I'm finding it harder than ever to take sides in this fight. I've always supported radio's position for all the reasons repeatedly put forth here, but considering how safe and bland music radio has become, do their arguments still hold water?
You are using personal taste to judge music. We have a greater variety of formats since the changes of ownership limits 30 years ago. And the ways in which music is selected and tested are, despite changing methodologies, is the same as when I first did Top 40 in 1954.
If you're an artist, what has radio done for you lately? Most formats are dominated by older music now, playing songs that are 50 years old or more on classic rock, and roughly 30 years old on average at Classic Hits.
That's because there are legal limits that prevent content that is considered, at least by FCC criteria, to not be airable.
But there are plenty of CHR, Churban, Urban, Regional Mexican, Latin CHR and country stations (among others) that play as much new music as ever.
The difference is that consolidation allowed clusters to have mid-level performers as they combined the whole group for sales. So markets that had 3 CHR station now have one. Heck, when I started to listen to the radio in the mid-50's, there were three viable formats in my market, Top 40, MOR and "Race". And that, at the time, was a top 10 market.
Now we have many more formats and each targets different age, gender and ethnic tastes.
A/C breaks no new music with playlists ruled by recurrents and gold tracks, where even the so-called “currents” are often a year old or more.
But "Hot AC" does. And going back to the 50's and 60's, the traditional MOR stations did not do much to break songs, either.
CHR stations have also increased the percentage of familiar older tracks, and most play it safe with new releases, usually trailing the streamers on all but the biggest artists.
As a former CHR programmer and even station owner, since the 60's we played gold and were careful on new adds as we know the average listener could not deal with too many each week.
And the "king" of Top 40 in many's mind was WABC, which waited weeks if not a month to go on the songs that were breaking per the Gavin report. Our criteria on new songs was, first, big known artists, second, artists with a few hits that seemed to be making it big, and then unknown artists.
That leaves Alternative, which has been reduced to a niche format centered on ’90s acts,
And alternative only survives on a handful of commercials stations and a bunch of non-coms. The genre has been fragmented for 20 years, with different groups liking different subsets. This is not radio's fault.
while Country runs the same two dozen artists through Nashville’s assembly line of sameness.
Obviously you are not a country fan. I am, and find the variety astounding. If you saw the array of artists at this spring's Stagecoach, you would have noticed how varied and interesting the music is now.
Across the board, these formats are super-safe, predictable, and repetitive. Radio has become a research-constrained commodity aimed at a passive, non–music-purchasing audience that’s content to hear the same old thing on an endless loop.
Music radio has done that since 1951 when Todd Storz created Top 40. They looked at the jukebox plays and retail sales of singles, and played the hits over and over.
Meanwhile, Big Radio keeps pocketing royalty savings while laying off creative workers and doubling down on automation and more of the same.
All radio is affected by a 60% decrease in inflation adjusted revenue in the last 2 decades and a huge increase in costs. Several of the largest radio companies do not have positive cash flow or have just tiny profits on operations (EBITDA). No shareholder at iHeart or Cumulus or Audacy or SBS or Beasley is pocketing huge profits.
Sadly, the reductions in staff are due to vastly decreasing revenue. Heck, on Monday TU radio fired all their market general managers and named just three people to manage the eastern, central and western US stations.
But then how can you support the music industry’s position, knowing that more than half the royalties would pad the already bloated record label coffers while primarily benefitting the small, privileged group of major-label artists who still get airplay?
That is a valid point, as the labels lost their profit point of physical sales that had gone back over a century to gramaphone records. Now they want to bite the hand that fed them for so long.
In fact, the only radio stations that meaningfully facilitate music discovery and drive record sales are smaller college stations and the tiny handful of Triple-A outlets, many of which are the most financially vulnerable to the labels’ royalty cash grab.
There are, as mentioned, plenty of formats that play lots of currents... CHR, Hot AC, Country, Urban, Churban and several in Spanish, too. They play with about the same criteria as they always have.
