Ignore The Hype

I received a comment about my post on AirSpun that described my opinion as a "smear." I responded to the specific complaints in the comments section of that post, but I did want to address the bigger point of AirSpun's business model. In short, the company's problems are fixable. My issues with AirSpun aren't that the idea behind their business is bad but rather that the service they provide is bad. How can they improve? Well, the following would be a good start:

• Don't charge for overnight spots
• Either don't sell them at all or provide them as free bonus spots for people who buy a longer schedule. I can't emphasize enough how worthless overnight spots are. Selling them to indie musicians who don't know any better is not much different from outright stealing from them.
  
• Require a minimum purchase of 10 spots
• As I outlined in my original post, the nature of reach and frequency is that a message isn't going to get across without being heard numerous times. That would require more than 10 spins, but at least 10 would be a minimal start. Selling less than 10 spins will have a marginal impact and is pretty much a waste of money.
  
• Give the artists more time to customize their spot
• The current AirSpun template includes a brazenly self-serving ad for AirsSpun.com that is part of the required 15 second tag at the end. Why are you advertising your service in an ad that the artist is paying for? Sure, you need to include a legal mention at the end of the spot that states it is a paid commercial, but that doesn't need to be more than 3 to 5 seconds, and it certainly doesn't need to include AirSpun self-promotion.
• Give the artist 50 to 55 seconds of time to include either more music or a co-op ad with a local venue or record store.
• Require radio stations to define spot schedules using exact language
• Is it too much to expect a station to tell an advertiser that the spot is going to run 3pm-7pm Monday-Friday? No, it's not. So why do they use undefined terms like "prime" that potentially can be twisted to mean a wide range of times if the station has oversold its inventory?
• Use a paid monitoring service to verify that ads aired
• Radio stations are infamous for filling out affidavits swearing that they ran advertisements only to have never run them. And why not? Outside of sitting by the radio all day long, there's no way to know for sure.
  
• AirSpun can--and should--get around that by using a paid service like RCS's monitoring subsidiary or somehow convince BDS or Mediabase to monitor the commercials.
  
• The irony here is that this problem would be solved if Mediabase or BDS monitored the commercial spins, but AirSpun has taken pains to point out that they don't want that to happen.
  

As my follow-up post on Google indicated, a lot of these problems inherent in AirSpun aren't relevant to dMarc/Google: dMarc uses a computerized system to monitor the airing of commercials, the musician has total control over the content of the ad, the spot schedules are purchased using very specific language, and you can exclude overnights if you want.

It would be nice if AirSpun, which claims to be a small company sensitive to the plight of the aspiring recording artist, actually served them as well as the corporate insensitive behemoth that is Google.

Labels: Airspun, Google, radio airplay, radio promotion

Posted by Jack on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 10:02 PM | Permalink