FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio - Don't touch that dial: why FM radio sucks - Review

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2001 by Frank Ahrens

Not surprisingly, free-form FM rock stations didn't draw big ratings. In New York, a major AM station could get a 20 share (meaning that among radio listeners, 20 percent were tuned in). Today, program directors get Cancun vacations if they grab a nine share. Even at its apex, WNEW never topped a five share. But it was enough to draw the interest of the money men. Say, they thought to themselves, if we took the edge off this station, reined in the jocks and established a playlist, this thing might actually take off!

And it did. On the West Coast around 1967, two consultants, Bill Drake and Gene Chenault, dreamed up "Boss radio." Boss took the hip new rock music championed by the free-formers and established "rotations"--hot new songs played several times an hour, interspersed with cuts rising or falling on the charts, as well as some deejay-derived "deep cuts" from albums. Deejay freedom was tightly curtailed. The patter was cut back. And when Boss jocks spoke, they did so with the balls-out basso profundo typical of today's classic rock stations: "Comin' up next: Time to get the Led out!"

Boss radio spread to the East Coast and a new generation of consultants. Men like Lee Abrams and Michael Harrison, who once free-formed on WNEW, sought a middle ground between soulless Top 40 AM pop and self-indulgent prog-rock FM. They hit upon a shocking idea. They decided to find out what the listeners wanted to hear, and in the process, ushered in today's corporate radio. By identifying and capturing a specific group of listeners--say, females age 18-to-34 in the market for a new car and still forming their soft-drink allegiance--they discovered they could sell that to advertisers.

The Last Imperial Deejays

What all this means is that radio has undergone a dynamic political evolution over the last three decades. If the free-formers of 30 years ago set up monarchic-anarchic states in which imperial deejays spun what they pleased, today's commercial radio is a mob-rule democracy. Neither system offers something for everyone.

The sad truth about modern radio is that it's not--repeat not--about playing music or talk that listeners like to hear. Radio is about promising discrete audiences to advertisers--it's an advertising-delivery vehicle. The truth is that most radio listeners don't want to hear songs they don't recognize or that haven't been sufficiently hyped. Only what researchers call "sophisticated" listeners are into music experimentation--and they don't comprise a big enough demographic to merit many radio stations of their own. (One example is the Adult Album Alternative (AAA) format that plays "safe" music skewed at tasteful adults--Billy Bragg, Son Volt, and David Gray--radio for folks who grew up on Elvis Costello.) In fact, when radio researchers perform what they refer to as "call-outs," they play seconds-long snippets of songs and simply ask listeners if they recognize them. Sometimes they don't even solicit a value judgment.

Ever since the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the door to consolidation, more and more privately owned radio stations are being snapped up by large, publicly traded companies controlled by Wall Street shareholders. As a result, only the "money demographics" get radio stations aimed at them. This is why you hear so much rap and R&B, Top 40, country and "adult mixes" of Sting and Gwen Stefani. Niche formats simply don't make enough money to survive. In Washington, D.C., the nation's seventh-largest radio market, the following niche formats have been killed in the last few years: nostalgia/standards, showtunes, rhythmic oldies, and opera. Public radio, ever in search of larger, pledge-generating audiences, has done the same, killing chamber and choral music and almost all bluegrass.