"Audio Theatre" is the best term for what's going on today in our field. "Radio Theatre" is not broad enough to cover the whole area. Many works today are produced as much for tape as for broadcast. In fact, some producers (like the folks at Playsontape.com, or Steve Ziplow's Hilton Head Island group), are producing works that will probably never be broadcast because the language is a little to "realistic."

The terms, "Radio Drama," or "Audio Drama," seem to leave out comedy. Publishers of audiobooks have several other terms for this kind of production, but most of these terms are not very good ones - "full-cast dramatization", "multi-voice reads", "read by a full cast", etc.

Let's get a standard term settled for what we're doing! For me the best choice is Audio Theatre.

And let's all realize that what we're a part of is in fact an Industry, just as much as the Motion Picture Industry or the Television Industry or the Publishing Industry. Once upon a time, back before Television, the Radio Theatre Industry was well-recognized, national in scope, and booming.

How big an Industry are we talking about in today's market? Consider this: the Audio Publishers' Association says that in 1996, audiobook sales in the US alone totaled 1.6 billion dollars on 60 million units. If just ten percent of those people are interested in audio theatre (and I think that's a VERY conservative figure), the sales potential would be 160 million dollars on 6 million units every year. It'll never displace TV, but audio theatre has a legitimate place in the entertainment spectrum, and the potential to create quite a lot of jobs.

Then there's the international market. British Commonwealth countries, and other countries with a significant number of English speakers, such as Holland, are obvious markets. But other markets have begun to appear in some unexpected places. New Jersey's Radio Repertory Company of America has two series running on English-language radio in Hong Kong - at the request of the Chinese.

The Japanese are inquiring about distributing audio theatre to help people learn English. Formal teaching does not prepare people fully for "English as she is spoken." Audio theatre is ideal (much more so than audiobooks, which are literary in style) for demonstrating actual conversational usage, rhythms and nuances.

Our experience at LodesTone, making and selling audio theatre, has confirmed several things:

   1. There is a large audience out there for audio theatre. The popularity of talk radio, OTR, and audiobooks is very large and well-established. Audio theatre builds on all these segments of the spoken-word audience.

   2. Sales and inquiries show a steady rise, even without any significant budget for marketing and advertising.

   3. People perceive audio theatre as higher-value than single-voice-read audiobooks.

   4. People tend to keep and collect audio theatre, and listen to it more than once, and see it as a valuable gift.

   5. Many people simply don't know where to find audio theatre.

That last point needs elaborating. When we get a call on the order-line which has been generated by a broadcast, or some reference to a single program, we'll mention that we have "a whole catalog of audio theatre," and the response in at least 95% of cases is something like "Do you really? That's wonderful! I had no idea something like this existed. Please send me a catalog!"

Go into a bookstore like Borders, Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks - wherever you can find a rack of audiobooks. If you look carefully, you'll find anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the products on those shelves are audio theatre. But since these items are not broken out in a separate section, and are not consistently labeled it takes some close reading to identify them.

Adventures In Cassettes had 78 audio theatre titles in their previous catalog; in the latest edition there were 90 audio theatre titles, an increase of 15 percent in about a six-month period. But they're scattered through the catalog, and (except for the OTR programs) not very easy to locate if you're looking for fully-produced works.

So, while the market is growing it is also in great need for some mainstream publicity and awareness. Audio Theatre is coming back - but we still have a way to go!

Richard Fish is the president of LodesTone Productions, the largest catalog of audio theater programs, and a voice talent, actor and live sound effects artist.