Norm Winer is in his fifth decade as a broadcast professional, serving as VP/Adult Rock for CBS Radio and in his fourth decade as PD of Chicago’s Triple A WXRT, a format leader for going on 20-years. With the arrival PPM in Chicago, ’XRT has seen a ratings resurgence while maintaining an incredibly long list of currents that is heavy on emerging artists. How’s Norm do it? Read this in depth interview and find out
Norm Winer
By Jack Barton
In a world where success is fleeting, Norm Winer is in his fifth decade as a broadcast professional. Even more surprising is that Winer is currently in his fourth decade as PD of Chicago’s venerable WXRT, shepherding the station’s growth from the end of the Progressive Rock era through the New Wave and AOR of the ’80s into the birth of Triple A, the format where ’XRT has been a leader for going on 20-years. Add to that the fact that with the arrival PPM in Chicago, a ratings technology that is believed to not be kind to stations playing lots of new music, ’XRT has seen a ratings resurgence while maintaining an incredibly long list of currents that is heavy on emerging artists. How does Norm do it? Read on and you’ll find out.
Despite the theory that PPM doesn’t love new music stations, ’XRT has seen ratings growth since PPM came to Chicago. How have you been able to improve your place in the market and retain the station’s identity as musically adventurous?
Over the years at ’XRT we haven’t dramatically altered the percentage of new music we play in the course of our larger playlist, or in the course of a typical hour of broadcasting. It’s simply being more selective and being more consistent; being more strategic with the music that you put into that new music category. Quantitatively we don’t measure up to a lot of stations in this or any format. WXRT has never rotated songs the way folks in the record industry would like us to.
However, given our inordinately high TSL over all the years, our listeners hear what we play. They hear what we say. We have a larger audience from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and we play the songs meaningfully. We don’t bury them. We don’t dilute our rotations. We don’t play songs exclusively in overnights for the sake of making someone that took us to lunch happy. We play music for the listeners.
The thing is to play meaningful new music by bands we believe are going to make an impact, the bands that perhaps are already within the sights of our listeners, given all the different sources they have for acquiring music and consuming music. We are kidding ourselves if we think people are still relying upon us to be their sole source of music, and especially not if you’re letting them down. If you’re adopting a conservative approach – nose in the research – you’re really not going to be capturing the passion of the audience the way we need to. And that’s what the brand is.
A radio station should make a difference in listeners’ lives, and the fact is the relationship this station has with their audience is what made Triple A viable. It’s what makes “Progressive” progressive. If you’re playing music that’s not as cool as you’d like your image to be, if you’re not playing music that is as dynamic or as challenging to your audience as the edgy imaging that you use in-between songs on the radio station, then you’re really not being consistent with the image you’re trying to portray.
A couple of years ago, just as your ratings were on the rise, you told me the station had “gone back to just being ’XRT.” Tell me what that means.
It’s easy to be swept along by being part of a format. You know, hanging out with kids who are all wearing the same letter sweaters. But the reality is that what will succeed in any given market, any specific competitive situation, is going to vary. It’s different in Spokane than it is in Boston than it is in Denver or Chicago. And what we do is in the tradition of radio that our demo target audience has heard in Chicago as they’ve grown up; the most relevant music that’s coming out by bands that, for the most part, are not being played on the radio.
As we’ve been talking about the panels to present at the AAA Conference in Boulder, you and I spent a lot of time in the last few months talking about keeping the creativity in radio in the face of all the distractions of the business side. How do your keep ’XRT, and by extension your staff and yourself, creatively motivated in that bottom-line environment?
It’s a matter of us collaborating on a succession of creative challenges. As technology has changed, there have been different things for air personalities to think about, which are now a daily part of their routine. For example, our website has altered its format over the last couple of years so it’s now far more blog-centric. And our deejays now can interact with our listeners in ways they’ve never imagined, in ways that the program director had traditionally discouraged over the air, because they don’t want them yakking on and on and on. There are PPM strategies that have been adopted, but they haven’t watered down the content or the quality of the station programming. It’s just a matter of structure and discipline.
But we actually still have to go to concerts, and the bands are exciting. The reason why my veteran staff remains so totally immature is because they’re still thrilled by seeing a cool band for the first time. They’re still thrilled by turning on a friend to a new band, and that includes all the people who listen to them on the radio. Terri Hemmert, our Radio Hall of Famer, and everybody else, continues to come to work and never ever sounds like they phone it in because this is still fun.
It’s interesting because you do have a very unique staff, all of whom have been at ’XRT for decades. Is that passion something that is just part of each of them or is something that you as a manager and leader can keep instilled in them?
All of them are former program directors in their previous lives, and they all have that passion. We do this because we believe in the kind of radio we’re doing. We do this because we still believe in this. We’re doing this in a very different way. We’re doing it in a way that takes a lot more time on our parts, takes time on their parts in terms of preparation, more so now than ever with having to succeed in different media all in the same day.
We’ve had the same conversation about the challenge the record companies face. What can they be doing to creatively deal with this century’s challenge to both keep radio as a partner breaking artists and, most importantly, keep getting new generations passionate about music?
They’re enabling us to bring their artists and their music to our audiences in a multitude of totally different ways. That’s really what we want. The artists we expose to our listeners are no longer just on the airwaves. And if they’re on the airwaves they’ll be on ’XRT. Or they’re on Channel X, or they are on our LastFM outlet, which is our HD3. There are so many different ways we can expose music, but the reality is there are so many other ways, nothing to do with the radio. That includes a website where we offer The Daily Download, which is powered by MP3.com the newly re-launched CBS website that is going to offer people free legal music all the time. We launched that with some forward thinking friends in the record industry helping to support us by giving us some of their material so we could offer them as free daily downloads on our 30-day launch each day in four different formats.
Forward thinking record company execs – like Jill Weindorf, Daniel Glass, Dan Connelly and Mike Martinovich – are being supportive about calling more attention to a vehicle where people could access free music. That should be a part of everyone’s day. That should be a part of every label strategy when they’re launching an artist. Make it available to the people, and the unique incentive we’re offering people is presence for this feature and for their artists on our websites, our streaming stations, and even over the airwaves of our participating radio stations during this launch period.
I guess the key question is, with all that content in cool places, how do you respond to the people who say that radio is no longer an essential part of the equation of breaking a new artist?
That reminds me of a quote I saw when I was taking my daughter to a field hockey tournament in Orlando. It was a quote from great soccer player Mia Hamm, and she said, “The only people who say winning isn’t everything are people who have never won anything.”
It reminds me of that because these people might never realize or acknowledge that radio was a part of the equation to begin with. And radio’s always changing. You and I recall when TV started, and people were worried that radio would die because TV offered so much better black-and-white pictures of old comedians and Talk Show hosts. But the best is, radio survived that. It survived cable and other media, of course. People worried that the iPod would be absolute death for radio.
But the fact is that we are part of the food chain. We’re the place where people hear music to begin with. We don’t use logirhythms, we don’t use tea leaves. That’s the unique thing about Triple A, and if your instincts are right, then you will be a valuable and invaluable and unimpeachable source of good taste. You’ll get your people to listen to your New Music day on the radio, and to be tagging and jotting down information so they can then pursue these songs elsewhere; maybe on a free download, maybe on a website or even – maybe – in a store!
Speaking of Triple A, when FMQB took over the Boulder convention you demonstrated a huge belief in the event by getting personally involved to whatever extent we would let you. Why do you feel so strongly about the Triple A Conference?
A few years ago, FMQB gave me the Most Influential Programmer honor. It wasn’t “Best Influential,” it was “Most Influential,” and at the time it pissed me off, to be honest, because I wasn’t PD Of The Year. But then I thought I could be a good influence or a bad influence, so I chose the former.
To me, part of that role is the Triple A Conference. That’s a place for people who are complacent to be brought out of the doldrums. It’s a place for people who are daring to be encouraged, to be reinforced in terms of the way they’re approaching it. And it’s an opportunity for people to share stories, because we don’t necessarily share the same music, but we share the same ideals.
And you’re not going to find a support group like that by advertising on Craigslist or even on Facebook. This is a pretty unique group of individuals, and it pumps me up to meet people that I know are carrying the torch for this kind of radio. It’s encouraging to me when we can create the kind of collaborative projects that are good for everybody, because that’s really what we all want. We want all of us to succeed without sacrificing our values, and that’s possible.
To me, Boulder is a place where we can exchange ideas and dreams and be reinforced and add and improve on some of our own ideas. And then meet the people that are going to want our job someday, and meet the people who should be getting jobs elsewhere sooner or later. By sustaining this event, we enable the format to continue.
So if you were to form Winer Broadcasting and buy a bunch of stations, what would the mission statement say about the company’s values?
The primary thing is to have respect for the audience. It’s essential that people pay attention to radio. I think the greatest danger over the last few years is people denigrated terrestrial radio and were touting the virtues of satellite radio and Pandora and the other alternate forms of audio entertainment. The thing is that we are making radio mundane by not following our creativity and our imagination. We need to be living up to our expectations, making this as exciting and as cool for the listeners as it was for us.
[eQB Content by Jack Barton]
