The Collapse of Old Media and Antique Ratings Systems.

By Mike in Tokyo Rogers

It's a recurring theme in many of my blogs; the old order is quickly collapsing right in front of our faces; TV and radio are dying.

Viewership and listenership of TV and radio are sliding down a steep slope and there's no recovering. Of course, think about it; anyone who has the time, in this day and age, to sit for 3 or 4 hours a day, everyday, in front of the TV must either be;

a) Jobless
b) Poor
c) Inactive
d) Lazy

Hate to be so rough sounding but I can't think of any sponsors who want to advertise or market to people who are inactive, lazy or have no money.

Most terrestrial TV & radio stations are both heading the way of the Short-Wave or Ham radios. The Internet is allowing for totally new ways for entertainment to be delivered to a targeted audience. Why would sponsors waste huge budgets on TV advertising that advertises to EVERYBODY when they can target their select group?

They won't. That's why old media is dying a slow death. Read more about that here and here in two articles I wrote about the Long Tail.

What a waste of a life. People who fear death, 

yet don't know what to do with themselves on a slow Sunday.

George Williams and a few few friends and I will be launching a new online concert series starting September in Japan. That's about all the details I can give right now because everything is still Top Secret.

This online concert series has come about because Japanese artists and musicians have gotten fed up with the old order and major record labels telling them what they can and cannot do. It also comes about because artists have seen with their own eyes what the Internet and Social Media can do for them.

From SNS services such as Mixi to Facebook and Linkedin, there are many artists in this country just now plugging in and finding out that they don't need a major label to tell them what to do and how to think. Twitter and Pick are also doing very well in this country even though it doesn't really seem that many artists have plugged into how it can help them to become independent.

Five nights a week George Williams has Japan's top artists on his U-Stream, and now, he's starting to place recorded versions of those shows on YouTube. Throw on top of that his blog that's about to begin (including blogging and video blogs) then you have a guy, in the music industry, who is showing these musicians first-hand just how simple this can all be.

The online concert series is all a part of this simplicity and freedom. One of the famous artists, Koji Kurumatani, who is an important partner in this online concert project told me that musicians are sick and tired of the old order.

He also mentioned that he (and I gathered a bunch of his other friend musicians) had come to the conclusion that it was absurd to sign with a major label as today's top selling albums on the Oricon Chart (Japan's version of the Billboard Charts) sells about 30,000 copies.

Koji said,  "If an artist signs with a major and only gets a 2-5% royalty with a major label, then they only sell a few thousand copies, then why bother? It would be much more profitable and fun to do it completely Indie."

Of course, Koji is 100% correct.

To prove that this collapse of the old order is not happening just in Japan, here's an article from the Washington Post that talks about TV getting the worst ratings in history last week.

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans avoided television in historic levels over the past week.

CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox together had the smallest number of prime-time viewers last week in two decades of record-keeping, the Nielsen Co. said. Given the dominance of the big broadcasters before then, you'd probably have to go back to the early days of television to find such a collective shrug.

The first week of July tends to be among the slowest weeks of the year in television, anyway, with families more engaged in barbecues and fireworks. The problem was magnified this year because July Fourthcame on Sunday, largely knocking out one of a typical week's biggest viewing nights.

Together, the four networks averaged 18.9 million viewers last week, Nielsen said. During the season, "American Idol" alone usually gets a bigger audience than that.

I'm sure that this sort of article will be coming out less and less in the near future. Why?

Because every week will be worse than the last one for TV, radio, magazines and old media. And this sort of story is becoming old hat really quickly.

The only place that will shine from here on out is the Internet.  The revolution is being televised - not by what TV is showing, but by what they don't show.  

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