re: your letter on drdemento.com

That is the DUMBEST thing I have ever heard read that was authorized by
you. No wonder your loosing fans and listeners. Instead of addressing
your probems and planning to do something about it, you just write up a
batch of excuses about this and that. I'm not buying this demented
Cool-aid for one minute.

Scathing? Hello, Dr. Demento. You Need a Reality Checkup.

So, we now know who the man behind the iron Talonian curtain is.

Unfortunately, your explantion on your drdemento.com website continues
to shoot blanks when faced with a reality check.

Why did your advertisers flee? Haven't you hired a sales manager to get
those advertisers to replace the ones that left? What about inviting
luke ski, Sudden Death, Weird Al, Richard Cheese, and all of those other
big names buy some advertisements that plug their albums and concert
tours?

Why aren't you in Los Angeles? Get your friggin' ass over to CBS or
Clear Channel or Indie or whatever and iron out a way to get your show
back on the friggin' airwaves. So CBS Radio likes to run 20 minutes of
commercials an hour. So what? Produce a 120 minute show with nine breaks
for stopsets and let stations add up to 60 minutes of commercials per
hour. That's a good three-hour show. The way your show is produced with
fewer minutes alloted for commercials per hour is very much in the way
of getting a station to carry a show. Remember back in 1998 when KLSX
dropped a segment so that it could run more commercials and annoying
announcements for some sex talk show? You should have saw some signs
that you need to listen to their needs.

As for the issue of whether a station should share their advertisement
revenue with a radio show host, it ain't gonna happen, pal! You're
simply not entitled to any advertising revenue a radio station
generates. The station is entitled to generating advertising revenue to
pay for the operations of their station as well as to pay for talent and
radio shows such as yours. All you do is supply the programming for a
fee, then that's all. It's just like every syndicator that sells shows
with no built-in ads. The station has the right to put a value on your
services, and if yours is not worth their money, they simply won't hire
you. Give them a reason to hire you.

As for telling the radio stations affilliates to cut off their streams
while your show is on, are you nucking futs? Your show is an
advertisement of your services in itself, and you killed off your own
free publicity machine in favor of, what's this you said, scathing
online denunciations in r.m.d. and other places? This is simply PR gone
bad. You're blowing it big time, Doc!

As for your online paid streaming services, f--- this! F--- this!
I ain't paying for bulls--t products from any bad business including
yours. I'm not paying $2 for a crappy lo-fidelty stream of reruns of
older shows I've heard an average of 27 times in the past 29 years I've
been listening to the show. Chances are, when I download some Dr. D
shows from a USENET binary newsgroup (thanks to all who do), I skip over
the songs I already have or have no interest in and listen to the newer
songs, then I seek them out on myspace for songs that might be on there
for me to download in high quality 128kbps.

I'm not joining your DOC club either. I have better plans to spend my
money since I'm no longer ponying up $40 a month for some goddamn
live365 service run by incompetent people who don't know how to make
money and keep customers.  I could pay for and listen to older shows. I
ask why if I've heard them so many times already, why repay again and
again?  

So, why do I need to listen to an entire show again if all I'm
interested in are listening to individual songs instead of waiting for
some song I'm not interested in to play out until something new and cool
or new to me comes in.  Selling your own shows online as a stream is
rather tedious at best. The world has changed into an on-demand basis.
Everybody wants to hear a particular song now instead of waiting until
after a block of other stuff played.

The fump.com, for example, is a good business model, and it even
features songs that should have gotten some fame by you by playing them,
but haven't. You can stream a song, you can purchase a high quality
individual song, you can buy an album, and you can even post your own
links to your own songs (wish they would host the sideshow songs). This
is a model you should be looking into, Doc.

I for one have six of my stuff on the fump sideshow. Check them out.
They're relevant, different, insightful, and unique, or check them out
at my website davidtanny.com and hear what dementoids have been missing
out on for almost ten years now. Some get it. Some don't. For those who
don't get it, that shows that I'm cutting edge dementia because a lot of
ideas for parodies and originals are coming from a point of view that is
being ignored by the media: the ordinary money-challenged (I can't
afford a studio or a staff as I'm all alone in this town)
academically-challenged (just a community college grad) person.

Does a song have to be good in order to be popular? No. Does a music
programmer have to like the song that they play on the radio? No. What
does matter? The public likes what is played whether the deejay or music
programmer likes it or not. Do people know if a song is going to be good
or bad just by looking at the title? Not until they hear it. Do people
like to request what some radio people call bad songs? Yes. What is bad?
It depends on one's humble opinion on whatever is good or bad to them.

Is it too late to save the Dr. Demento Show? The way things are going,
it probably is. No station is streaming the show. Krellan is out of the
Dr. Demento business because of that (thanks Krellan for your hard
work).

I would have paid $2 for a decent download of a 24kbps Dr. Demento show
back in 1997 just to sample the songs as that's been my interest for
most of my life as the streamers back then were unreliable (remember
those hiccups of the signal back in the day?) or out of reach in the
days of dial-up.

Now that cable broadband is the way, 128kbps is the way to go for $1 a
show stream but it has to be made in a way that is employed on
myspace.com where you can forward or reverse within the show so you can
sample the song again or skip over some overplayed stuff.

Dr. Demento, you need to stop the excuses on your website as your letter
slams us for posting what you call "scathing online denunciations." I
say they're called "consumer complaints." When I criticize AT&T for
their bad service, it's a consumer complaint, not a scathing
denunciation. The same goes for Talonian Productions' way of doing
business; it's a consumer complaint.

Also hampering the Dr. Demento Show is a rather small selection of new
funny music. How about doing several shows a year featuring six full
sets of all new demented music and comedy. When are you going to play
some modern day comedians on your show? Why haven't you been playing any
recent stuff from George Carlin (an editor can excise the $325,000 words
out of the material)? I like the "Modern Man" comedy bit a lot, and you
stiill won't play it?

Hello, Dr. Demento. Time for a checkup. Play some golf and let me or
somebody else create a playlist for you full of new and notable
dementia, novelty, comedy, weird, and otherwise insane material and give
a person a reason to spend $2 to sample a show. Preferably at least
96kbps, but keep the 24kbps for dial-up listeners, but charge the same
anyway. Make them upgrade to cable to get a better sound.

Now listnen. Dr. Demento. Take down your silly "note from Dr. Demento"
propaganda. You apologize to the readers. You hire some qualified people
to change your business model into one that fully embraces the Internet
like I was forced to do back in February of 1997 as I had been doing
since then. You allow radio stations to stream your show again for no
additional fee. You hire a sales rep to get some businesses to advertise
on your show. You remodel your website so that it's consumer friendly.
You rethink how you sell indivudual shows. You start reselling song
downloads like fump and itunes are doing.

Dr. Demento, get yourself demented once again. Admit your mistakes
instead of posting excuses. Do something now or else your show will
simply fade away.

signed

david tanny