p_herring said:
Can we stop beating a dead horse? The station does poorly because it has no focus. How is there any incentive to listen to it when you know only 20-30% of the music being played will appeal to most people's tastes? Also, there is no point to any radio station playing the likes of 70's punk/new wave unless they want to attract the same 12 aging hipsters. Sorry, there are just no ad dollars that want to be spent to reach that demographic.
You're fine up to the "no focus" part. But everything after that, well...even if aspects are technically true, the Joe Blow tasteless jerkwater "we're all right, Jack" sneering undercurrent is disturbing. It's like a vulgar McMansion builder sneering at the loft'n'condo crowd as irrelevant marginalia; and, all in all, it's self-fulfilling, i.e. the reason why there's only those same 12 aging hipsters to you is all the rest of them have no use in dealing with your type. They bailed long ago.
And the reason why I offer that is...do a little soul searching. It's this kind of mentality which not only explains how the "radio sucks" myth came to be in the 70s, but also the radio-is-a-dying-medium spectre of today.
I mean...it is a puzzle to me, too. Why is it that NYC has
never been able to support or even generate a true "modern" powerhouse a la KROQ, or, shall we say, a "post-WNEW" AAA? Given the city's
white/non-ethnic cultural demographics, such concepts "ought to" have been naturals, far more so than the dunderheaded mullethead/Sarah Barracuda fodder that is, I guess, "rock as far as radio is concerned" as far as a lot of you are concerned. Maybe not to a super-duper mass audience; but at least to a satisfactory, lucrative-within-reason niche.
Well, hindsight is 20/20. My feeling is, it was a radio-industry-culture thing. 30 or so years ago, they fumbled a certain broader cultural ball out there. And it wasn't just a matter of their turning a blind eye to the new punk/post-punk paradigm; it's also that these were the last persons you'd trust handling it. Partly it was age/generational (New York radio staffing tending to be older than the norm, with lots of pre-boomers on WABC or WNEW); and partly it was raw deficiencies in taste. Like, think back to vintage shots of CBGBs or Studio 54--there's a certain timeless electricity to them, even if the fashions are dated; and even they're "dated" in such a way as to inspire successive waves of retro-tinged fashion. Compare the styleless god-awfulness of contemporary shots of radio staff, who tend to look either like two-bit Leisure Suit Larrys or John School graduates. You can just tell they were the equivalent of creaky-voiced silent film actors unprepared for the impending age of talkies.
Sure, maybe a RADIO TRUTH might have superficially tried to jazz things up with a few B52s-type adds; but judging from his attitude t/w the Velvet Underground, he was terminally out of his depth re the bigger shifts taking place. A philistine is a philistine is a philistine, IOW.
It was against this woefully square tableau that the
real hip NYC music-radio gravity shifted to urban/ethnic; and even the white urban hipsters recognized it. Meanwhile, "white" music radio increasingly seemed to have less to do with NYC than with some kind of entropic NJ/LI/SI vacuumland--which probably accorded more with the trashy realm of the auditorium test and the Arbitron gratuities that the industry felt most at ease with. And then there's the matter of commercial talk radio--maybe, to detractors, the ultimate vindication of earlier radio-sucks feelings.
So, if "there are just no ad dollars that want to be spent to reach that demographic"...well, yeah. None of
your kinds of ad dollars. Because "you", the industry, dropped the ball long ago. The ad dollars for
that demo bailed for other parts. Or if it's still using you, it's only to bottom-feed.
The real reason RXP is failing is that it's like a 1983ish ideal radio concept that woke up from a long Rip Van Winkle slumber, oblivious to how times and circumstances have changed. The audience traits it hoped to score are now hopped up on iPod and web-based ways of consumption.
Which happens to be the new mainstream. And which is why those proverbial "12 aging hipsters", or virtually anyone who comes on here with a "why doesn't NY have an (x) format" gripe, seem like hair-shirted remnants who haven't heard the news...
