Comments on: could an overhaul at fm radio save the music business?

By: josh k

josh k — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:55:45 +0000

@dj paul. now we need to hear your show. time to harness to the power of the webaverse….or maybe the power of greyskull? (please send all obscure references complaints to kiala)

By: DJ Paul V.

DJ Paul V. — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:36:23 +0000

Radio, for the most part, completely and totally SUCKS. And yes - just WHO is listening and CARING?
While I’m an employee at INDIE 103.1FM here in Los Angeles, I seriously and truly would be listening even if I wasn’t (as I did before they actually gave me my own airtime). Hell, I actually STILL
listen to the station now, because I actually (there’s that word again) dig what they play.

Yes - they are a commercial, FM station. So yeah, you have to suffer through commercials, alas.
But they are the closest thing we have - in all of America, I think - to what radio was up until
about 1984, roughly. That is - a station programmed by music lovers, that actually takes chances
playing brand new, unheard, songs and bands. Along with that, giving 2-hour chunks of airtime to
folks like Henry Rollins to play whatever the hell he wants. That kind of stuff is unheard of at any
given FM rock station. There’s a reggae show, a roots-rock show, a metal show, a punk rock show,
a local music show, an import show, and on and on.

My little chunk of airtime is 3 hours late-night Saturday/Sunday morning, where they let me drop all
that crunchy electro/indie rock remix stuff the kids are eating up so heartily lately. But then I also get
to drop in the masters of where this all came from in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I’ve dropped plenty
of Gang Of Four, Japan, Heaven 17, Suicide, Medium Medium, Shriekback, Nina Hagen etc.
I call it all “NEON NOISE” - http://www.myspace.com/neonnoise

The highest compliment I ever got paid, was when I had Medium Medium on the show live, and their
guitar player Andy Ryder said what I’m doing reminded him of John Peel! While I would never boast that
kind of thing myself, I was really proud and honored to hear it!

Sadly, Indie 103.1’s signal is not even close to what KROCK (notice there’s no hypen there) booms out, and
their ratings are in the depths. But their online listenership is massive - as is the passion and loyalty
of their terrestrial listeners - again, such a rarity these days!

Anyway - just my two cents, because I love the station and SO want them to survive.
Not just for my own stake, but for the listeners - and the SPIRIT of what they do.
Paul

By: Dave Cusick

Dave Cusick — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:35:54 +0000

Yeah, I hear you. I consider myself part of the Long Tail. I really hope that radio does somehow get out of lowest-common-denominator mode. I feel SO SAD for kids who grow up only knowing Britneyback! I can’t imagine trying to discover and forge my identity in that kind of landscape.

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:47:10 +0000

@Dave Cusick
I like the comment - “And can “we got played on the radio” ever be as gratifying as a performer to say as “we got blogged”?
You’re right, the blogosphere doesn’t reach as many people as FM radio can but then again in a Long Tail world you’d be surprised at some blogs reach. Burial is a good example, a great album that hit all the blogs and ended up on a lot of end of year top albums lists - that album probably got zero to little airplay on radio but hopefully sold pretty well because of blog exposure. radio is doomed if it continues along its current path…..

By: Dave Cusick

Dave Cusick — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:48:34 +0000

I agree with you, Dave, that a major overhaul of FM could save the music industry. But I doubt that it will happen any time soon, if ever. With the FCC’s allowance of media consolidation, the gap between people & programmers who love music, and the people holding the money is a chasm to large to bridge.

I’m working as hard as I can to get into radio, and started down that path six years ago, because I still remember being able to turn on the radio and hear something new and worth hearing. I came of age listening to pre-grunge 970 The Beat in Portland, and made several tapes, while on family vacation, of Live 105 in San Francisco (whose jockeys included a younger and more idealistic Mark Hamilton). When proper radio disappeared entirely, it left a huge void in my life, until the advent of the mp3, Internet radio and music blogs. There were actually about six or seven years where I thought that people had stopped making good music, that the era of good music was over.

I wouldn’t write off entirely the importance for a band of getting some airplay. Maybe it’s just my nostalgia combined with my career aspirations, but there are listeners who really pay attention to what they’re hearing and ask “who was that band?”. And can “we got played on the radio” ever be as gratifying as a performer to say as “we got blogged”?

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:54:36 +0000

Justin,
I have read some of those “how to have a music career” books with disgust as I see them offering up false hopes to young artists. Rule 1 in my book has always been “If you need that book” or “you must go to a music conference to get the downlow on the biz” then perhaps you are on the wrong career track. And as Joe says the reliance on radio as a major promo tool was at one time correct. Unfortunately the type of bands that won that valuable airspace were all genre-selected by white men in the back office I think - if Nirvana pushed up the Arbitron ratings then we got a whole host of copycat bands such as Bush etc…
BTW - my book will be entitled “How to have a career in music by ignoring the music industry”……

By: Joe Wallace

Joe Wallace — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:37:51 +0000

For my money, it’s a leftover from the bad old days in terms of promotion, but radio is indeed an essential for artists for a variety of reasons. Repetition is the key to mass-market advertising. If you hear or see a band name once, it’s shrugged off. Twice more or so in the right context and the unfamiliar becomes “who’s that?” A dozen times and psychologically, that familiarity becomes credibility. We can’t help it–its the way our brains are wired and the marketing types have spent TONS figuring that out over many decades and using it to push product. Doesn’t matter what the product is, either.

Radio helps establish that repetition…who cared about Nine Inch Nails before they hit the cover is Spin Magazine back in, what was it, 1992? Suddenly Nine Inch Nails was EVERYWHERE.

For 99.9 percent of the artists in THIS space, these things will never apply because you don’t care about reaching a lowest common denominator mass appeal market. But if you examine the career arc of REM and Nine Inch Nails you see commercial radio airplay for both groups being insignificant at first until somebody got interested in repeating the keywords–the band names and singles–as many times as possible over a wide territory. Then they were EVERYWHERE. That somebody was the band’s nicely compensated PR machine.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:56:59 +0000

here’s a question - if radio is so dominated by top-40 homogeneity, and the format is being increasingly ignored, why does radio still get mentioned as an “essential” tool to promote artists? I’m referring to the myriad of books and articles targeted at new musicians that offer a “how to” view of the industry. I page through these now and again, and I am constantly surprised at how big a deal they make airplay out to be. In philadelphia, there is only one (maybe 2) FM rock stations that play things you haven’t heard before, and they aren’t all that popular. I don’t see how chasing airplay is a worth an artist’s time, unless they already have a huge record deal with a major. Nonetheless, there’s tons of published advice out there about how essential it is to artist promotion.