Urban Radio's New Music Mission

Exodus, Revelation & Reality

One of the biggest challenges that Urban radio programmers face this fall is finding and then scheduling the right music for their audience. One of the sub-challenges under that is how do you meet the audience's expectations and still occasionally surprise them? We're revealing all these things this time because that's exactly what you've got to do.

Urban radio, like all other formats, has a growing problem. Although millions tune in each week to hear their favorite stations play their favorite, often over-researched songs, it's still getting tougher to hold listeners' attention.

Although Urban radio's audience has traditionally been a rather fixed commodity and always brought in a unique, wide-age demographic, that target audience is changing as the median age of the baby boomer population rises. The overall popularity and acceptance of recently spawned format genres, specifically Urban AC and, in some markets, Hot Urban AC, have changed because of the need to continue to target the aging Generation X and even the new Generation Jones.

Urban radio's new music mission is to use caution, but to still find a way to cater to the fragmented segments of the audience that want to hear some fresh jams. That's the audience currently being underserved. The secret is to pick and play all three categories of hits in the proper rotation. You can find the gold, recurrent and current hits easily enough. The real challenge is finding the future hits you must play to maintain a fresh presence for your station.

A lot of programmers we've spoken to recently are responding to this fragmentation challenge by lengthening their lists. Usually, they wind up with a young-end audience that is dissatisfied because they're not hearing enough of the newer music they really like.

Then there's the older audience that hears too much of what they don't like. If, for example, there are 15 songs in each category, the top five or six probably will appeal to more of the listeners in the other segments, but the bottom of the list of the "C stack" don't appeal to any other segment. If you're playing all of those songs, you might be blowing off everyone else, as well as your cume because it's possible that the bottom 10 songs aren't familiar to anyone outside of your core. That's going to become even more important in the future as Arbitron continues to replace the diary with the PPM.

A Definable Hit

In order to understand the power of a definable hit, you must also understand the "filtering process." One of the main things that attracts listeners to Urban formats is the fact that we play new music. Yet no age cell is more important than 25-49.

Most Urban stations are vying for the coveted 18-39 demo, but it's the younger end, 18-24, that drives the demand for new music. The hunger for new music doesn't stop at age 24. It used to be all about fresh new music, with the audience saying, "Don't filter it. Just be my source for fresh new jams." What winning Urban programmers do is feed their audience the definable hits -- and playing definable hits means dayparting. What's definable in morning drive is very different from what's definable in the afternoon or evenings. The new music that airs during the day has to be the cream of the crop, the tracks that have the best potential of making it into the library. Many of those daytime currents probably started at night with the younger audience, making that initial

playground vital to the overall sound and image of your station.

Some stations have apparently given up on the young end of the demo because, in their minds, listeners in that age group are too fickle in their musical tastes and are not loyal listeners. The fact is that loyalty has to be earned by programming the right new music - the definable hits.

Having an MD with great ears and a good gut feel is important. Research isn't going to help you when a song is brand new and no one knows it. You have to know in your gut if it's going to work on your station. Also, while ignoring the younger audience and becoming predominately gold or recurrent-based may increase your older audience, that tactic has a limited shelf life. The audience's musical taste shifts as they get older and you'll eventually find your station becoming out of touch when it's no longer an important place for people to go to hear new music.

We are living in an era of information overload and our brains have had to become filtering mechanisms that eventually find the stuff that really matters, including music.

Radio's dominance in being a dependable delivery source for new music has diminished somewhat over the years because of all the new music delivery sources, but it is still far ahead of all other mediums. The only thing that comes close to radio in exposing new music is word of mouth -- and that has to start somewhere. It's best that it starts with your radio station.

Urban stations build trust with their audiences based on their filtering ability. If

you consistently get behind new music that eventually makes it into your library, the audience will trust you to be their filter.

Someone said that satellite radio is a better source than terrestrial radio for finding and exposing new music because they don't have to worry about ratings. It sounds reasonable that listeners who have ponied up a monthly fee would choose satellite radio for a new music source. But satellite radio is not satisfying the demand for new music because the total number of subscribers to satellite is less than five percent of the total available listening audience. If the typical satellite radio system has over 150 channels, well, you do the math. While satellite radio is growing as a medium, and we definitely need to watch its growth, we also need to keep it in perspective.

What about the Internet, you say? Well, the fact is more people use the Internet to get music than ever before. Research shows it has become an important delivery tool for new music, but terrestrial radio is still the primary destination where people hear about new music first. The reason is that the choices on the Internet are so vast that, unless you know exactly what you are looking for, finding a definable hit is like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, because the Internet has become such an important delivery system for music, it makes sense that your radio station should be streaming online.

You Can't Get Away From Research

Properly applied audience research is still one of the most important things that radio does today. Anyone interested in a career in radio needs to know the fundamentals of the audience. In today's day and age, research issues weigh quite heavily.

Programmers regularly complain that they don't have enough room to play all the great songs currently available, so they use callout research to whittle down their lists. At times, radio is flooded with a seemingly infinite amount of songs, so callout research is the tool they use to seek out the songs that make the cut. What they're really looking for are the definable hits. Usually they're the proven superstars and their follow-ups ... but do they have staying power? That is the question.

What's happening to Urban radio today is what previously happened to a lot of heritage Top 40 and Classic Rock stations. We're seeing more and more classic-based stations that haven't established a foothold in the market change to high-end Urban ACs. The problem is that if your format is 80% oldies and recurrent-based, you've got to constantly research those oldies and recurrents and then rotate them perfectly. If your station doesn't have a strong morning show, whether it's local or syndicated, your entire appeal is music-based.

One more thing to keep in mind: When an Urban station becomes classic-driven, the obvious goal is to attempt to satisfy those older listeners who don't want to hear the songs their kids want to hear. The problem is no matter what your liners and promos say, people only come to conclusions based on what they hear.

Many young or first-time program directors look to make an immediate statement. They want to make an instant name for themselves, so they program a lot with ego and emotions. They fail to maintain balance in their music programming and if they don't have the budget or the bodies to do some serious research, they get into trouble quickly. That's one reason why we've had so many changes in the industry lately. Urban radio's new music mission is a lot like the format clock and the wheel. They were some of man's greatest inventions - until he got behind and they rolled over him.

Word.