Morning radio is a concept that has been around for as long as my twenty two year old mind can remember. I remember listening to Matty in the morning on my way to school in middle school, and listening to other radio hosts at other points of my life blabber on while I was still coming to grips that I was up and not in my bed.
Those of you who do have a morning commute may also be familiar with the idea of a morning radio show. The most recognized name of our generation is no doubt Howard Stern, but go to any market and you will find some middle-aged guy cracking wise between the hours of 6:00 and 10:00 AM. Like most forms of media however, this model is starting to become less profitable for the radio stations, and these types of shows are beginning to disappear from the airways.
Adam Carolla (The Man Show, Love Line), who took over for Howard Stern after he left for satellite radio, has decided to take a different approach to the idea of morning radio. After being hired to fill Howard Stern’s shoes and subsequently fired after only four years, he decided to go into the newest form of getting ones thoughts and ideas into the world: podcasting.
Podcasting is a new form of media that is essentially just a downloadable radio show (although there are smaller amounts of video podcasts too.). You can download them for free on Itunes, and most will have one or more new episodes each week. Carolla’s daily podcast, which started on Feburary 23, 2009, only days after he was fired from his radio station gig, was an instant success with just under two and a half million downloads in the first two weeks alone. It is now consistently in the top five of Itunes downloads, and is currently the top downloaded comedy podcast.
Although the show started as just Carolla interviewing guests, it has now returned to the format of his original radio show, which adds a female co-host who reads news and an audio drop guy. The show also has a guest every day, who will stay on for about half the show and join in on the news commentary and answer questions from Carolla.
The show centers on Carolla’s bread and butter: hilarious ranting about anything that annoys him. While the newsgirl Allison Rosen reads the news, Carolla will crack wise about anything from crows and why they should be trained to be part of our military, to why people who buy Subway subs are really just torturing themselves on purpose because they don’t think they deserve a good life. A lot of these rants turn into what some may deem inappropriate, which is why podcasting is Carolla’s most effective platform. The FCC does not govern Podcasts, which allows Carolla to be as crude and brutally honest as he wants, often going on tangents about provocative areas that a terrestrial radio station could never air. However, while Carolla is allowed ultimate freedom in this format, it does have some drawbacks.
In a recent interview with Web Pro News, Carolla talked about how at first it was hard to find advertisements for the show, “When it comes to advertisements and monetizing on the podcast, there’s nothing that people have done and are aware of”. This, he says, led advertisers to be skeptical of advertising with the Adam Carolla Podcast. However, the show is starting to see light at the end of the no profit tunel, “Just within the last six months companies are starting to open their checkbooks”. Any recent episode you can hear the multiple commercials and live reads throughout the show. While this may seem obnoxious at first, when compared to the constant commercials on any terrestrial radio station, you realize that it could be much worse.
While Carolla is seen in some circles as a pioneer of podcasting, he reminds people that pioneering doesn’t necessarily mean huge profits. “NFL players in the 50’s made $7,000 a year and worked at car dealerships in the offseason”. So while Carolla may be revolutionizing the way morning radio is heard, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen overnight. However, he does think that it will ultimately be successful. He does not see podcasting as that different from radio stations and has an attitude that many people in new media have, “you sit there, you talk and tell jokes or you have some provocative conversation and either people want to hear it or they don’t”. Carolla hopes to that people want to hear.
You can find out more about the show by going to adamcarolla.com or simply searching the show on ITunes.