Western Standard - February 15, 2024


Legacy media needs to evolve or die

Topics
technological evolution in music and radio
Mentioned
Trudeau Taylor Swift Blockbuster Steinbeck Jode
One extremely furious horse...‼️ DEI is destroying ideology

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

213.21

Word count

1,214

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

People need to adapt to change, rather than fight it, to keep up with it. That s the key to economic growth, and that's what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be focusing on in order to keep pace with the times.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm going to go back in time a bit for those who remember the 80s and late 70s.
00:00:03.820 If you remember the Buggles, they released a hit single, and this is an earworm, this one.
00:00:08.080 And, you know, video killed the radio star, if you remember it.
00:00:10.480 That was nearly 45 years ago.
00:00:12.520 And that song bemoaned the end of radio-based stardom for musicians because music videos were hitting the scene.
00:00:19.200 Well, it's getting near half a century since that song came out.
00:00:22.000 And music-based radio stations, they're starting to fade away, but it took until now.
00:00:26.100 And it's not video that's taking them out, it's streaming music options like Spotify that led to the change.
00:00:31.980 And the stars aren't gone.
00:00:33.500 They've just moved on to a new platform.
00:00:34.920 I mean, even if every radio station was to shut down today, like her hater, Taylor Swift would remain a household name and would pack stadiums for her shows. 0.95
00:00:43.300 Things have just changed, that's all.
00:00:45.100 Musicians in the early 1980s who weren't willing to embrace videos, well, they were often left behind, especially once MTV became huge.
00:00:51.640 So artists so willing to change with the times found videos provided a whole new platform to reach audiences.
00:00:56.480 So rather than whining that video killed the radio stars, they actually found a new way to make money.
00:01:00.920 And they did very well with it.
00:01:02.380 Every technological change brings out people claiming it's going to wipe out jobs or destroy an industry.
00:01:07.540 Now, while tech-inspired transitions can be disruptive and harmful if an inflexible market is out there, you know, but products, industries, they evolve.
00:01:17.020 And jobs remain for those willing to do things differently.
00:01:19.520 I mean, myself, I used to work as a surveyor in oil exploration.
00:01:22.540 I'd been trained in using a transit and a theodolite.
00:01:25.360 GPS made that mode of surveying pretty much obsolete.
00:01:27.840 And I had the choice to adapt or lose my job.
00:01:30.020 Well, I adapted.
00:01:31.320 Mechanized agricultural practices.
00:01:32.940 I mean, they did put millions of farm laborers out of work.
00:01:36.600 Remember the Jode family and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
00:01:39.200 They were initially displaced because of new tractors working the cotton fields.
00:01:42.960 But while new agricultural technology caused a lot of social and economic upheaval for a time,
00:01:47.420 should governments have tried to block the evolution or subsidize people to plant and harvest crops by hand?
00:01:54.180 Technological advances have since increased agricultural production to the point where famine is rare in a world with 8 billion people in it.
00:02:00.880 And the evolution caused pain, but it was worthwhile in the long run.
00:02:03.500 And labor balanced itself out as people learn and embrace new skills.
00:02:07.360 Getting back to the arts.
00:02:08.600 Stage performers, I mean, they feared moving pictures would wipe out their industry back at the turn of the 20th century, the start of it.
00:02:14.960 But Broadway's still going strong today.
00:02:17.300 Movie stars, they feared television would wipe out their industry.
00:02:19.860 Well, movies and the stars associated with them are still doing quite fine.
00:02:23.500 Artists willing to flex were actually provided with a broader spectrum of performance options.
00:02:27.920 Netflix, they began as a movie rental company.
00:02:30.480 Actually, they delivered DVDs.
00:02:32.160 Then they started a streaming service.
00:02:33.680 Blockbuster, though, they were a movie rental company and they stuck to their guns.
00:02:37.720 Well, Blockbuster went from an industry giant to oblivion.
00:02:40.580 And Netflix is now worth an estimated $240 billion.
00:02:45.020 Changes can hurt and the transition periods can be messy, but the change is inevitable.
00:02:49.820 People need to adapt to change rather than try to fight it.
00:02:52.640 Or worse, people could try getting the government to fight the change on their behalf.
00:02:57.100 And that brings us to the state of today's news media.
00:03:00.560 Conventional news media has been in a state of steady decline for nearly 20 years now.
00:03:04.260 The collapse of the industry has been accelerating.
00:03:05.920 And the recent spate of layoffs in Canada by CTV sort of drove that point home.
00:03:10.260 But instead of seeking rational ways to facilitate the transition of an industry in flux, Trudeau had a temper tantrum during a news conference.
00:03:17.380 And he declared, I'm pissed off.
00:03:19.540 At what?
00:03:20.420 How?
00:03:21.740 How long does Trudeau expect a business to continue without a viable business model?
00:03:25.940 Of course, it's a bit much to expect Trudeau to understand even the most basic of business or economic principles.
00:03:30.440 If he hasn't caught a glimmer or sense to those issues, you know, by now he's not gonna.
00:03:34.140 Trudeau's government's been pumping incentives and direct subsidies into legacy media outlets for years.
00:03:38.520 And it's failing.
00:03:39.740 I mean, ostensibly they're doing it to save an industry deemed too important to fail.
00:03:43.880 In reality, of course, he's more motivated in buying the love of media for his embattled regime.
00:03:48.300 And he has bought a little bit of love.
00:03:50.440 I mean, they're certainly holding the leader of the official opposition to account.
00:03:53.600 But media outlets can't afford to operate under those outdated models.
00:03:56.740 The layoffs and closures are gonna continue.
00:03:59.060 If anything, Trudeau's handouts to media outlets have made things worse.
00:04:02.160 Legacy media outlets, they've quickly become dependent upon subsidies rather than looking at ways to adapt to changing times.
00:04:09.240 And Trudeau tried a failed cash grab on social media giants like Facebook.
00:04:13.000 And not only did it fail to garner any money, but it took away a means of drawing traffic to media sites,
00:04:17.960 causing them all, whether large or small, to lose revenue.
00:04:20.800 Yeah, he made it worse.
00:04:22.400 Outlets counting on checks from Facebook.
00:04:24.280 Yeah, they're suddenly realizing that money isn't coming.
00:04:26.380 And now they're starting to cut.
00:04:27.220 Look, guys, print newspapers, they're not coming back to where they were again.
00:04:31.440 People aren't gonna pay for classified ads again.
00:04:33.760 Families aren't gonna gather around the TV to watch the evening news anymore.
00:04:36.680 Those days are gone.
00:04:37.740 The market isn't gone, though.
00:04:39.160 It's just diluted.
00:04:40.640 And people have so many new means to seek entertainment and information.
00:04:43.540 We just don't need some of the services news outlets are trying to provide.
00:04:47.420 They need to change.
00:04:48.240 They need to flex.
00:04:48.780 I can find the weather forecast for my area or anywhere else in the world within seconds on my phone.
00:04:54.480 So why are TV stations still bothering with meteorologists on staff?
00:04:57.300 That's just one example.
00:04:58.920 I can go directly to websites to find information that I used to have to get from newspapers and broadcast outlets.
00:05:03.360 Now, people still want to read, view, and listen to news and opinion.
00:05:06.900 And they're willing to spend money to do so, as the Western Standard subscription model is proving.
00:05:11.300 But the outlets need to be lean, targeted, and efficient now.
00:05:14.720 No more giant buildings, no large studios, and no printing presses.
00:05:18.080 As with every other industry, the news media will adapt to a working model,
00:05:22.140 though many outlets are going to fall by the wayside during the transition.
00:05:24.760 Subsidizing existing outlets is doing little more than animating a corpse at this point.
00:05:29.320 As with most things, all the government needs to do with media is just get out of the bloody way.
00:05:32.960 It's going to take care of itself.
00:05:34.820 That's unfortunately contrary to the authoritarian nature, though, of the Trudeau regime.
00:05:38.640 Let's hope the next administration knows how to back off.