RUSH: We were talking in the last hour about the Live Earth, and the paltry lineup that they have given it’s the biggest issue facing our lives. You people gotta understand the context here of what I’m saying. This is the biggest issue, it’s the most important thing facing our lives. Our lives at stake here, and where are the big names? Where are the Stones? Where’s Streisand? Where his McCartney — (interruption) well, Sheryl Crow. She’d probably be there. Sheryl Crow would probably be in charge of the portable lavatories handing out one piece of toilet paper to every reveler. I have not seen her on the list. That’s a good point. I have not seen her on the performance list. But, you know, the music industry, Drudge had a story up on his page not long ago that the music industry is down now for the seventh consecutive year, and concerts all over the world are being canceled due to slow ticket sales. Barbra Streisand had to cancel some of hers I think in Italy, and in other places. There’s a major, major evolution or whatever going on in music right now. It’s going to have implications for radio. I, of course, as a highly trained radio specialist and broadcast specialist am tuned to all of this and where it takes us in the future, and I’m going to make you a little prediction.
With the portability now of music being so vast, so many different ways of getting it yourself, with your own play lists and listening to it on your iPod or your MP3 player, cell phone or what have you, radio stations that play music, and primary the FM types, are going to have some decisions to make about programming. This is nothing any time soon. It’s going to be years before this happens, but just as FM came along and provided a much better environment for listening to music than AM did, and AM was thought to have then died and fallen off the cliff, that of course until I came along with this show in 1988 and single-handedly saved AM. I predict that we will single-handedly save FM because the music is eventually going to be available in a whole lot of other places, and I think spoken word is what’s going to end up being dominant on all radio, terrestrial radio. And of course what do I do? I speak. This is called spoken-word format, so it’s exciting. A lot of people think change is bad because it’s new, but there are all kinds of opportunities. But the music business itself has got some basic business problems, with sales down, concerts not being sold out, and this sort of thing. I’m not going to get into my theories about why because I’ve got other things to do here. But it is related to talent. I think content is king. Content, content, content, and apparently it’s fallen off.