Does "Good Business Sense" Make Good Business Sense?

Radio is a business. Even non-commercial radio; a non-commercial radio station that doesn't make enough money to pay its bills soon becomes an ex-non-commercial station (or at least one that changes format to something that delights its listeners in a way more likely to convince them to support it.)

Let's focus on commercial radio here, though. Many in the central New Jersey area that Altrok calls home have lamented that not only has any radio station whose format came anywhere near daring disappeared, they've almost uniformly been replaced by hit radio outlets.

There's other formats on the dial to be sure, but there sure has been a lot of hue and cry from the folks that lost G-Rock last year and, unfortunately, all that energy has been focused on making the license holders, Press Communications, "pay" for their transgressions - boycotting their advertisers, protesting their live remotes, signing Internet petitions, etc.

To be sure, Press Communications committed a lot of transgressions over the course of their eight-year-long stewardship of the alternative station at 106.3 and 106.5 MHz, at least if it was their intention to actually run an alternative station. First they tried to run an Adult Contemporary station that called itself Alternative. Wrong. Then they tried to add classic rock to that mix and call it an Alternative station. Wrong. Then they hired an experienced Alternative programmer and made him run an Adult Contemporary station (and call it Alternative.) Wrong. By the time they got around to hiring people that actually knew how to program an Alternative station and actually let them run it *as* an Alternative station, Press had thrown seven years of good money after bad. Mitigating some of this, however, is the fact that FM106.3 itself, the pre-2000 precursor to the station's sale and the institution of the G106.3/G-Rock formats, had become a consultant-hamstrung shadow of its former self by the date of its sale to Press.

However, again, I must intone the mantra I began this article with:

Radio is a business.

The goal of this business, if you're a radio station owner, is to make as much money as possible. With an Alternative format running the way Press were running it, a failure to reach that goal should have been a foregone conclusion, but it took Press eight years to realize that they owned a station whose format they didn't stand behind. They didn't like the format, they didn't like the audience the format attracted, and no amount of focus group testing would change that. At some point, after spending eight years smacking themselves in the fingers repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer, pausing only on occasion to buy a shinier, slightly more expensive new ball-peen hammer, they decided to stop doing that.

They changed formats to Hit Radio.

Was I offended that they did so? Sure.

Were others? Sure, a couple hundred of 'em showed up on a cold January Saturday a week after the format flip to protest. Press dismissed that as pathetic, but in my book that was a sizeable fraction of a ratings point willing to take physical action to protest a format change...not war in Iraq, not homelessness or starvation, not abortion, anti-abortion or anti-anti-abortion. A format change. Say what you want, but these folks were committed.

Did I promote the cause of "bringing back G-Rock"? Hell yeah, even though I ostensibly run a competitor.

The fact is, however, that at that point Press Broadcasting's obligation to the community of Alternative Rock listeners ended. They were out of the Alternative business - even though it was always arguable whether they were actually in it, they were now officially out.

Press now runs a Hit Radio station. Which, in my objective estimation, they're doing admirably. Almost like they believe in it. Good for them - it's what they should have done in 2000 when they bought the station in the first place.

The problem is that Hit Radio, as it currently stands, will become obsolete faster than any other music radio format unless it establishes itself as the place you're likely to hear the next hits. If it concentrates on today's hits, it's already obsolete.

It's said that hit radio skews younger in listenership, and I believe that's true - many's the time I've heard Hit Radio defended as being what "these kids today are listening to".

I happen to be a parent of a couple of "these kids", and (probably to the chagrin of Hit Radio programmers) I get to hear them complain repeatedly about hearing a track on a Top 40 station "again". Since this is usually in the car, the complaint is usually followed by preset button pushing until they either hear something that isn't quite so burnt out, or they give up and turn off the radio.

The process is slower when their friends are in the car. Tracks don't burn out at the same rate for everyone, and they'll generally abide hearing something that's stale if someone else in the car still wants to hear it, unless the majority don't, and the odd person out concedes that, yeah, they should switch the station.

They stop when they hear something new that appeals to them, that isn't already on their iPod. At the same time, they're also clued in to the meaning of the word "derivative" - if it sounds exactly the same as the last hit from the same artist (or from some other artist) it gets dismissed.

The fact that they've got itchy preset button fingers, of course, means that they DO NOT tolerate advertising unless it's entertaining in and of itself.

"Where are they hearing these new songs that aren't so burnt out?" you might ask. Well, actually, the moment a song appears on the scene and starts transmitting virally across their friends' radar, they're more likely to pull it up on YouTube than to wait until it shows up on Hit Radio. Hit Radio's really only the most attractive option when they're in the car and out of Internet range.

So who's filling out the Arbitron diaries that result in the ratings that make hit radio so attractive? I'd suggest that, empirically, adults are absolutely listening to that - especially adult women - though the younger-skewing artists wear thin fast.

By "empirically", I mean "in my neighborhood filled with soccer/dance moms and sports dads". Since I'm the guy with the music collection, it generally falls to me to program the music, and of course (since I'm always asked for it) I've done a bit on my own to contribute to sales of hit music. And my programming tool of choice is actually iTunes.

Not only does iTunes make it easy for me to acquire new tracks mid-party, it also, through iTunes DJ, makes it easy to have a true jukebox environment, where more than one person has the ability to influence the mix, because everyone that has a iPhone or an iPod Touch can use Apple Remote to queue up requests, as long as they're connected to my WiFi cloud. (Every party - and there's one every Friday night somewhere in the neighborhood during the summer - usually makes iTunes about $5. Yes, it's a good neighborhood.)

[For the curious, between iTunes and the speakers, there's a C. Crane FM transmitter and a few cheap portable FM receivers scattered around the backyard. If you're within 100 feet of my house, you'll hear us on 103.9 MHz, but we haven't shown up in the ratings. Yet.]

Now then, I don't think that the entire assemblage wants to hear Hit Music (it's really actually a genre of its own now, isn't it?) In fact, some of the wags with access to the queuing system throw in some Pantera just to keep us on our toes, though I have to say my addition of La Roux's "Bulletproof" last summer got some traction. But the fact is that the wives in the neighborhood (who, empirically, generally don't have the iPhones) pressure the husbands (who - again, empirically - generally do have the iPhones) to queue up Black Eyed Peas, Beyonce, Katy Perry and Pitbull when they're not queueing American Pie, The Time Warp and Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

(I keep threatening to make this a format, by the way. Yes, we embarrass the kids.)

To make a long story short (too late) I definitely think adults, especially adult women, are listening to Hit Radio tracks. Whether they listen to them on the radio, and whether that listenership is really enough to support SEVEN hit stations in the area is for the market to decide.

Oh, one more thing: Lady Gaga is a genius. I say that without reservation or equivocation.

None of this has anything to do with the popularity of hit radio from a programming perspective. Hit radio is simply an easier thing to sell to advertisers, full stop, and it will continue to be easier to sell until the advertisers get wise that their perception of hit radio's popularity isn't backed up by the numbers for the station they're able to afford to advertise on. Whether that means they stop radio buys altogether or they realize they need to support a different paradigm is difficult to say - I suspect the former.

Radio is a business. The current conventional wisdom for the running of that business dictates that your station's format must appeal to the largest number of people by playing the most popular music. Audience cultivation is not a priority - only audience reach. You need to get as big an audience as you can now; it's not cost-effective to attract a more committed listener.

But committed listeners stay committed. Causal listeners push buttons and disappear.

I see a better future for non-commercial stations that cater to their audience.

With any amount of luck, I'll soon be running one, so we'll see.