This is now on the front page of www.DrDemento.com.
It is being presented here as newsworthy and off interest to our
members. If you have a demento on-line membership and access to his
forum, you may want to also post about this in that forum. This is also
being posted in the main forum of www.TheMadMusicArchive.com.
-Tim

-----
A note from Dr. Demento...

Recently a few people have written scathing online denunciations of
Talonian Productions, the company that produces and distributes the Dr.
Demento Show.

Talonian is not what some uniformed denouncers have claimed. Talonian
Productions is wholly owned by myself. Talonian currently employs a
manager, Arthyr Chadbourne, and a webmaster.

For many years the show was supported by national advertisers. The fees
they paid supported the entire budget of the show and enabled me to make
a living. That's the way radio is supposed to work.

In the past few years advertiser support for the show has evaporated.
I've heard various explanations of this, but the most sensible one seems
to be that our listenership is spread too thinly among various
demographic groups. Advertisers prefer programming that appeals to
particular segments (such as women aged 18-34 or men 30-45) so that they
can reach listeners prepared to buy their products in a more efficient
manner. I was always proud that the show appealed to entire families,
but that is starting to look like more of a curse than a blessing.

Therefore, though we still have some fine stations carrying the show, we
are not making enough from radio to support it.

For that reason, we decided to launch a fee-based Internet service. We
felt this offered a chance for the show to become self-supporting once
again, and in addition made it possible for people in areas not served
by one of our radio affiliates (which is most of the country, alas) to
hear the show.

Many listeners have been happy with this service. Others have
complained, mostly to such forums as rec.music.dementia. Most often,
they are unhappy that our Internet streams are not free of charge. It
may be true, as the old song said, that "the best things in life are
free"...but we do have to pay royalties to the creators of the songs we
play, and we also have to pay for the website's own operation...and I do
have to make a living somehow. Therefore, we charge *a very modest fee
for the streaming -- a rate we feel is fair to ourselves and our
audience.

Several of the show's radio affiliates stream their own programming,
free of charge (the expense is defrayed by advertising). Since we don't
share in the stations' ad revenue, we have asked them to discontinue
their streams while our show is on. Most stations have been very
understanding about this.

I have loved doing this show for 37 years, and have felt incredibly
lucky to have made a living from something I love. However, unless the
show's financial situation changes soon I will be unable to continue the
show much longer.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

-Dr. Demento

The first thing that I will say is that this *does* indeed look like
Barry's writing. Other letters posted on his website in the past, had,
in my opion, looked like they may have been written by his manager for
him to sign.

-Tim

"Tim Ryan" <> wrote ...

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007 15:03:15 -0400, "Tim Ryan"

...

I certainly can't argue with that.  The show needs to have some kind
of revenue coming in to pay, at the very least,  for the licensing
fees.  There's no doubt that Barry's loved doing to show all these
years, but he can't be expected to pay all the costs himself so that
we get the music at no cost.  If things don't change for him and the
show sometime soon, I expect it'll be off the airways completely.  The
advertiser-supported business model has imploded--and that's a shame.
Barry's devoted most of his life to the show, and it's certainly meant
a lot to me over the years.

If I were working, instead of chronically unemployed for the last
couple of years, I'd happily pay to hear the show.  ($9.95 a month to
hear the shows at 96kpbs would be a very reasonable price--I might
even be OK with $14.95 a month.)  I think it's absurd that some folks
are complaining that Talonian won't give the show away.

Unfortunately, (the lack of) money is definitely a major problem for
us right now.  I'll go back to figuring out a way to improve the
reception from our "local" station (KLOO in Corvallis, 80 miles away
from our house in Portland).  Our reception used to be pretty good,
but dropped greatly in quality about a year ago...and I can only
filter out some of the static with Goldwave.  But at least KLOO has
continued to carry the show each and every week, for more than seven
years now.

--
John Lorentz (1100 shows and counting...)

On Oct 6, 5:11 pm, John Lorentz <jlore...@spiritone.com> wrote:

I don't mind paying either. My issue is portability. I need to be able
to download the show and play it on my iPod when I want to hear it, as
I have said numerous times.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 14:44:16 -0700, peterpuck9

There are a large number of programs that will let someone record
streaming audio and convert it to MP3 files.  Goldwave (which what I
use to edit audio files) will handle that with no problem, and I think
that are some free software options what will handle the task also
(but I've been happy with Goldwave, which I originally bought to
handle the processing of the 400+ cassette tapes of Dr D shows that I
used to have--they're all on CD-ROMs as MP3 files now).

--
John

This reply was posted by Stavro288

I don't have a reply yet, but here's his...

http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/thread.aspx?TopicID=2483

Seems like he looks in on this site from time to time. And I'm glad that
he confirmed my assertion that Talonian is, indeed, his corporate self,
taking a bit of 'mystery' out of it all.

As a 'informed denouncer', few understand better than me the concept of
getting older and then having the revenue that fed one's livelihood
vanish for explainable but no less nasty reasons. As 'Talonian', he has
a manager and a webmaster. Didn't they tell him the net was a way to
bring his show to everybody who couldn't hear it on radio- a vast new
market that should be seen as an opportunity to find new fans and
reestablish contact with old ones (like me) who lost the show because of
greedy corporate station owners?

There were piles of cash to be made if it was done correctly. If he had
a well designed and user friendly site, hordes of new 'dementoids' would
descend on it and buy all the products he could possibly think of
selling- including a reliable high quality stream of the show. This
would solve the problem of revenue loss elsewhere. How difficult would
it have been to set up such a site if he already had qualified people to
do it? Not very, I expect. Since it was done so badly, it may have been
his people and not us who were 'uninformed'.

Instead of seeing the internet as an opportunity for more revenue, he
saw it as a threat to the revenue that remained, turned on his fanbase
by attacking sites like this one, which began as a 'tribute' site and
eliminating the streams of his show either with threatened legal action
or by conveniently 'forgetting' to provide new shows to stations that
streamed it. A rather unethical business practice, if ever there was
one. All this bad faith he was generating combined with what many see as
poor service on his site has brought about the mess he's in now.

The Doctor Demento Show need not end. A few gestures of good will such
as making peace with sites like this, allowing streaming again so a
whole lot of fans like me can hear it and a reworking of his site-
including the sale of a high quality stream or better yet, a podcast of
the show (192kbps or more) could make it all commercially viable for
years to come. He need only listen to his fans instead of...whoever he's
listening to now, make a few adjustments and things will be fine again.
It's something any good 'corporation' would do.

On Oct 6, 8:19 pm, John Lorentz <jlore...@spiritone.com> wrote:

Interesting......Thanks.......Pete

On Oct 6, 1:03 pm, "Tim Ryan" <TimRyanAA-comc...@NOSPAM.net> wrote:

I think that the Dr. Demento show could become a fee-based podcast.
That is the current model of internet broadcasting.
I just feel that the $2 per show may be a bit too expensive.
I've never subscribed to a pay-podcast before, but what _is_ a typical
fee for one?

    Russ josephson

Is it to be a podcast or audio on demand?

There's a difference between audio on demand and download and listen.
I notice that in some cases the BBC has audio on demand with the
comedy program's music and podcasts with the music removed.

One may be able to record AOD either by using something like Total
Recorder which records stuff going out to the sound card or by using a
packet sniffer to get the streaming URL and then using a program which
can download using the various streaming mechanisms (e.g. Mass
Downloader or NetTransfer)

It appears that Real Player is cacheing its streams somewhere (e.g. if
you hit pause on an AOD file you may have no network activity when you
are listening again) but I'm not sure how one can save the cache. I
would guess that Real has tried to make this difficult.

On Oct 7, 10:44 am, peterpuck9 <peterch...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I didn't realise it was such an issue for many people, I have always
directly saved the streams to mp3 no conversion required. You get an
m3u which points to the actual mp3.

On Oct 7, 6:02 am, goo...@josephsons.org wrote:

$2 per show in and of itself is not that expensive for a 2-hour show.

It's the $2 per show for 24kpbs quality, and the difficulties in
downloading it, that I take issue with.

Now if the podcast version was 128k, that seems more reasonable.  That
would be approx. 110MB, which is reasonable with today's broadband
speeds.
Hell, even 96k wouldn't be bad.

...though I still say that the reason why advertising is drying up is
because of the "no stream" policy and the fact that many stations take
issue with that.  CBS Radio (back when they were Westwood One) ran
into that issue a few years back, and their shows suffered and started
hemmoraging affiliates because of it (case in point Tom Leykis -- I
was listening to that show religiously back then, and I had a bit of
inside info, which is how I noticed the issue at that time).  Now that
CBS Radio is allowing streaming again, they've rebounded.

Advertisers like internet exposure!  If the show were to allow
streaming, and pitched to advertisers as "potentially worldwide
exposure" for their ads regardless of demographic, then advertisers
should be busting down Talonian/Dr. D's doors to get in!

--Emi/DJP