Winding Down 2005

A Brief Look Back At The Year Just Past

As we wind down the year 2005, we turn up a brief look at the current state of our industries.

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 20% burn just means that 80% 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?

In 2005 urban radio let go of some songs that they thought were no longer relevant or hip with their P1s -- something that happens a lot once they crossover. Once listeners who are your P1s 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, then, bottom line, 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.

2005 was also the year in which everyone realized the value of a strong morning show. It was the year 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, did the format come to a crossroads in 2005? Maybe. And is the honeymoon over? In some markets the answer is yes. Let's go back a few years and look at what has happened with urban radio. In some major markets there were two or three different versions of urban and urban adult formats. Eventually it was whittled down and the strongest player or players survived and the others changed. This kind of thing continues right up to today and is the reason for the new "Jack" format explosion. Jack is going to continue to happen with these formats until "they get it right." And it's important that they keep trying because if they discover something newer, faster or more compelling, we all benefit.

But wait! So far, Jack doesn't really have a morning show. For the most part, they're just music intensive with an expanded playlist, reduced clutter and commercial load, and an aggressive marketing effort. Does this mean the start of trend where stations eliminate staff and just voicetrack? Yes 2005, is another year in which there are seemingly more questions than answers.

Making Mornings Work

One of the on-going axioms of our industry is "as mornings go, so goes the station." Yet while most formats have developed either a local or syndicated morning show, the blueprint or personality archetype for urban radio is still developing. In other words, we have not yet developed a complete system for developing strong local morning shows for the future. Like those in other formats, urban programmers continue to say things like, "The music is really the product. We'll get the music right and let it do the talking. We can hire or import a morning show and we'll be all right." That philosophy and attitude in a world with no competition might have been able to generate some numbers in the past, but for those of us dealing with the real world where there are strong, well-financed stations hammering at us from all sides, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you got to have a "killer" morning show to be competitive. And not all morning shows work in all markets.

There's really no question about the power of a strong morning show on urban radio, though. But what changed this year was the recognition that morning humor really comes from character. Nationally syndicated morning shows from Tom Joyner, Doug Banks, Russ Parr, BJ Murphy and now Steve Harvey have proven this. There was a time in urban radio, just like general market radio, when we obsessed on morning show benchmarks. We were totally into games and bits. Games and bits may be icing on the cake, but they're not what makes great morning shows work. Everything that's funny about successful urban morning shows comes from the characters of the individuals and the way they mesh, or even clash. Humor comes from truth -- reflecting on life and the way these morning shows relate to the audience they were designed to reach. The harder your morning show has to try for laughs, the fewer laughs it deserves. Character doesn't come in a can. It comes from truth.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's funnier. Truth avoids the perils of patterns. Although we kind of always knew it, in 2005 we re-discovered that noisy neighbors, a series of canned jokes, stale contests and forced phone topics just wouldn't get it. And the other thing that emerged is that humor often comes from editing. In this less-is-more age, the new "Generation Jones" audience

wants their humor condensed and packaged. This means editing -- a role that the morning show producer must play. A role that really came into its own in 2005. The morning show producer role is becoming more and more common, even with local morning shows. Editing really means making choices and that requires that there be a lot of stuff to choose from. It also means your morning show needs the freedom to try a lot of new things. Some will be great and the rest will never be heard again. It means your morning show should take the creative initiative and want to try new stuff.

And not all morning shows work in all markets. You could bring in a morning show that got great numbers in a similar market and it could fail. Audiences are fickle and might not take to a new morning show right away (if they take to it at all). That's happening right now in all size markets. What happens in mornings affects the state of the format.

Payola

This 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 -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.

As an indirect result of the on-going payola investigations, independent promotion was affected.

For urban and urban AC stations in particular, what emerged in 2005 were statistics that showed 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, make marketing to African-Americans essential to the record industry.

While most general market stations have found their formats fragmenting in recent years, urban radio has its own set of problems, particularly urban adult radio. The decline of total audience in some markets is also affected by the increasing disaffection for our core audience of women 25-49 in middays. This trend is not related so much to the vagaries of research, but to improper programming. Stations are suffering from image problems. They were perceived as being too laid back, much like the jazz-formatted stations that realized that if they were to remain true to their causes they would have to accept a much smaller slice of the ratings pie.

Now what we have to do going forward is combine all these elements and then leverage what the audience remembers best in order to get those diary mentions for Arbitron. People recall "snapshots" which stand out in their recent memories. They don't remember every consistent moment no matter how consistent those moments were. In television, a show, game or movie is remembered for its highlights. 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 in particular: a strong morning show, precise math, research and moments of distinction. Some say today's audience isn't listening at all -- it's merely practicing. Indeed, "audience" is as antique a term as "record." The record, not the re-mix, is the anomaly today. The re-mix is the very nature of the digital world. In 2005, an endless recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply folly. 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.

As we wrap another year here at All Access, we wish for each of you a joyous holiday season, and for those in radio, high cumes and extended TSLs.

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