Most of Sean Demery’s career has been spent in Alternative radio, with on-air and programming stints at a number of that format’s stalwarts, including KITS/San Francisco and WNNX/Atlanta, plus consulting gigs in the format. But it was his short tenure as morning man at then-Triple A KMTT/Seattle that informed the latest move in Demery’s journey, which finds him ensconced in the PD chair at one of Triple A’s more recent additions to the non-comm panel, WYMS/Milwaukee. Demery recently spent some time talking to Pro.qb about the move to non-comm Triple A, RadioMilwaukee’s place in its community and the future of the medium.
By Jack Barton
Sean Demery
Most of Sean Demery’s career has been spent in Alternative radio, with on-air and programming stints at a number of format stalwarts, including KITS/San Francisco andWNNX/Atlanta, plus consulting gigs in the format. But it was his short tenure as morning man at then-Triple A KMTT/Seattle that informed the latest move in Demery’s journey, which finds him ensconced in the PD chair at one of Triple A’s more recent additions to the non-comm panel, WYMS/Milwaukee. This transition finds Demery joining other major players in commercial radio who have defected in the last decade, including KCMP/Minneapolis’ Jim McGuinn and KXT/Dallas’ Mark Abuzzahab, to name a few. Demery recently spent some time talking to FMQB about the move to non-comm Triple A, RadioMilwaukee’s place in its community and the future of the medium.
You worked primarily in Alternative formats prior to coming to RadioMilwaukee, with one quick Triple A stop in Seattle. What brought you back to Triple A?
This opportunity made sense, a lot of the others didn’t. This one seemed like you could do some damage with this version of Triple A, and Triple A overall is a weird format. We get to the NON-COMMvention it’s a hodge-podge of people doing six or seven different things under one heading and some of them seem kind of old school to me.
Do you see any similarities between Alternative and Triple A?
I prefer to think of it as we’re doing an Indie Triple A. It’s a sonic value more than actual acts. There is a large adult sonic value not being utilized. There’s a large crack in many markets and I think we can fill it with what RadioMilwaukee is doing now.
Can you elaborate?
Indie is that music style that’s hard to put your finger on. It’s not based in Blues chords. It’s not what Alternative has become. It’s basically Rock Top 40. It has a chord style and you can hear verses and songs that have a lot feeling as opposed to just straight rocking. It matches pretty well with 18-49’s.
RadioMilwaukee has always followed a unique path that is even different than the more eclectic non-comms in the format. Talk about that.
WYMS came with a mission statement that was based on radio for Milwaukee by Milwaukee. They wanted to do inclusive music; they wanted “black music” and “white music” together. When they went on it was a pretty 50-50 station. But because the people doing it didn’t come from radio, they purposely tried not playing the hits in any specific genre so they would find the next layer of music; songs that sound sonically pleasing but nobody knew the artists, and they played a lot of them. They played a lot from the Rhythm charts, Urban charts, Rap charts and Triple A charts, put it all together and called it a radio station.
What are you doing now to continue down that road, or to find a divergent path?
Over the last seven years the station that used to be a 50/50 blend of Urban/Rhythm/Rap with the other 50 percent being Triple A augmented the list so it’s more of a 60/40 blend now. The Rhythm I’m bringing to the table is still based on many artists that are not common to the Rhythm charts. But there’s a lot of Trip-Hop, there’s a lot of Indie Rhythm that we found. We’re literally finding records that match the Triple A/Indie sound of the other 60 percent of the radio station, and putting them together in quarter hours where we think a person would find it interesting to listen to. It’s not based so much on skin color as on aural and sonic values. For instance you could hear Arcade Fire into Neneh Cherry and Robyn into Max Frost, and that would go into R.E.M. “The One I Love.” We try to put all these things together so you can hold somebody for more than five minutes.
The station has only modest goals to increase audience. The main goal is having more people so more people can hear the mission in action, with the mission being to reach out to Milwaukee with Milwaukee content. We do a thing called Stories About Milwaukee which are pretty positive. It’s about all the groups and non-profits doing things for the city of Milwaukee, and we use the music as a carrier to get these stories out to people so they know that the town is happening.
RadioMilwaukee has always stood out among its Triple A, market-intensive brethren by taking the local commitment to new heights, covering all aspects of the station. How do you plan on continuing to expand in that role in the market?
Well, to start with, Milwaukee is not the town I thought it was, in the sense that you don’t know until you spend some time here what it really is. It’s an amazing town and it has its problems like many towns do, and there are things we’re trying to address. The main mission is inclusiveness. There’s a segregation problem in Milwaukee, and it’s more than just black, white, or Hispanic. There’s inequality in income for all sorts of people, which is common, but there are also lines of demarcation in the town. Our goal is to bring together the town and make a community and have it focused on making things better. We do a lot with non-profits whose main goals are to empower people financially or neighborhood-wise or through better health care. We like to use our loudspeaker for purposes of good rather than evil. We try to propagate all that stuff.
We have a brand new facility and one of the missions is not just to have a great place to work or have bands play, but also a great place for non-profits to have so they can get the community together. So it’s more than just for us, it’s for the community. The station is located in a part of town that’s up and thriving. It used to be the manufacturing and warehousing section of the town and like a lot of towns, there are people making multi-use spaces into living spaces. There are houses along with old warehouses that have been made into businesses down below and condos on the top. Again, the radio station’s mission is to be the loudspeaker for all those efforts. We really believe towns get better when people understand each other better, and we have a forum at WYMS to help that along.
Programmers on both ends of the dial talk often about “best practices,” do those change based on format, public radio or commercial radio?
It depends on what your goals are, but non-comm has been a loose gathering of sounds and ideas which is great, but the problem is things have changed dramatically in the last 10-years. When everyone has access to anything they want, anytime they need to have it, no matter what mood they’re in, all of a sudden doing something for everybody doesn’t make much sense.
So if you want to go back to best practices, best practices is, “no one ever succeeded playing the least popular music of all time less frequently.” Yet not all songs have to be smash hits. All songs are stiffs until they become familiar to you. Some of the best songs ever recorded were absolute stiffs until people got to know them. So our goal is to somehow find a middle ground; to not overplay music, but to play it enough so people know who the artist is, what the song is, and maybe will feel comfortable to hang out for a few minutes.
There used to be almost a radio farm system based in smaller markets, overnight and weekend airshifts and support jobs around stations. As more and more of those positions are eliminated, how do you develop talent?
Being here in non-comm, if all those non-comms have as many people as I have working, there’s a chance for mentoring the next generation. But I found consulting stations in commercial radio that there are stations with one, two and three people running the whole damned thing and in that situation, you’d say mentoring is impossible. And that’s exactly right; it is impossible. The only people you can find in those situations, because it also pays so poorly, are people who emulate what they’ve heard in the past, which can be good or bad, because there’s no one who has time to mentor them. Every once in a while you find someone with natural talent, who just “gets it” and understands the psychology as opposed to just emulating what they heard in the past. They are actually thinking why they are doing what it is they’re doing; why they are putting information where they are. There are potentially good people starting up who need mentors, but they don’t have them. I was really lucky and had some pretty good ones
What does that mean for the future of our industry?
I don’t think it bodes well. It’s harder and harder to find the next generation of guys because the system doesn’t allow them to get through it. And if you look at the profit and loss sheets at a lot of these radio stations, especially at the medium and small markets that are part of a group that are not independently owned, it’s ugly. There’s no money. People are only looking for computer solutions. They’re just trying to get to the next quarter. They don’t want a five-year plan. They don’t want a one-year plan. That trickles down to the point where you’re going to have a hodge-podge of people saying stuff on the air that doesn’t mean anything, and that worries the crap out of me.
Does that mean that non-comm is going to become more prevalent in music formats and most entertainment driven radio?
Non-comm has the best opportunity to make a difference for the simple fact that they’re seated differently than commercial radio just because of the way they operate. Every year they put together fund raising, grants and donors and they put together enough money for operating expenses. That’s a completely different situation than somebody at a commercial station who needs an 18-20 percent profit for investors, in a market where rates keep going down. It’s a bad combo. Not at all stations, but if you’re one of those people who bought that station at 16 times the billing, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that you still have to pay the mortgage at the end of the month, and there’s less and less money to do it all the time. You have to start cutting corners, and that’s the problem. I don’t think managers want to be in this situation, but I don’t think they have much of a choice, which trickles down to people getting into the business.
I just read an op-ed piece in the last week that radio and record companies are irrelevant to younger music lovers and play no role in their musical discovery. Do you agree or disagree with this notion?
I think it’s true, because more kids are taking that position because they want to believe that position. It’s their version of individuality. It may not be completely true, but it’s their version of being individuals and the biggest problem is that they believe it. I don’t think it’s really true, but that’s the biggest danger radio people don’t understand. There’s no difference between what we do and what people do on their own. You have a whole generation of people who have a lot to work with because radio’s been so crappy for years. Just like a baseball analogy: If the Boston Red Sox are the only exciting team to watch in baseball, and the rest are just proficient, they play catch, hit, slide, but are not exciting to watch, those other teams are in trouble. For every radio station that sounds amazing, there are basically hundreds and hundreds of stations that are basically proficient, but not good enough.
How do you reach and stay relevant to an audience that takes pride in considering itself “unreachable?”
You work very hard at something that matters. You work very hard at crafting your breaks, so people don’t hear just an exercise of the 168 words disc jockeys say over and over. You try to paint pictures like your forefathers did, but actually successfully paint pictures so people are in tune with what you are saying and are actually interested in what you are saying. You try to play music that is interesting and ahead of the curve. If I want to listen to The Beatles I can listen to them any time I want. I have iTunes. If I want to listen to Eric Clapton, I have his whole library on Spotify. All that is left is new music curation. That’s where non-comms come in; successfully curating new music in a way that people can hear a song more than once. If you have a library of 6,000 songs, if you play a song on Thursday and the next time you hear that song is a month later, there’s no way to build familiarity with that.
[eQB Content By Jack Barton]
