Sean Ross
by Sean Ross
Regardless of whether a radio tuner ever appears on the iPod, the two are already sharing my car radio tuner on most afternoons, when the iPod is hooked in through an auxiliary jack and becomes, in essence, my 13th FM button. The drive home may start with the iPod, but if it goes for long stretches without tempo or plays the same song that I was so excited about hearing yesterday, I’m back to my music radio buttons. Then it becomes a test of how long my local stations can hold my attention.
Frequently, credit for keeping me on FM for a few extra songs goes to WHTZ (Z100) New York’s J.J. Kincaid. Like WCBS-FM New York middayer Bob Shannon and new p.m. driver Bill Lee, Kincaid is a “jock’s jock,” an appellation that’s as often as not a pejorative for some programmers these days. Kincaid does the sort of “writing” that has become not just a lost art, but one that few air personalities even know to aspire to. And on many afternoons, he can make me more interested in hearing a song that I could have dialed up on the iPod 20 minutes earlier.
Some programmers have responded to the iPod’s incursions on radio listening, real or perceived, by abdicating the “continuous music” franchise and turning the airwaves over to high-profile personalities. Then there is the on-air streamlining heard over the past few months on many Clear Channel stations as the seeming successor to its Less Is More spotload initiative: shorter breaks, more cold segues, briefer, low-key stagers. While it’s doubtful that anybody in corporate programming ever specifically used these words, competing PDs often describe the stations as “more iPod like.” And whatever Clear Channel’s intent, the issues raised by the streamlining are more than 40 years old.
In many ways, the history of radio programming has been all about honing stations down to their presentational essentials. What was tightened in 1965 by Bill Drake was tightened again in 1971 by Buzz Bennett, tightened further in response to the rise of AOR in the late ’70s, and tightened again in the late ’80s when programmers began using stagers to handle the station business that was once executed by jocks. It took the success of Howard Stern, Tom Joyner, Delilah, and other high-profile personalities to swing the pendulum the other way.
How you felt about the Drake format or Bennett’s ’70s “Q-format” depended a lot on who was executing it. Nobody who heard Robert W. Morgan or the Real Don Steele on KHJ Los Angeles could credibly accuse Drake of making Top 40 sterile. Same goes for Walt “Baby” Love on WXLO (99X) New York — a great jock (and personal mentor) whose intensity was only heightened by a format that made him faster and louder. But the “Q” format also prompted 1975’s famous “Nine” parody — envisioning a world in which all radio had been homogenized into nothing but one word, repeated over and over. For many jocks at the time, systemization meant sterilization.
Even CKLW Detroit, the ’60s / ’70s Top 40 powerhouse that influenced me as much as any radio station, had its highs and lows. A year or so ago, I finally got to listen to several days’ worth of skimmer tape from 1973 that has been circulating recently. CKLW at that time had finally responded to the “Q” format — dropping its trademark Drake jingles between songs and adding the shotgun jingle that was one of Q’s calling cards. And depending who was on the air over those few days, there are times when the “Big 8” that looms so large in my memory doesn’t sound big enough — devoting a lot of on-air real-estate to giving the hit-line numbers and giving away albums to the right caller and not much else. But even in that stretch of 1973, some jocks were funnier, more entertaining, or more subversive than others.
It’s a lot like that with the Clear Channel stations I’ve heard over the past few months. As with anything done within the confines of a thousand station group, there’s rarely the standardization from station to station that critics expect. In the same way that voice-tracking sounded a lot better at some stations than others, I have indeed heard a few stations that might as well be automated now, but I have heard others, like Z100 that are tight without sacrificing any of their essential bigness.
Tightness didn’t necessarily translate to a lack of content in 1965 or 1973 and, even in this post-Stern era, it doesn’t have to now. Being tight is never a bad thing — I certainly don’t miss hearing the once-epidemic 90-second jock break about an upcoming sponsor event followed by the 60-second recorded promo for the same thing. That said, being clean is never, by itself, the answer to all of radio’s problems. The ultra-streamlined Top 40 of the late ’70s still couldn’t compete with AOR radio. It was Mike Joseph’s much more produced “Hot Hits” (and better music) that gave Top 40 its primacy back a few years later.
And just in case anybody thinks that streamlining a station will tear me away from the iPod, the function the iPod serves for me is as, again, an extra FM station — playing the songs I like but can’t get from the radio. When I choose the radio instead, I am neither looking for uninterrupted music — already available to me — nor to hear 30 minutes of incorrect answers to “What is it that 63% of all women say they do every day?” I’m looking to hear some music that I wouldn’t necessarily program for myself in an entertaining package. That can as easily happen in a 10-second jock break as in a 10-minute segment, but it often happens in neither.
Sean Ross is Vice President, Music and Programming for Edison Media Research. His weekly column, Ross On Radio, can be found at www.edisonresearch.com. Sean can be reached at (P) 908-707-4707; (F) 908-707-4740.
