Classic Rock: Evolve or Die!

[joebtsflk1]

Also, as I posted under the 60s, 70s, 80s format, another court today ruled against Sirius in the Turtles lawsuit. It's going to end up killing the airing of pre-1972 music on any digital service, including Sirius, Pandora, and more.

And the roof of The Renegade Roadhouse would absolutely cave in. Oh, wait...it already has! At least it did for the real building.

The format of the Roadhouse stream, which I would say centers around 1972, would take a direct hit.

With revenues of recorded music cratering over the last few years, it won't be just pre-'72 music they'll be going after. Also, "on-demand" music performances over the internet will cost the consumer. Ad revenues won't be enough. I could see 1/2 cent or a cent per play.

Like it or don't, a large body of the Classic Rock format is at least thirty years old. There may be new listeners who weren't even alive in the 80s that might take to the sound of Classic Rock and to a lot of the 70s and 80s hits in that format. But for the format to really have a future, it will need new blood. The Black Keys might fall into that category, but are there enough others?

 

[b-turner]

Interesting note on Classic Rock and Country. In Texas, the Austin Music Scene has always influenced the music. Red Dirt Country is heavily rooted in Southern Rock. While still very niche, groups like Whiskey Myers and others are blurring the lines.

 

[joebtsflk1]

One thing I think is worth mentioning is the evolution of formats over the decades. This is no longer a world where a contemporary format means just top 40. There are so many splinters. This is making radio more difficult to program because we can no longer risk playing a song that sends the listener elsewhere. It is just plain hard to expand because these splinter groups have evolved their tastes into such a small circle of music you have to unite as many groups as possible with a playlist all will like in order to get the numbers that will bring in the revenue. When I started in radio, adding a song out of the box was not a big deal. People were much more tolerant as listeners. And after all, programming is just the reaction to the desires of the market.

Makes the creation of a new radio service just that much harder...will radio return to the soap opera? It may very well focus on more spoken word and less music.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Standards, a format that has various iterations ranging from the noble but unsuccessful contemporized Red in St Louis to the Al Ham version, has simply aged out of existence. While there is a small core of under-60 partisans, it's not big enough to support a local station anywhere.

It's still around. It's just mixed with soft AC and oldies. And newer recordings are being made all the time of true standards.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Some of the bands ae still recording.

Myrtle Beach SC once had a classic rock station that played new songs. I think someone may have used the term "future classics". Or maybe it was just my idea and no one ever did it. In any case, after numerous changes, the station is back to rock as "everything that rocks".

Fixed. Something is seriously wrong with this site and not others. I thought I had fixed everything.

 

[John Gallagher]

Regarding Standards.... Michael Buble is still recording new songs that see airplay on Standards format. And, while Tony Bennett/Lady Gaga are on the Smooth Jazz chart, I wouldn't hesitate in the least to spin that song and others from the album on a Standards format.

 

[K.M. Richards]

On the one hand, you have the suits who believe that every single format on the radio is so identical to every other format that a single, holistic, one-size-fits-all approach to evolutionary change works for all types of music in all markets because it has been tested to death. Therefore, classic rock should evolve in an identical manner as all other formats.

On the other hand, you have musicians, music lovers, and ordinary listeners who recognize that classic rock is a much bigger tent than all of the other narrow little formats. It's a distinctively unique kind of music, with it's own unique and distinctive appeal, and stands the best chance of success if it evolves in a manner best suited to it's unique, distinctive character.

Avid, I'd like you to listen (if you can stand it) to my client station in Albuquerque, which runs my Eighties Channel format. I consider it to be within the genre of Classic Rock (as opposed to Classic Hits) but it leans New Wave/Modern Rock/early Alternative and has a slightly more CHR ("Jack"-like, actually) presentation.

http://70.90.204.50:945/krke

I just want to know what you think of the music mix within the context of this discussion. For that reason, please give it a decent amount of listening time and don't come to conclusions based on just one or two music sweeps.

This is a serious request and I would not make it of you if I didn't think there is much within your point of view to consider when you aren't being argumentative.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Smooth Jazz could not evolve any further. It began in 1987 as a "new age" format, added soft and more melodic jazz and light r&b vocals and other ingredients. But by the time the format reached 20 years old, the audience was aging. Different stations tried different blends of music to try to keep the format alive, and none succeeded. There was no evolution, as Smooth Jazz stations changed to everything from Regional Mexican to CHR.

I'd like to point out that, just as there are still markets with Beautiful Music stations, such as Palm Springs, there are still a handful of smaller markets that support Smooth Jazz stations (like "The Oasis" in Albuquerque, which is co-owned with my client station there) but the audience does trend older, both formats are stuck in a time warp with little to no prospect of further evolution, and they survive entirely on local ad sales efforts ... no national agency business.

I think the question here is: Will we see the Classic Rock format, within the next decade or two, get to a similar point (no further evolution, graying audience, surviving on what local ad dollars are spent on the listeners that remain)?

 

[K.M. Richards]

My parents listened to Standards or MOR stations that played the likes of Frank Sinatra and such. I noted growing up hearing these stations that they began blending in the softer side of top 40 to skew younger, eventually evolving as lite rock or adult contemporary stations if they survived at all. By the late 60s a few stations were doing true AC but they were few and far between, stuck in that canyon between MOR and Top 40.

My radio career began at one of those. They went on the air as a brand new station right after New Year's Day 1972 with a hybrid Beautiful Music/MOR Standards format; by the time I joined them in July of 1973 the instrumentals were restricted to cover versions of 1960s pop and they were playing four current "Easy Listening" (soft contemporary) songs per hour. When I left in the fall of 1977, the music mix was about half MOR songs that had also been top-40 hits in the 1950s and 1960s and half AC/EZ songs, both gold and current. The only instrumentals left were songs that had been pop hits and a bunch of low-rated EZ singles from the past few years used to back-time to network news.

That was a pretty significant evolution in the space of less than six years, especially for the early- to mid-1970s.

To draw a parallel, Progressive Rock as a format evolved to AOR under Lee Abrams, and then to Classic Rock as current rock music largely split into genres that made it difficult to play AOR gold with any kind of currents. (If you have access to the Whitburn "Rock Tracks" book, look at the Album Rock section for the 1980s and notice that AOR might as well have stood for "All Over the Road".)

How, pray tell, does one expect the format to "evolve" given the circumstances surrounding its creation?

 

[Avid Listener]

Like it or don't, a large body of the Classic Rock format is at least thirty years old. There may be new listeners who weren't even alive in the 80s that might take to the sound of Classic Rock and to a lot of the 70s and 80s hits in that format. But for the format to really have a future, it will need new blood. The Black Keys might fall into that category, but are there enough others?

There is no shortage of excellent bands and solo artists who are performing and recording new "classic" rock. They can't get any airplay, so the mainstream audience is unaware of them. Really intense classic rock fans will go out of their way to find new classic rock. It's still really big in Europe, so that's one excellent source. If it were available on the radio, I'm positive that many people who heard the new classic rock songs would like many of them as much as they like the old classic rock songs. But, since no radio suits will give new classic rock a chance, the suits will never know what they're missing. And neither will most of the potential audience.

To draw a parallel, Progressive Rock as a format evolved to AOR under Lee Abrams, and then to Classic Rock as current rock music largely split into genres that made it difficult to play AOR gold with any kind of currents. (If you have access to the Whitburn "Rock Tracks" book, look at the Album Rock section for the 1980s and notice that AOR might as well have stood for "All Over the Road".)

It's not a life form. It's an artificial construct. All it takes to change is a suit who can think outside the box.

Oops. I just realized. Since there will never be a suit who can think outside the box, change will never happen.

 

[TheBigA]

It's still really big in Europe, so that's one excellent source.

OK, fine. In order for European recording artists to get airplay in the US, their music has to be first licensed and copyrighted in the US, and then they need to find an American record label to get behind them and distribute them here. That's necessary before they can receive US airplay. The Beatles were anxious to break into the US back in 1962, but they had trouble finding American distribution. It took a couple years before Capitol was willing to release their music here. Conversely, there are lots of American artists who would be popular overseas, but they can't get distribution, and they're also often unwilling to tour overseas. It's not as simple as playing whatever you want.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Since there will never be a suit who can think outside the box, change will never happen.

Since there will never be a Avid who can think outside his box ...

 

[Avid Listener]

OK, fine. In order for European recording artists to get airplay in the US, their music has to be first licensed and copyrighted in the US, and then they need to find an American record label to get behind them and distribute them here. That's necessary before they can receive US airplay. The Beatles were anxious to break into the US back in 1962, but they had trouble finding American distribution. It took a couple years before Capitol was willing to release their music here. Conversely, there are lots of American artists who would be popular overseas, but they can't get distribution, and they're also often unwilling to tour overseas. It's not as simple as playing whatever you want.

In other words, it's nothing that can't be solved by throwing money at it. I mean, it must be an incredibly difficult and expensive thing to start a record label.

 

[TheBigA]

In other words, it's nothing that can't be solved by throwing money at it.

I'm saying playing European artists on US radio not strictly a radio problem.

 

[Avid Listener]

I'm saying playing European artists on US radio not strictly a radio problem.

I looked up several of the European bands I listen to on a regular basis that play classic rock music. Their labels include Nuclear Blast (distributed by Red Distribution and Fontana Distribution in the US), Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) a part of Sony, and Century Media Records. All of those outfits have US affiliates. I'm not talking about European garage bands or bar bands. I'm talking about European artists who sell out huge arenas and tour most of the world, other than the US. I'm talking about bands with recordings in the top 20 of various European charts. And, since most Europeans speak English as a second language, most of these bands perform in English, so their recordings would be easily accessible to American listeners.

No US radio station that plays classic rock would have any difficulty in playing the songs of the bands that top the charts in Europe.

 

[davideduardo]

No US radio station that plays classic rock would have any difficulty in playing the songs of the bands that top the charts in Europe.

If the labels that have the bands you mention do not do US releases, it is likely because they do not think there is any sales potential for the material in the US.

The average US radio station does not have access to foreign releases, and would be concerned that the might either have rights violations or have the label slap them with a C&D for playing an unreleased album or song.

And even a station that might be willing to take the risk would end up buying a lot of useless material and perhaps find nothing impressive. Many "English" lyric European songs have rather bizarre word usage and pronunciation. Others are simply styles that are not appropriate at any given moment for mass US audiences.

If we take the "classic" in classic rock to mean "Having lasting significance or worth; enduring" then no new or unknown song can be classic until it becomes established and venerable. So your whole suggestion is contradictory to what "classic rock" actually is.

 

[TheBigA]

All of those outfits have US affiliates.

You are correct. So it should be easy for them to get the paperwork done within their company, get the licensing done, and the get the promotion department to send the music to the radio stations. Maybe even take out a trade ad in Billboard to let them know. That way the radio stations know. You've suggested that radio stations advertise so people know about them. The same could be said about these particular artists.

BTW, you might think their music is classic rock. But if the label feels they might sell more records by getting airplay in another format, the label will take it to another station. I'm often surprised by the way labels classify music. It's not always as simple as we think. If you think there are a lot of suits in the radio business, you should hang around with the record labels a while.

 

[semoochie]

There are some formats that simply die off, as the genre or genres they presented decline or age out of what radio can program profitably.

Beautiful Music did not evolve. As the audience aged and record companies ceased to release product, some stations migrated to different forms of AC while others changed format completely.

Smooth Jazz could not evolve any further. It began in 1987 as a "new age" format, added soft and more melodic jazz and light r&b vocals and other ingredients. But by the time the format reached 20 years old, the audience was aging. Different stations tried different blends of music to try to keep the format alive, and none succeeded. There was no evolution, as Smooth Jazz stations changed to everything from Regional Mexican to CHR.

Standards, a format that has various iterations ranging from the noble but unsuccessful contemporized Red in St Louis to the Al Ham version, has simply aged out of existence. While there is a small core of under-60 partisans, it's not big enough to support a local station anywhere.

AAA is another format that met with great success in its formative years about 40 years ago, but which has not successfully been introduced to new audiences in other markets in the last several decades. It appears that some markets were able to create their own core AAA audiences back when FM was the only choice, but today listeners will not support a station with eclectic, broad and often unfamiliar playlists.

Classic Rock has only been successful when it focuses on the aging AOR listeners of the 70's and 80's. Stations that have tried to add newer material or deeper cuts have not, with rare exceptions, been successful. For that reason, as the format ages into the 55+ demos, it will die and stations will either morph into something related such as alternative (a tough sell for newer format converts) or unrelated formats.

First, let me say thank you, for answering one of my questions and getting this discussion on track, after six pages. Beautiful Music did indeed evolve to Easy Listening! It gave the format nearly an extra decade. It never would have made it that long, if it still consisted of lush strings versions of popular songs, from 1890 to the present.

 

[Avid Listener]

If the labels that have the bands you mention do not do US releases, it is likely because they do not think there is any sales potential for the material in the US.

The average US radio station does not have access to foreign releases, and would be concerned that the might either have rights violations or have the label slap them with a C&D for playing an unreleased album or song.

And even a station that might be willing to take the risk would end up buying a lot of useless material and perhaps find nothing impressive. Many "English" lyric European songs have rather bizarre word usage and pronunciation. Others are simply styles that are not appropriate at any given moment for mass US audiences.

If we take the "classic" in classic rock to mean "Having lasting significance or worth; enduring" then no new or unknown song can be classic until it becomes established and venerable. So your whole suggestion is contradictory to what "classic rock" actually is.

Again, you ignore the fact that turns of phrase or figures of speech are not necessarily literal. Technically, by your pedantic interpretation, "classical music" could only refer to very old works of music. But to musicians who specialize in symphonic music, even a recent composition that has the same sound as "classical music" is accepted as being "classical music". No one disputed that Aaron Copeland's "Grand Canyon Suite" was classical music when it was first written and performed.

Likewise, "classic rock" began its existence as certain kinds of rock music that stood the test of time, but in short order it came to mean a genre of music that had a particular sound. It evolved into a specific genre of music.

As for sales potential, anyone with a lick of sense recognizes that without radio airplay, it's almost impossible to achieve mass market sales. The fact is, since downloading is replaced purchasing hard copies of recordings, and when hard copies are purchased it's usually through an online vendor who ships the product via common carrier, the is little need to persuade American brick and mortar record store chains to stock your product.

You are correct. So it should be easy for them to get the paperwork done within their company, get the licensing done, and the get the promotion department to send the music to the radio stations. Maybe even take out a trade ad in Billboard to let them know. That way the radio stations know. You've suggested that radio stations advertise so people know about them. The same could be said about these particular artists.

BTW, you might think their music is classic rock. But if the label feels they might sell more records by getting airplay in another format, the label will take it to another station. I'm often surprised by the way labels classify music. It's not always as simple as we think. If you think there are a lot of suits in the radio business, you should hang around with the record labels a while.

I don't give a damn what the labels or the radio industry suits want to classify a song as. In the context of "Classic Rock" Evolve or Die", the evolution of classic rock will either move in one direction, in which case it will live, or in another direction, in which case it will die. Your pedantic nitpicking just doesn't matter.

Are you just arguing to hear yourself argue? First, you claim that one of the several sources of new "classic rock" material is unavailable because the Europeans don't have the right papers. Then, when you're shown that they do have their papers in order, you counter with it's their fault they don't try to persuade short-sighted, imagination-free radio suits to play their music. It's not about that. It's about getting you narrow-minded suits to expand the scope of your thinking for one freakin' kind of music. One. Not all of them. Not pop, not dance, not ethnic, not any other kind of music. Just one particular radio format that happens to have the same name as a genre of music.

Why can't you understand that?

 

[TheBigA]

I don't give a damn what the labels or the radio industry suits want to classify a song as. In the context of "Classic Rock" Evolve or Die", the evolution of classic rock will either move in one direction, in which case it will live, or in another direction, in which case it will die. Your pedantic nitpicking just doesn't matter.

Do you want to know why things are, or do you just want to believe what you want to believe? It doesn't matter to me one bit. I'm trying to explain to you the realty and practicality of the situation. If it sounds like a lot of corporate crap, well you're right. But that's how the BUSINESS works. We have laws to deal with, we have corporations to deal with, and we have competing interests to deal with. Somewhere in there, we also have music and art. All you care about is the music part. That's fine. But sometimes there are other factors involved, and lots of options for artists, record labels, and radio stations to pursue, depending on what works for them.

Here is the basic truth: There are about 800 classic rock radio stations in the US. Some of them will continue to do what they do, some of them won't. It's not an all-or-nothing, one-or-the-other thing. As you've seen in this thread, there are still radio stations playing formats like smooth jazz, which most stations have dropped. I expect the same thing with classic rock. When you have hundreds of stations run by independent companies programed by different people, you will end up with lots of different results. Without the promotional support of record labels, you won't see any new "classic rock" artists added to station playlists. That's just the reality of the situation. At the same time, there are lots of classic rock listeners who are strictly fans of the older stuff, and don't share your view that there is current music that is equal to the music of the 70s.

Try to understand that playing music on the radio isn't a game or a hobby. For us, it's a job. If you just want people to agree with you, you're probably not going to find them on a radio board.