Black Music 2006 - Where It's Been, Where It's Going, Part V

The Future of The Format

As we wrap of our current series of Black Music 2006, we take a brief look at the current state of the music and radio industries. We're going to focus a little more on Black radio this time because it determined so much of the success of the music. If great songs and artists never got on the radio, never had hits, and never toured, our world wouldn't be the same. We still hold the future of the format and Black music in our hands.

What have we learned? Well, some of the lessons we already knew, we just reapplied them. For example, our research told us or we re-discovered that a song with twenty per cent burn just means that eighty percent of the audience isn't burned on it. If it's an artist that was valuable enough to play often and early and take a vested interest in breaking, why in the world would you want to walk away from the artist and let another format just have them?

That's why research became and continues to be so important. Research allows you to make informed decisions about the music. It wasn't as though no real programming was going down in Black radio before the end of the 70's and 80's. It was just that there wasn't much real science and research being applied, even among major market stations. Program directors at Black radio up until the beginning of the '60s were usually just "chief announcers." They put up announcer schedules and worked with the public service and news directors to make certain shifts were covered. They did not offer advice to air talent. They didn't recruit, set salary plateaus or plan contests and promotions.

Even those who had the title simply didn't function as program directors. The reasons were many and varied. The primary reason was that they (the programmers at Black radio) had not been trained and they lacked the experience that would allow them to program with confidence. Most owners and managers didn't want to risk their stations to these untrained PDs.

During this period, programming had reached a point where the pressure had come from a lot of community-based groups to find and train some African-Americans to be put in charge of the growing number of Black stations that were springing up all over the country. Naturally, the first ones to be recruited were usually the announcers who had tenure in major markets.

Some of these guys had little or no knowledge of ratings, research or recruiting, but eventually some companies began training their chief announcers to become radio executives. The next step, of course, was to put some Black general managers in place. This task was somewhat easier because there were some Black salesmen and sales managers who could make the transition to the top management level.

Programming had become somewhat of an art form for other formats. No longer were dee-jays given the freedom to program their own shows. Gone were the theme songs and the creative freedom to include comments in between the songs they played. So was the clutter. Clutter was extraneous talk, long promotional announcements, and scheduled newscasts outside of mornings.

News, with the advent of deregulation, was limited to just the hours between 6 and 10 a.m., and the result was that Black radio became much more controlled, lean and mean. A lot of jobs and people were eliminated in the process.

But progress was made. Those who were programming Black radio figured out how to cut the current playlist down to about 40-45 titles. They made certain that the oldies that were played were former top hits and even learned to blend songs so that the smoothest possible transition occurred between songs.

About 1965, the composite hour theory was born. That theory said that every hour was like every other hour. The little shows done by each of the individual dee-jays were less than the big show, which was the whole of the broadcast week. The training was begun by the white program directors and finished by the Black program directors that eventually replaced them. Dee-jays were brought in, usually after their shows, and forced to listen along with the program director to their tapes. Areas that needed improvement were pointed out to them.

The result was that Black program directors emerged who knew how to set up a station to win. They learned how to construct contests and how to make certain that there were no repeat winners. Research was used to determine what the most wanted prizes were. Big deal -- it turned out to be cash and cars. If it was a car, it should be a red car. Red was the most popular color for cars. So a real contest was often one that offered a new car and $10,000 cash in the glove compartment.

On the music side, records were rotated throughout the broadcast day so that overplay and underplay of songs was carefully controlled and the audience found they could listen longer.

All these practices made Black programming more competitive. In some markets, such as Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta and Mobile, Black radio stations moved to the dominant position in the market.

Now

In 2006, urban radio is still letting go of some songs that they thought were no longer relevant or hip with their P1s -- something that happens a lot once they cross over. Once listeners who are P1s to the format start hearing those songs on "their little sister's or brother's station," they often change their opinions of it. This is especially true of certain rap artists.

Just because an artist gets picked up by multiple formats doesn't mean that we should stop playing it in drive time -- after all, isn't that what we want? As a business we are way over-thinking this issue because of the complaints of a very vocal few in the audience. Not that we don't care about those vocal few. We do, but we're in a mainstream business, which means we want fifty-one percent of the vote.

If it's an act you consider still important to your audience and the format, you should support it. But it's also important that the artist(s), their management, and label know that imaging the artist with the station will be necessary for the station to consider treating them as core artists instead of song-to-song.

As we have now reached the half-way point in 2006, we realize the value of a strong morning show. In many cases, syndicated morning shows. Last year was the one that rock morning maniac Howard Stern made the decision to leave syndicated terrestrial radio for Sirius satellite radio. This was the year that saw Jack radio proliferating in all size markets, "playing what we want." So far this year we have witness the firing of syndicated black shock-jocks Star and Buc Wild and the ripple effect that it has caused. So, has the format come to a crossroads? And what is the future of the format? And is the honeymoon over? In some markets the answer is yes. This kind of thing continues right up to today and is the reason for the new "Jack" format explosion.

Payola

Another thing that exploded in 2005 was payola. Last year was the one in which New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer continued his inquiry into the music and radio business. His investigations even looked at company e-mails and found that certain major labels offer outright bribes to radio programmer in the form of vacation packages, electronics and other gifts.

The probe showed that, contrary to listener expectations, although some songs were selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, airtime was also often determined by the undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees.

Consumer Spending & Marketing

Despite the payola findings, for urban and urban AC stations what is also emerging in 2006 are statistics that show the tremendous buying power that exists in the estimated $300-billion consumer market created by African-Americans. The total black population has increased at twice the rate of the majority population in the last decade. Projections for population growth by the end of this decade show increases to at least 35-million consumers. Spendable income should grow at the same pace to exceed the $300-billion now available to advertisers, including record and CD purchasers.

The size of the African-American population coupled with the propensity of blacks to spend a disproportionate share of their disposable income on music, continue to make marketing to African-Americans essential to the record industry.

Now what we have to do going forward is combine all these elements and then leverage what the audience remembers best. Artists are remembered for their hits. A hit is remembered for its hook and a station is remembered for its "audio snapshots." So being consistently good is really a lot less important than being occasionally great.

So many things in particular affect the state of the industry in general and urban formats. Some say today's audience isn't listening at all -- that it's merely practicing. Indeed, audience is an antique a term as record -- the one archaically passive the other archaically physical. The record, not the re-mix, is the anomaly today. The re-mix is the very nature of the digital. In 2006, an endless recombinant and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product. To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply untrue. But the record industry, though it may not know it yet, needs to be careful that it doesn't end up going the way of the record. Instead the recombinant (the bootleg, the re-mix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot of the turn of our two centuries.

We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us -- as surely and perhaps as often as we've been redefined.

And so we end our series like we began, by asking the question "why?" We attempted to define and re-define and finally wrap up this series on Black Music 2006 with some of the answers to the question why. We hope we were able to share some stories and develop some new interest in our music and radio roots. We hope you learned something. The history of racism in the music business has been documented in many ways, including the PBS television series on rock and roll. It showed how after the British invasion, the careers of black artists who had been "crossover" artists, meaning popular with both blacks and whites, took a sharp downward turn. When a black artist or group recorded a new song, a white group like the Diamonds or Pat Boone would do a cover version before the original version was released. Record companies have cheated incredibly talented artists such as Ruth Brown and Little Richard. Many have lived and will die in obscurity after (or without) even brief moments of fame. This includes many whose music is still loved and played on the radio and continues to enrich our lives, Black Music Month 2006 is another growth year in which there are still seemingly more questions than answers.

Word.