It started with a straightforward question at last week’s Country Music Summit: Is HD Radio dead?

For the most part, the radio panelists at the Nashville gathering, organized by Billboard and the Country Music Assn., seemed to think if HD isn’t terminal, it’s at least gasping for air. Interestingly, some blamed the corresponding introduction of Arbitron’s PPM methodology for HD Radio’s shaky start.

“HD Radio came along at about the same time that PPM came along,” explained Cumulus Broadcasting senior VP Jan Jeffries. “We started [seeing that,] holy smokes, the whole game has changed: how we market our radio stations, how we program our radio stations, and now all of a sudden we’ve got six other channels that we want to deal with? It’s like, hit the brakes. I’ve got one problem here, I don’t need seven.

“As we figure out PPM—and I think we’re starting to until the rules change again on us—once we get that settled then maybe we can go back and say, ‘Now, let’s move [on] to other things to add to the station.’ But right now, I don’t know. [HD is] certainly on the back burner with us,” Jeffries continued.

“When it first came out, we talked about it [internally] and it was exciting that we could do all these different formats and really just circle around our big radio stations with all these others,” Jeffries added. “It seemed to just kind of go by the wayside as we got really into how do we protect the major radio stations, because now we have a whole new game that we have to learn the rules for.”

“That speaks to PPM’s madness, to be honest with you, and the whole Arbitron system in a lot of ways,” said new WSIX Nashville PD Jon Anthony. “We’re such a unique business in the sense that our report card, and the things that we try to adjust our programming to reflect the system or at least game the system, it’s so ‘bass ackwards’ in some ways… The true success of a radio station is the money it’s bringing in, and the community that it serves.”

Added Jeffries, “It’s the ultimate game that never ends. It’s not ‘game over’—ever.”

Sony Music Nashville senior VP/promotion Skip Bishop called HD Radio “a train wreck.” He asked the seminar attendees to stand up if they owned an HD receiver. Only one person stood, and explained that his came with his car. Said Bishop, “That’s the last hope. It’s about programming… In a PPM world your terrestrial signal is everything now, and the programming really hasn’t been there. The stations call them ‘side channels.’ That alone is an indication.”

Anthony said one of the problems with HD Radio is that “It’s been marketed horribly.” While he said the success of Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio app proves people want variety, and options, just hammering variety as a selling point isn’t effective.

“It’s been marketed too generically,” Anthony said of HD. “It’s been ‘Hey, get an HD Radio and get all these channels.’ OK, name one that matters to me. I’m a DirecTV subscriber. They don’t come on with Direct TV promos and go, ‘Hey, good thing you have DirecTV because there’s thousands of channels.’ We learned this in satellite radio, just because you’ve got hundreds of options, only four or five really matter to you… You’ve got to market it somehow in a way that makes me see the value of the four or five that I’ve got. Coming on with a generic message of saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got all these options,’ that says nothing… We need really good, compelling content on the HD side channels, and we need a way to market them.”

The other problem Anthony, like Jeffries, has seen with the introduction of HD is that many broadcasters fear cannibalizing their main signals.

“There are a lot of people afraid to give up that share,” Anthony said. “You’re going to have to sacrifice some of your listeners on your main channel to come to your side channel… I don’t know that a lot of GMs and operations managers really want to take that chance of seeing this main share go away to grow this other thing.”

On the positive side, Anthony said, “HD Radio has the promise of selling smaller subsets of people that have higher value because you know more demographically about what they are, and you can actually sell that better in a lot of ways than you could just a broadcast station trying to serve a lot of people.”

But just as the introduction of PPM may have derailed HD initially, Anthony says the coming introduction of Internet in cars will crush it further.

“Cars are going to be able to have WiFi streaming, so the HD technology itself—digitally, from a broadcast tower—it’s about to get surpassed by the ability of using wireless Internet ubiquitously across the entire country,” Anthony said.

Perhaps responding more to the provocative title of the radio session itself (“Country Radio Dead or Alive?”) than the discussion about HD, Premiere Radio Networks president Julie Talbot went on the defensive.

“I always wonder what television executive got together with a reporter and said ‘Is radio dead?’ ‘Is HD Radio dead?” she asked. “I just think it’s a ludicrous question. There’s never been a more exciting time. We are very focused on great brands, whether it’s an individual radio station or a national personality. A brand can then extend into all kinds of different areas. Radio, or a brand, doesn’t just have to be listened to on the largest area in terrestrial; it can extend into everywhere in digital and apps—anywhere that we want. It’s an extremely exciting time, and I’m always so offended when anybody even suggests we’re dead. We have never been more vibrant.”

Elsewhere at the Country Music Summit, keynote speaker Kenny Chesney talked about his interaction with radio in the early days of his career.

“I’ve always had a wonderful relationship with country radio,” he said. “It always was the one thing in my career that was solid, even when a lot of the media wasn’t there yet… I’ve never really forgotten that.”