With a career spanning more decades than he cares to admit, Sky Daniels has seen almost everything, working in radio, at labels, in music marketing and back to radio, bringing an unmatched passion to every stop along the way. For the last year, Daniels has been building a non-commercial Triple A for Los Angeles, KCSN, starting at the ground floor and putting it together piece by piece. FMQB recently talked with Daniels, who was more than happy to share what he’s learned over the decades, and to graphically explain why he thinks his future will continue to be on the left end of the dial.
By Jack Barton
Sky Daniels
With a career spanning more decades than he cares to admit, Sky Daniels has seen almost everything. Starting out in radio in Akron, Daniels then moved around the Midwest, where his last stop was WLUP/Chicago before heading further west. Once he hit the coast, Daniels forged ahead with stints at legendary stations that includeKMET/Los Angeles, KISW/Seattle and what would become a Triple A leader,KFOG/San Francisco. Having conquered the radio side, Daniels set out on a label career, putting in time with Sony, Polygram, RED and Fontana, with stops in the middle at trade publication R&R and retail behemoth Best Buy during its brief foray into the label world.
It is this varied experience that informed Daniels’ decision to move to the non-comm side of the radio world when Triple A KCSN/Los Angeles came calling in 2010, offering him the opportunity to take over the PD chair and build a Triple A outlet from the ground up. Armed with not much more than the perspective gained by working all sides of the industry and his own passion, Daniels set out on a mission, using that passion to attract some of L.A.’s most recognized talent – former KCRW MD Nic Harcourt, Berlinfrontwoman Terri Nunn and Mark Sovel (Mr. Shovel), who is best known for his stint as MD at Indie103 – to his airstaff. That same passion also attracted his industry friends, like Tom Petty who did a fundraising concert for the station, to offer resources and attention.
FMQB recently talked with Daniels, who was more than happy to share what he’s learned over the decades, and to graphically explain why he thinks his future will continue to be on the left end of the dial.
At last year’s FMQB Triple A Conference, you closed out the last panel with an almost evangelical stream of consciousness rant about the power of radio and responsibility that comes with it. I guess that means you think radio still has a strong impact.
I see what a lot of the interactive radio is doing; how aggressive they’re being in acquiring new listenership and how robust their programming is. If we’re talking about SiriusXM, it probably outspent terrestrial radio 10:1 in the last decade in marketing. This is a situation where radio, the medium I love, is a medium that a lot of Americans still use, but I don’t know if they’re as committed to it. I know they’re not as committed to it as certainly older listeners once were, and in the younger marketplace there’s about a ten year gap where they don’t care about radio at all. They may listen to it in a car, but don’t confuse that with any sort of engagement or dedication. Until we’re offering a truly robust and passionate experience, don’t expect any reciprocation by the listener, and that’s the concern I had. Frankly, that’s why when a younger person says to me “radio doesn’t matter,” my blood boils. I can’t take it personally, but when I came to KCSN, there was an opportunity, with a clean palette, to build a radio station that was all about passion, and it was all about real connection to our listener.
How does radio, with all the undeniable business pressures that it faces, fulfill those responsibilities and bring that passion to an audience?
The larger corporate groups need to start to create, much like we did within the major labels system, almost a farm team system. We had our major mass priorities, but then we had our artist development priorities. They were going to be smaller scale, smaller cost. The major radio players need to take that second step back and realize if you own X amount of sticks in a marketplace, you better start creating one or two of them that are dedicated to a deeper, more robust, active engagement with the listener than you’re giving them now.
Radio, by and large because of Arbitron, targets to the lowest common denominator that exists. Sadly, that lowest common denominator does not really align itself with robust music discoveries, or deep appreciation of different styles and genres of music. So they’ve got to decide they’re going to dedicate one or two sticks in the marketplace to that robust music experience for the sake of the terrestrial media itself. They’re going to have to have a couple of them with a totally different mission.
Do you think that the role of music gatekeeper is essential to the survival of the medium?
It’s all about music curation. People can have what they want when they want, so what are we doing that will make them defer to us as opposed to doing it themselves? So music curation becomes so essential to music stations. If we are to believe PPM and other research, people aren’t tolerating a lot of dialogue about the music; they don’t need a stentorian class held on every song that was played. So the role of personality has changed in that the audience doesn’t need us to back sell a set of music and give a factoid or a story about every single song we played in the set. That stuff’s over; Wikipedia exists, so they don’t need us for that. But they do need an original, creative musical curator. We should be able to do a better job than they can as lay people. We certainly can do a better job than any logarithm created by Pandora. Whether or not we elect to becomes whether we’re allowed to and that becomes radio’s challenge.
Everywhere I’ve gone – and this is having left radio, gone to the label side, gone to the entertainment marketing side, gone to the trade publication side and come back – every time I come back to radio, nothing’s changed. There’s still an audience desperate for a deeper, more robust radio experience. That may not be in the numbers that are demanded by the big groups, but they’re out there. They’re out there with a passion and they’re praying that radio fulfills that purpose. I’ve gotten so many emails from people that say “I’ve given up on radio; then I heard your station.”
So what do you do around the music to make your station the trusted and respected curator, as opposed to a station that plays a bunch of songs nobody ever heard before?
The fact is I’ve been blessed – with no money, by the way – to attract some iconic radio personalities in this marketplace. In my Saturday line-up alone, we’re just as competitive as any radio station anywhere in America. When you have a Nic Harcourt, who’s a recognized international brand in new music curation and clearly responsible for elevating KCRW to the position they’re in, and a Terri Nunn, and a Mark Sovel who was Music Director of the last national buzz station at Indie103 in L.A., you have people who are capable of delivering that messaging, attitude and engagement, while not being self-indulgent about it. I’m not saying we’re eliminating personalities, I’m saying we’re recognizing people’s attention spans. Am I happy about it? No, but you’ve got to acclimate yourself to it.
So what you end up having to do, much like the great songs of the ’60s that were two minutes and 20 seconds long, is to get to the hook fast in the raps. We’ve got hosts here that can do that, and they do it. They also have a lot of credibility. They are respected experts and they show enough of that in their daily routine that they remind people that they are trusted music concierges of what they can and should seek out, and it’s not just about new music. In our case they also remind people a lot of things that they hadn’t heard on the radio in three decades. That “Oh Wow!” factor comes through the airwaves on an hourly basis here.
I hear a lot of passion and a lot of esoteric and philosophical reasons why this works. What if you were not at a non-comm, but had to sit down with sales managers, GMs and RVPs to explain how your goals as music gatekeeper are going to dovetail with their business goals?
It can’t be done. There’s a reason I’m in non-comm. Respectfully, I have close personal relationships with the titans of programming and many of the respective commercial conglomerations, meaning the senior executives, many of whom campaigned on my behalf to bring me into their respective companies. But they don’t normally say to me, “it’s a fit.” They say, “We have to find the GM, the market and the situation where being active and aggressive are welcomed, and in all of our chain there’s maybe one or two of those.” So unless I’m willing to move to medium market X, it ain’t happening. Culturally, it’s just not part of what they do.
But the more passionate and engaged you are in music, the more you try to ignore it. I’ll say this until I can’t say it anymore: We all are held hostage by a system that hasn’t even gained accreditation by the people it’s supposed to serve. We’re all blindly adhering to a methodology that is not accredited. What the hell is going on? Well it’s the only game we have. It’s a losing game, you know. It’s the game of extinction, and that’s the part that made me realize when I decided to come back to radio I’m going to do what I believe in and that’s good radio.
Not a lot of people get an opportunity to build a radio station with the purity I’ve been given in the #2 market in America. So I took a lot less money, put a lot more weight on my back, and I’m doing it. I couldn’t do it on the commercial side; it’s just not out there. No one’s going to hire anyone to come in and be a passionate, flag waver right now. They’ll all argue when they read this, but it’s true.
You initially said KCSN would be an experiment to see if your musical vision would work. A year in, the logs reflect everyone from Bob Dylan, The Righteous Brothers, The Kinks and John Prine, to Rebecca Ferguson, Delta Spirit, JJAMZ and Bahamas. If you’re sticking with that broad a mix a year into the station, you must see the needle moving.
Well I can tell you that with no amount of real data that I can interpret, and Arbitron obviously not really reflecting our audiences, we don’t really get what our true audience is made of yet. We have emails we send to our community with a 40 percent open rate, so that’s pretty engaged. I’m starting to identify that there is an audience 45-65 who does remember free form radio, appreciates it, and they are engaged in new music. We do a lot to make sure that new music is correlated and accessible to the legacy artists we play. I like to put all the new music in context, and we’re able to do that.
When you really look at our playlist, it might seem out of context, like a hodgepodge of things. But when you listen, you understand why people should care. We do “sets” in a context, and the weird sets of music perhaps as you read them they wouldn’t make the sense, but they do when you hear them, and you go “Oh my god, all those songs flow together magnificently!” We’re getting a lot of people who come for the “Oh Wow,” factor.
The big question for me is whether or not I can engender adoption of this kind of radio station for the 18-34 listener. They have not had broad-based radio in their lifetime. They don’t owe anything to radio as a medium. They don’t put their faith in radio to turn them on to new music and to lead them. So my biggest concern is regenerating the younger listener into adopting a horizontal music model, as opposed to a predictable music model. I might be able to do it with marketing. I might be able to do it with a more robust, aggressive and attenuated social media campaign. I just don’t have the resources to do those things yet.
So, have you seen membership spike since you’ve been doing this?
Oh, sure. We all know I was blessed with a miracle. Sixty days into my tenure here, Tom Petty said he’d play a free event for us in a 500 seat hall. And that was a real blessing. I’ve known Tom since the beginning of his career. I thought of 5,000 reasons why a superstar would say no to that request, no matter how close you are to them. Out of the 5,000 reasons to say no, I knew the one reason he’d say yes.
Which is?
That I was there for him at the beginning, and I truly helped break him as an artist. He knew that, and he knew it was the right thing to do. He created an enormous amount of interest in this radio station in the marketplace. A lot of commercial listeners had never ventured down to the left side of the dial. They don’t go into that “weirdo zone.” It’s been a challenge getting them to understand that this is a different beast, and that we rely on patronage. But they’ve noticed that there aren’t 16 minutes of commercials every hour, and they realize that something has to supplant that for us to be able to eat and that’s a process. But that really was the trigger that created a real surge of interest.
What I’m finding is (as I knew all along) if we do the right thing, the audience will come.
We just need to move the needle a little bit more so that the industry realizes we’re doing it.
I’m in the L.A. market where if I can successfully create even a modest platform that truly is devoted to artist development, it’s going to have a position because this is a power center. The labels are here, most of the artists live here and the entertainment business is centered here. They’re dying for this kind of experience. And even though it’s a one man show, it still comes through the speakers and is connecting with the audience in a big way. I know what needs to be done to accelerate the mission and I know what needs to be done to expand the signal and the audience itself. It just requires people, audience and time, and I’ve got the time.
[eQB Content by Jack Barton]
