Reconnecting With Your Audience

A New Game Calls For New Rules

This time we want to examine one of the major problems facing both the radio and music industries. That issue, for all of us, is reconnecting with the audience.

Today's business environment calls for new rules because it's a new game, with new players -- some of them "true players." To be a "true player" one must be willing to play the new game and win. We've got to be willing to give up old habits and practices and learn new ones.

How do we reconnect with our audience and get back to a practice in which no true hits are barred? Can we develop a new generation from the maze of control freaks and dictator broadcasters, consultants and independents that are looking to build a reputation by not playing certain records? The answer is yes, and the first step is to seek out and promote those decision-makers who listen to music, understand how to apply research results and keep their word. I mean, you've got PDs and MDs who don't even have a research system in place telling label executives, "Your record didn't make it in our callout research."

The biggest blame for weak or marginal records being played in our format is that programmers have either forgotten how to listen to music or how to effectively utilize their callout research. As a result, they wind up adding and playing marginal records. Then there are the group conference calls. The problem eventually exacerbates when an influential station or group of stations adds a record and the PDs of 20 other stations who watch their playlists add the record too.

Today, more than ever, we need to begin to understand and take more control over the values and knowledge that will eventually shape our lives. How do you reconnect with your audience, and how do you go about really understanding the game? It helps to look at the facts and the math.

There are approximately 12,000 radio stations in this country, a part of a $17 billon a year industry, and nearly half of them play the same four formats: contemporary music, Oldies, Country or News. Urban falls into the broad category of contemporary music. These stations have been using essentially the same template since the '80s. Then, because of deregulation, companies that owned a few stations were bought by companies that owned a few more, which in turn changed the stations to suit their needs, until only a few formats managed by multibillion dollar conglomerates came to dominate the radio airwaves, which are supposed to be used in the "public interest." But, in many cases, public interest has given way to "vested interest." Radio has become a delivery system for music and advertisements so that investors and labels can maintain pace and make a speedy profit.

But we can profit along with everybody else. We can get better jobs, keep the ones we have and enjoy being a part of one of the most exciting industries in the world. We can do all this better if we understand the methods of survival and growth. We owe the reasons for the increasing importance of all these issues to one word -- success. Because before we had success, there was no reason to change.

Training and understanding the game is really what it's all about. Programmers and music directors are not born, they're trained -- some of them not very well. And if they're not trained, they're vulnerable. So are their stations. So are their jobs and ours. We're all at risk. The very word risk implies some danger. But how much? Well, if you're a circus trapeze star and haven't tested the safety net, it could mean a nasty bruise. If you're an investor calculating how much you will make if you're lucky and not what you might lose if you're wrong, you might as well kiss your bread goodbye.

So how do you reconnect with your audience? Well, programmers have to take some risks and chances. Programming, when it is done right, is a science. Not an exact science, but a science nonetheless.

To be a programmer, you have to be a little crazy. You have to be an explorer, and you must have a taste for adventure. One has to take reality with curiosity and courage to be able to understand it and change it. Programmers are a lot like architects. We live on the frontier, and every so often we have to cross it to see what is on the other side. The good ones understand Arbitron and use techniques to generate an emotion and do so with its own specific language made up of words, proportions, math and creativity.

And like in all arts, there are going to be difficult moments. Creating means grasping in the dark, abandoning points of reference, facing the unknown -- tenaciously and stubbornly. Without stubbornness you remain outside of things. To be truly creative, the architect has to accept all the contradictions of his profession: discipline and freedom, memory and invention, nature and technology, taking risks in the name of progress and training.

The First Step: Get The Music Right

The music has to be right. Music is a lot like fashion, and the trends always begin with the younger end of the demographic scale. Teens and young adults are an active part of that group. They are the trendsetters. Music trends that are created at Urban radio go all the way up the demographic scale. The Urban audience is big, and they like the fact that they can still relate to some of the same music and artists they liked when they were growing up.

This is why research is so important today. Urban radio still has the ability to

somewhat control its own destiny. It's a destiny that starts with the managers and owners. They need to begin budgeting for the battle before they start calling for the cume. That means that they have to give their programming people a realistic budget. The only thing you can do on a shoestring is trip, and not the way you want to. We need to adapt a policy of "no hits barred." If we're going to reconnect with our audience we have to let our imaginations and creative juices flow freely. Be aggressive, take chances, push hard at all the creative boundaries, and question all the conventional wisdoms. Then remember, there is still no substitute for being informed and prepared. And finally, we must realize that we are all working against two enemies -- time and corporate America. Corporate America may eventually be the demise of our industry, especially if it keeps co-opting the subculture. In some cases, it's using the language and ideas and concepts of the rebellion and struggle to sell its ideas.

Because of its quest at any cost for profit and sustaining its ideals and morality, my fear is that we may be looking at a homogenized society where eventually everything that is unique will be bought and controlled by corporations. We could soon be staring down at a world where some wild animals (including some of the two-legged kind) may no longer be an endangered species but rather a quaint memory, where our energy system could collapse and take part of our society with it, where our reckless consumption leaves us with an environment that's flooded and poisoned and a radio community that has been systematically deprived of what we continue to promise them.

So not only do we have to reconnect with our audience, we have to reconnect with our true selves. We have to make certain that our industries don't lose what makes them special. Then we've got to make sure the music we play has what it takes to build audience. And finally, we've got to remember that even if you've got what it takes, you've still got to find someone to take what you've got.

Word.