Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.

Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.
On The Air Everywhere

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

By Ken Levine: UnReal

By Ken Levine: UnReal















Dain Schult, CEO, Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.

www.globalentertainmenttechnology.com

www.dainschult.com


I have to cop from Kahlil Gibran to make a statement:



On Children - The Prophet -  Kahlil Gibran



Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.



You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,

but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.



You're not out of touch Ken.  Your television children had children who then had children and here we are today.



The sitcoms and dramas of yours and my youth are quaint and Smithsonian worthy now.  What passes for comedy and drama now is so alien, it's a perpetual "Stranger in a Strange Land" song outtake.



When I was 25 I was thrust into managing a suburban Atlanta radio station - it was heady times.  I inherited this old geezer  who went by the nickname, "The Gator" who was my music consultant.  He was in his sixties and looked like he needed to be wheeled over to a rest home.  And yet when the record reps used to show up on Tuesdays to hawk their wares and drop a needle on the singles they were pushing, the Gator was amazing.  This guy somehow managed the impossible - his ear for music didn't age with his body.  He could pick the hits within 30 seconds or less of hearing a new song.  It astounded me.  I always said that I wanted to be like him when I was his age.



Now, I'm in my sixties and having stayed in management and ownership, my ability to pick a hit song now is so non-existent to not be remotely funny.  My kids are in their twenties and thirties now and what they listen to, I can't.  And their children's musical tastes are that much farther away from me now...



The quality of what you or I did in the past isn't denigrated - it's just the natural evolutionary process.  Most of what I see on television right now is straight up dreck and/or I don't get it.  But then again, I don't want to get it.

(As an aside, GET will be involved in both Terrestrial and Internet radio operations in states across the country, including, but not limited to Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Iowa and Wyoming.)

Sunday, August 28, 2016

By Ken Levine: I hate Power Point

By Ken Levine: I hate Power Point














Dain Schult, CEO, Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.

www.globalentertainmenttechnology.com

www.dainschult.com

Amen, Testify!  Here's a novel thought - someone gives a talk, a presentation, an anything - without props of any kind.  They're engaging in their presentation and so practiced and nuanced in their delivery that they hold the audience in the palm of their hands with no visuals - just their voice as the Theater of the Mind...  nah, it'll never work - everybody has ADD now thanks to the Internet... 

Dain

(As an aside, GET will be involved in both Terrestrial and Internet radio operations in states across the country, including, but not limited to Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Iowa and Wyoming.)
Is Terrestrial Radio Still the Cockroach of All Media?  by Dain Schult













Dain L. Schult, CEO, GET
www.globalentertainmenttechnology.com

Cockroaches can survive a direct nuclear warhead explosion. That was proven back in the Fifties when nuclear bomb tests were taking place all over the world.

Ironically the Fifties was a time when the original Golden Age of Radio was giving way to the first Golden Age of Television. All of the most famous radio show stars migrated to television with varying degrees of success. So that was the first test as to whether radio was washed up and ready to fade out like Vaudeville had in the Twenties when radio first appeared on the scene.

And just like the cockroaches running around after the bomb blew up, here came Allen Freed, Dick Clark and Top 40 Music Radio and the industry romped on merrily through the rest of the Fifties and all of the Sixties and Seventies with music radio supplanting the old days of soap operas, game shows, variety show and comedies that were all long gone to network television.

Then the Eighties hit and AM radio was gasping – FM had sucked all of the music off the AM dial for itself because it was stereo and AM wasn’t. Like Steely Dan sang – “no static at all…“

So who should appear to save AM but Rush Limbaugh (the greatest person to ever come out of Cape Girardeau, Missouri – just ask him) and with him came an army of other “talkers” who transformed the AM dial into a haven for every kind of talk, news and sports radio – all designed to engage and enrage you so that you would keep coming back for more. And the radio cockroaches kept right on scurrying about.

Meanwhile MTV and then VH1 were doing their damnedest to steal FM radio’s music audience away but could never assault radio where it mattered the most – in car listening – and besides, when the music industry really started tanking and the money for new music videos dried up MTV was the one having to reinvent itself. And yes, the radio cockroaches were alive and well and running around in everyone’s cars…

The late Nineties brought on satellite radio – XM and Sirius before the shotgun marriage that became SiriusXM and its own assault on radio. Like a mutant derivative of terrestrial radio, it has confounded all the experts by continuing to not just survive but actually show a steady stock price – something iHeart Media or Cumulus can’t do apparently. Satellite is a factor in cars – not so much really anywhere else.

And then there was Internet Radio. The next logical evolutionary step in media and the very thing that neither the record industry nor terrestrial radio could kill though the music industry tried as hard as they could – when 10 Billion+ songs are being downloaded off of YouTube every year and converted to MP3 files without having to pay anybody anything for the music, you’d want to destroy it too, but I digress…

Old head terrestrial types used to think that just taking the on-air programming feed and shoving it on-line as well as “Internet Radio” and learned over time that wasn’t the answer.

The Next Radio crowd is banking on all of the phone manufacturers to put their FM chip in all the new smartphones they sell and while that is having some success it hasn’t taken the market by storm yet at all.


So while some people will argue over whether Pandora or Spotify is “radio” or not, it appears more now that Internet Radio is the future so the real questions are how much of the future is here right now in front of us or actually in our ears? And how much is yet to come?

With 700,000+ Internet Radio stations coming and going every day, it sure looks like the future even if it’s totally jumbled and a version of the Tower of Babel at any given moment. This will be a totally different breed of cockroaches, to be sure.

The older cockroaches are still running around but they tend to be congregating in smaller towns and rural areas now – places where major market radio hasn’t killed everything and where a local DJ at their local station really still means something. So small town/rural radio will be the last to fade off the air.

Everything changes. Life is change. Business cycles come and go. The baby today is tomorrow’s old man waiting to die. And yet, there will still be cockroaches running around listening to radio – in one form or another.

What do you think?


(As an aside, GET will be involved in both Terrestrial and Internet radio operations in states across the country, including, but not limited to Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Iowa and Wyoming.)

Friday, August 26, 2016

What If There is No There There?














Dain Schult
Chief Executive Officer of Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.
www.globalentertainmenttechnology.com


What If There is No There There?

Anybody out there who remember Gertrude Stein?  Of course not, but you're probably googling her name right now.  She was a character before being a character was fashionable.  She was her era's Lena Dunham without the social media buzz to create celebrity.

Ms. Stein is best known for her pronouncement, "There's no there, there" which is interesting because she was deriding her hometown of Oakland, California.  I would have to disagree with her if only because the Tower of Power came from Oakland so something good did originate there and the band did put the city on the map culturally if nothing else.

Yes, we've all been places in our life where there was no there where we were there - does that make any sense?  I spent year one afternoon in Chunky, Mississippi, so I have some clue to all this, but that really isn't the point of this.

This is.  What if there really isn't a there in the Frankenstein monster that is the mixing of a gazillion forms of social media with raging, never stopping digital technology development?

Then what?  Instead of just changing underwear every day, we'll be needing to swap out smartphones or notebooks every day too?

What about how one gets musical entertainment now?  

With somewhere north of 700,000 Internet radio stations and digital outlets screaming for attention along with YouTube and everything else on the net plus terrestrial radio and (here's something novel) vinyl records, it comes to the point of how many songs can you listen to at once?  Like how many watches can you wear at one time? Or pairs of shoes?  Or anything else?

So when you get "there" it's not that there isn't something there - it's too much of everything there, so, in essence, there is no there then.

Gertrude Stein was right.


With the Push of a Button - Dain Schult





Being in radio for what seems like forever, the thought was that when a listener driving in a car didn't like a song or a commercial, the easiest way to get rid of it was to push another button on the car radio and try another station (unfortunately the competitors).

These days with ad blockers for both computers and smartphones you don't even have to push a button anywhere to make the commercial or pop up ad go away.

Making a song go away and switching from one Internet Radio station to another is a different animal, to be sure, but all in all, it appears that it has gotten easier than ever to ignore the very thing any advertiser wants - to have their ad listened to or viewed and then acted upon.

What are your thoughts on this?

If you have any experience in dealing with this in marketing, I'd like to hear your thoughts. The Internet is the ultimate Tower of Babel already but there has to be a way to provide advertisers a path to success in marketing their services and products.


(As an aside, GET will be involved in both Terrestrial and Internet radio operations in states across the country, including, but not limited to Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Iowa and Wyoming.)