Black Music Month 2009 - Part III: Saluting Our Past ... Shaping Our Future

As we ease into the third segment of our current series for Black Music Month 2009, we pause for a brief look at the current state of the music and radio industries. What may have begun as a voice of advocacy is now a tool of empowerment. We're going to focus a little more on Black radio this time because it still contributes to and determines so much of the success of our music. If great songs and artists never got on the radio, never had hits and never toured, even in this economy, our world wouldn't be the same. Those of us in Urban radio still hold the future of the format and Black music in our hands.

So what have we learned? Well, some of the lessons we already knew; we just reapplied them. For example, we found the reason that some of the early black-owned stations failed. When we examine the reasons for the failures, we find that like other business built on bloodline alone, they were doomed to fail. Successful family businesses, including radio stations, have to be flexible, innovative and solution-oriented. Because today's competitive environment is so tense, to stay in business, parents are looking for their adult children to come into the family business and bring their corporate expertise with them. At the same time, many children are finding that job security no longer exists and that they're more likely to achieve their potential in the family business than in corporate America.

Research History & Early PDs

Musically, our research told us or we rediscovered 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?

Despite the fact that the economy has forced many stations to cut back or eliminate it completely, research is still important. Properly done and interpreted, research allows you to make informed decisions about the music and other programming. It wasn't as though no real programming was going down in Black radio before the end of the '80s and '90s. It was just that there wasn't much real science and research being applied, even among major-market stations.

Despite the fact that the economy has forced many stations to cut back or eliminate it completely, research is still important.

Urban programmers up until the '70s, regardless of what title they held, 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. And I can tell you firsthand, even in the major markets, we were not given a programming budget.

Many of those who had the title simply didn't function as program directors. The reasons were many and varied. The primary reason was the owners and managers knew they 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 Urban 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.

The problem was that not every great air personality makes a great PD. 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 GMs 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 DJs 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 even scheduled newscasts outside of mornings. News, with the advent of deregulation, was limited to just the hours between 6 and 10 am Monday through Friday. 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 Urban stations 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 1968, 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 DJs were less than the big show, which was the whole of the broadcast week. The training was begun by the white PDs and finished by the Black PDs who eventually replaced them. Air talent 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 eventually, black PDs 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. So although most PDs, who were not really into effective cume-building contests settled for "designated caller contests" -- which do not work, by the way -- at least began to offer contests as part of their overall presentation.

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 Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Baltimore and Mobile, Black radio stations moved to the dominant position in the market.

Fast Forward

In 2009, 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 and their dial settings. 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 tend to over-think 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 51% percent of the vote.

If it's an artist 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.

We have now reached the halfway point in 2009. We realize that many things have remained the same, including the value of a strong morning show -- in many cases, syndicated morning shows. What has happened is the ripple effect that has caused a loss of jobs. There have been a number of on-air personnel who have been forced out ... many with no place to go. They've been replaced by board operators.

So, has the format come to a crossroads? What is the future of the format? Is the honeymoon over?

So, has the format come to a crossroads? What is the future of the format? 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 syndication and voicetracking explosion.

Consumer Spending & Marketing

Despite the challenges, for Urban and Urban AC stations, what is also emerging in 2009 are statistics that show the tremendous buying power that once existed has gradually slipped. That once-$300 billion consumer market created by African-Americans is now off as much as 30% ... even though 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 needs to grow at the same pace to approach the $300 billion formerly 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.

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 2009, an endless recombinant and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product. To say that this poses a threat to the music industry is simply untrue. But the music 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 re-define us, as surely and perhaps as often as we've been redefined.

And so we continue to ask the question "why?" We attempted to define and redefine this series on Black Music 2009 with some of the answers to that question. We hope we were able to share some stories and develop some new interest in our music and radio roots. We hope also that you were able to laugh a little as you enjoyed the humor in the history. And finally, speaking of humor, something else we discovered is that he who laughs last, didn't get it.

Word.