It seemed like a good idea to founder Bob Wilson. Put together a weekly newspaper about Radio & Records... both enjoying far better fottune in 1973 than in recent times. Record companies before MTV, in a pre-video, pre-Internet environment lined up to advertise their newest releases. Radio, far too cheap to ever be advertisers, would none the less line up in droves as subscribers, wanting to know what what was going on the air at like-minded stations in their genres as FM stations increasingly grabbed bigger chunks of audience.
It was a natural, except for one problem: Nobody told the truth.
35 odd years and 4 owners later, the same company that owns Billboard owns R&R, and decided in the face of declining revenues from Record Companies and declining subscriptions from Radio - who took what they wanted from the web for free - decided the two publications were redundant and chose Billboard as the survivor, in part because their website requires a paid subscription to access anything relevant to decision making.
Fittingly, executives kept the spirit alive to the end in explaining the rationale for the action on their websites: Nobody told the truth.
Earthquake, tsunami,
'Nobody told the truth?'
ReplyDeleteWhat's that about?
It's hard to come up with a clinically precise diagnosis, but the dysfunctional relationship is like a bad marriage between compulsively lying narcissists.
ReplyDeleteYou don't really want to know how they make that kind of sausage.