It's all about making The Inention Economy happen.

Dave Lockie: We Get to Decide What the A in AI Stands For. This follows The Intent Stack: A New Design Space for Human-AI Collaboration. Also dig Intent-Driven Commerce: What E-commerce Can Learn from AI Agents and DeFi.

Dialing out

Cumulus Media, one of the three big owners of commercial radio stations, just filed for bankruptcy. Audacy, another of the big three, did that two years ago. iHeart, the third, did it in 2018, came out later, and today is less weak than the other two. But the whole commercial radio station business is doomed.

For the civilized world, radio was for many decades the main way to hear music, news, and talk over the wireless connection we called "signals," which came from "stations" and heard on devices called "radios." Now we can listen to an infinite variety of music, news, and talk using smartphones, which are also required for much else in our civilized lives. Want a radio for your house? You won't find one at CVS, or even Best Buy. (Well, maybe online.) But you're likely to find one at a thrift shop or an antique store.

The value of AM stations is diving to zero. When Cumulus took its off-the-shelf conservative talk programming off KSFO/560, and put it on its 810 AM signal, it turned off the 560 signal completely, and erased the KGO callsign on 810, ending KGO's century-long landmark existence, during which it ruled ratings for something like eighty years. Apparently, there is no market for the 560 AM signal, even though it could easily be diplexed onto any number of other stations' AM towers around the Bay. Nobody wants to spend money on AM at all.

In cars—the only places where broadcast radio still has listeners—the makers are burying radio functions behind others on dashboard "infotainment" systems. Gone are knobs for tuning. What people mostly want now is to put their phone screens on the dashboard, with Android Auto or CarPlay, and then play whatever they like.

I have a lot more to report on this, but I will save it for another post somewhere. Meanwhile, I will say I have hope for noncommercial (public, religious) radio. I think they'll be most of what's left after the market collapses, simply because their listeners will pay for it. Advertising at most has been a side thing for them.