to portable people meters in the Hampton Roads market in mid 2010. After the first book was released, The Mike and Bob Show, a program that had routinely claimed the number-two position with persons 18-34, was now pegged at dead last in the same demographic. Repositioning the show and jettisoning staff members couldn’t save the program from this method-driven nosedive. By the release of the first book of 2011, the show was effectively dead in the water and Bob Frantz’s professional radio career was done. With a buyout package in hand and a radio career in afternoon drive that had begun quickly after he graduated with a degree in history from Virginian Commonwealth University in Richmond, Frantz decided to begin a podcast. And, thus, Bob’s Boneyard, the flagship podcast of what would be an emergent network of shows, came to be.

Of course, these transitions are never that simple nor are they out of the blue. Bob had taken some time off from his show for paternity leave upon the birth of his first child and promptly watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show he both loved and seemed logical to mock on the air. However, even though the program could occasionally “talk Trek,” the program couldn’t find enough room for his own personal TV ramblings. Bob began to think about a Star Trek  podcast. He had become acquainted with podcasting as his 96XFM radio show posted a podcast and online videos of the show as a YouTube channel. When the program was effectively trimmed back from talking 35-minutes an hour to only 3- to 11-minutes an hour of talking in between MP3s, Bob suggested that the show should produce a podcast. The other members of the staff didn’t find the suggestion interesting.

 Whatever their reasons for not producing a podcast, Frantz shortly found himself without a job, time to kill before the paychecks and benefits ran out, and time to find a new batch of reasons. Let go in Spring 2011, Bob Frantz quickly decided within days to  follow the path of other displaced on-air personalities, such as Marc Maron and Adam Carolla, and begin a podcast. And like Maron and Carolla, Frantz drew from radio talent he once worked with on terrestrial radio to bring the podcast to life. Working with Alfredo Torres and Manny Fresh, the three decided to produce the podcast, Bob’s Boneyard, a program that would essentially produce much of the same banter – odd, offensive, and localized – that used to take place over the airwaves. Working with Stephane Frantz, Bob’s wife and soon-to-be podcasting colleague, the the four formed an LLC and moved forward with what would become a successful Kickstarter campaign that netted enough starting capital for computers, a board, and recording equipment and promotional materials.

What digital taketh, digital giveth, albeit one without any cash-flow and health care benefits. Trying to grow a profitable local podcast with advertisers and cultivate a significant audience would prove something different altogether and is the subject for the second part of this three-part post, which is forthcoming. In the meantime, those interested in listening to the Bob’s Boneyard podcast can visit their website or find them in iTunes.

Photo credit: Houston Press

In the media policy wars of the early 2000s, when the Michael Powell-led FCC was hell-bent on eviscerating ownership restrictions, one corporate villain stood out for its egregiousness: Clear Channel Communications (Hissssss).

And deservedly so: as Exhibit A for the dangers of conglomeration run amok, Clear Channel and its 1,200 stations hit a kind of media-monopoly trifecta, bulldozing the values of diversity, localism, and market competition. They bought up all the stations they could in a given market, making sure to hit the maximum number of demographic niches, then programmed them centrally (and unimaginatively) from some computerized studio located in who knows where.

“Thank god,” both music lovers and radio fans said frequently during the Bush II years, “for college radio.”

Well, don’t look now, but guess who just went to bed with Clear Channel: college radio. Clear Channel – destroyer of adventurous playlists, scourge of the live local DJ – has now signed up more than a dozen top college stations for its iHeartRadio distribution service, including such esteemed stations as Radio DePaul, Seton Hall’s WSOU, and the terrific station at my own college, WDUB at Denison. Public stations are available through iHeartRadio too, such as New York’s WNYC, and more are on the way.

Clear Channel is bringing these local stations to the mobile space, competing with satellite radio’s national programming by offering a plethora of interesting local stations over cellular networks. Whereas Sirius XM often replicates the narrow market segmentation and tightly controlled playlists perfected by terrestrial broadcasters like, well, Clear Channel, iHeartRadio counter-programs them with “GOFR”:  good old-fashioned radio, with real DJs in real local studios producing real local programming. The only difference is that the GOFR is arriving through your cell phone instead of your radio antenna.

To be clear: exploitation is still Clear Channel’s game. The company sells ads against these college radio streams, and none of that revenue is going back to the students or their institutions. In other words, the great enemy of radio localism has now found a way to co-opt localism, using these quirky local stations to add value to its national offerings but offering no revenue-sharing or other financial support in return.

Although one station manager I spoke with welcomed the potential for new listeners and greater exposure that will come from partnering with iHeartRadio, the material benefit to participating college stations will be minimal at best. Maybe alumni in Boston or Boise will tune in and, somewhere down the line, write a slightly larger check to their alma mater, but that’s about it.

In the meantime, the economic and policy supports for independent radio in the U.S. remain threatened, and ever more colleges and universities are selling off their radio stations. In fact, one of the college stations picked up by iHeartRadio, Rice’s KTRU, had its transmitter sold out from under it last year by the university; it has since streamed online and leased the local Pacifica affiliate’s HD radio capacity, which few can receive. In that specific case, distribution through Clear Channel seems like an improvement, but it is difficult to see how this deal does anything to preserve college radio nationally over the long term.

Be that as it may, the deal is further evidence that “radio” is undergoing more change, innovation, and excitement (for better and worse) than perhaps at any time since the 1920s.  All that talk of “convergence” and “revolution” in visual media?  As is often the case, it’s nothing compared to radio, which currently boasts more new platforms, technologies, business models, and programming forms than TV can shake a stick at.

Many people have a tendency to imagine, as they did in the 1950s, that radio is a dying form.  It’s easy to do: none of my students seem to listen to much traditional, over-the-air radio, and if it weren’t for NPR, neither would most of the adults I know. But if Arbitron’s latest survey can be believed, more than 93% of Americans age 12 and above still listen to some radio each week, and in some demographic segments (e.g. Hispanics) the radio market is positively booming as a growth industry.

In terms of infrastructure, you now have your choice of satellite, analog terrestrial, digital terrestrial, and internet distribution offering you local and national programming.  Sitting in your car, you can direct your own programming (e.g. Spotify and Pandora), choose your genre (Sirius XM and most terrestrial radio), listen to local stations from all over the country (iHeartRadio), or just plug in your phone or iPod and listen to your podcasts or your own music library.

We’re also seeing the effect on programming, such as the experimentation we’re seeing in the podcast space and innovative uses of audio in shows like 99% Invisible and Radiolab, and alternative business models such as “cottage networks” like TWiT and success stories like Jesse Thorn’s “Maximum Fun” podcast-based empire.

So while we continue to keep a wary eye on Clear Channel and the other behemoths in the radio industry, let’s also admit that, compared to a decade ago, it’s not the worst time to be a radio listener—or for that matter, a radio scholar.  I don’t heart iHeartRadio, but I still heart radio.