Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreesen raised eyebrows recently by saying that traditional media must “burn their boats.” He was referring to the legend of Cortes, who removed any temptation of returning home to safer lands by burning his boats when he and his army landed in Mexico. Andreesen’s focus was on print media—he recommended that they completely eliminate their paper editions and totally embrace the web, burning their boats and removing any temptation to bolster a dying business. This thinking is relevant to the broadcast industry as well.

The broadcast industry doesn’t need to burn their towers—the hundreds of millions of people who listen to their radio every week would be outraged—but radio does need to keep this anecdote in mind, because while our boats are still necessary, they are increasingly being left behind by consumers.

What I mean is that the terrestrial signal is eroding in the face of internet (IP) delivery. A graph of time spent listening to a terrestrial signal would show it falling significantly year after year. While a graph of streaming audio consumption would be growing dramatically. The reality is clear: People are increasingly embracing web audio and departing terrestrial audio.

In practical terms, the need for radio to prepare for this trend is very real, and the scope of these preparations are expansive. Radio needs to not just understand the new medium and how its distribution points differ, but it also needs to understand how best to leverage new assets for both programming and sales which didn’t exist before. The good news is that I’m saying that radio needs to prepare for something positive—an audio delivery methodology which is much more robust than a terrestrial broadcast. Note, I’m not even talking about websites—I’m discussing the delivery of audio via a stream rather than a broadcast tower.

That’s all well and good, but there is another side to this strategic planning, which is what to do with the boats we call towers. We certainly don’t want to burn them now. In fact, we may never want to burn them even as their influence wanes. But, all that said, we need to look at them in a new way, and Andreesen’s anecdote is a helpful reminder to what the future value of towers are to our business. To Cortes, boats had no value. In fact, they were actually a problem in that they distracted his army from focusing on Mexico. So he burned them. With radio, we have towers where they have value, even as it decreases, but—and this is an important point—they are also a problem in the same way the boats were a problem for Cortes: Radio is being distracted by them when they need to focus on more pressing problems and opportunities.

We see this again and again in various announcements that highlight some new technological feature of a terrestrial broadcast. Of course the biggest was the creation of HD Radio, but this has continued with press releases about things like “tagging,” where radio could allow a user to download tracks heard on the radio to their MP3 players, and recently the announcement of an Electronic Program Guide for HD Radio stations. While on a usability level, these things all might be good ideas, there is a much bigger concern here: Radio is patching up the boats when they should be focusing on blazing trails and building settlements in the wilderness. That they aren’t doing this is the problem, and it’s exactly why Cortes burned his towers.

Radio is at a crossroads here: They can look ahead and find new vistas or they can wade back into the sea and patch their boats. They can create things like Electronic Program Guides or they can work on creating a marketplace for in stream audio, integrating on demand into a mass appeal stream, targeting audio inventory beyond demos based on a sample, and on and on. While I don’t think radio should be Cortes, we should certainly start thinking like him.