What Really Killed the Radio Star?
Not the internet, or Sirius XM, or even Spotify
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A recent CNBC piece by Joe Andrews asks “Would you care if music disappeared from FM radio?” It goes on to speculate that there may only be a decade or so to save it.
That probably comes as no surprise to most people. Think about the last time you listened to music on the radio. Go ahead, I’m waiting. If you are younger than forty, music radio is probably not a huge part of your day, if at all.
I grew up in a radio music generation. Even though television had mostly replaced radio as the main entertainment media of the day, it didn’t broadcast music in direct proportion to the number of younger people that were interested in it. The people who brought the best and biggest rock groups to television—Ed Sullivan, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, Johnny Carson—were not cool people. Radio was where you could hear the cool people playing the cool music that you wanted to hear.
The development of FM radio—no static at all—was the alpha and omega of music radio’s existence. Prior to FM, radio was strictly a commercial enterprise, the OG pay to play riff. The music was paid for by the ads and by direct payments of one kind or another to the on-air personalities. FM radio took off largely on the basis of DJs playing the records they wanted to play, which were the records their audiences wanted to hear because the DJs themselves were members of that audience. Nothing drove the development of rock and pop music and the sense of community around it like FM radio.
But FM sowed the seeds of its own destruction in that it created the ability for smaller niches of the popular music world to be diced and sliced for parts of the audience. Check out this observation from Steve Greenberg’s piece on the 30th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album:
By the end of the 70s, 50.1% of radio listeners were tuned to FM, ending AM's historical prevalence and hastening the demise of the mass-audience Top 40 stations that had dominated the radio ratings since the 1950s. By 1982, FM commanded 70% of the audience-and among the 12-24 year old demographic, it was 84%. Consequently, a mass pop music audience that crossed demographic lines could not be sustained. Instead of listening to stations which offered "the best of everything" as they had on the old AM Top 40's, the abundance of choice on FM afforded listeners the luxury of hearing only the musical sub-genre they liked on more narrowly formatted stations, without having to wade through everything else. The result of this shift was that each audience segment had only limited exposure to the music played on the formats targeted to other audience groups.
Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30 by Steve Greenberg, Billboard 11/19/2012
Of course, that slicing up of an audience for popular music that had previously been kind of herded into one large group has only continued at an accelerated rate in the technologies that followed. The walkman and discman took the idea of portable public music engendered by boom boxes and shifted it to portable private music. You could have your own soundtrack to the world and you could use it to effectively block out some of the world. No longer would couples or roommates be forced to have meaningful discussions and outright arguments over what music to listen to.
One of the main things that came from radio was the interpersonal connection. You were listening to music along with a lot of other people who enjoyed the same music you did. Sometimes that similarity could reach across more than musical lines, sometimes not. AM radio recovered from the loss of the radio music format by embracing the talk radio format which removes the music and is all about the community of listeners.
Streaming music and podcasts have served to increase this niche treatment of modern popular music while only somewhat easing the sense of isolation. Podcasts are like radio shows but they are not interactive nor do I think most sponsor a real sense of community. Sirius XM was the technology that used the radio model to provide listeners with access to programming that digs ever more deeply into their listening niche.
In fact, Serius XM is very much to music as newsletter subscriptions and content platforms such as Medium are becoming to publishers and writers: a way to achieve a comfortable profit margin while catering to the needs of a smaller, but hopefully more loyal audience.
It remains to be seen whether music radio survives, but there are still a few mavericks who think that it will precisely because of the human factor. In the Andrews article Bob Pittmann, CEO of iHeartMedia, has this to say:
“We are not providing music to people. We are providing companionship to people. If you go into this thinking our job is to put music on, you’ll miss the point… “
Then there’s this from Edison Research’s Larry Rosin:
“If someone only ever liked radio for the music and nothing else, they have moved on,” Rosin said. “But for the overwhelming majority of radio users then and now ... it’s more of a full-flower experience, even including the ads.”
It’s arguable that today technology provides the function of the late night DJ, giving jazz listeners both expert and nascent the ability to look up the artists and albums of their choice and obtain information both biographical and discographic (not sure it’s a word, but it ought to be) about an artist. But it lacks the intimacy of someone on the radio talking to you late at night, when all decent people are asleep. In dulcet, well-modulated tones they would talk to you, and you alone it seemed.
Think Donald Fagen’s Nightfly ‘with jazz and conversation/from the foot of Mt. Falzone.”
Think Clint Eastwood’s cool California late night jazz DJ stalked by a rabid fan in Play Misty For Me.
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Mind your step as you exit, and have a wonderful day full of music. Thanks for listening.