Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio?
It’s a valid question, more so now than when Joey Ramone posed it in 1980: “We need change, and we need it fast/Before rock’s just part of the past/’Cause lately it all sounds the same to me.”
Now the format, which is even more derivative than it was in the ’80s, is speeding down the freeway to irrelevance.
Since October, at least eight major-market rock stations – mostly modern-rock, alternative signals, similar to Denver’s steadfast KTCL-93.3 – have flipped to other formats ranging from hip-hop to reggaeton.
With the share of people age 18-34 listening to modern-rock stations down more than 20 percent in the past five years – and with thriving numbers for 13-21-year-olds, a demo some big advertisers don’t care about – rock radio should be on a quest to redefine itself.
But it’s not.
“Rock music is in a renaissance right now,” said Mike Flanagan, the new general manager at the CU-Boulder’s student-run Radio 1190 and a 30-year broadcasting veteran. “You have more bands doing more things than I can ever remember in the history of the genre, and if modern-rock radio would recognize it for what it is and let the people put the music on the air, great.
“But what’s happening is rock radio is in trouble because they’re sitting there with their limited playlists and their limited visions, and rock is going the way of any other commodity.”
Added Jon-Michael Deshazer, who runs a website critical of Denver radio : “People thrive on familiarity, but only to a certain extent. You can’t keep pounding it into our heads with a jackhammer. As is, bands like Cake and the Flaming Lips and Beck would never make it onto mainstream radio today. The only reason they’re there now is because of their success 10 years ago.”
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the past decade in modern-rock radio is its failure to bring listeners to new music. The excitement of radio always has been in the discovery, the slap in the face of something new and fresh and hot. While KTCL deserves kudos for championing the occasional local act, most recently The Fray, and mass-appeal indie bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, it fails to give listeners enough.
“They say ‘innovation’ and ‘newness,’ but then the second day you’re hearing the same songs again,” said Radio 1190’s Flanagan. “Who has an iPod with 100 songs on it? The audience is a lot broader than they give them credit for.”
Modern-rock radio may be in trouble, but modern-rock music is thriving creatively and commercially.
As Billboard Radio Monitor’s Bram Teitelman points out, the current No.1 album belongs to System of a Down. . That replaced Dave Matthews Band, which supplanted Nine Inch Nails. Next week Audioslave easily could take over the top spot on the charts.
“And that would be a month of No.1 rock albums,” said Teitelman, managing editor for rock at the broadcasting industry mag. Modern-rock radio isn’t dying as much as “it’s going through an identity crisis.”
“But even though there’s a lot of high-quality rock music out there, there’s no Nirvana or Seattle scene that’s getting people excited about it,” he said.
“There’s no 50 Cent in rock radio.”
Despite the lack of a compelling star for fans to glom onto, some experts say the sudden mass abandonment of the format has more to do with the financial and cultural aspects of the listener base than it does the health of the music or the format.
Some reasons modern-rock radio isn’t working include:
“So much of this doesn’t have anything to do with the music but the changing profile of the people in the country under the age of 35,” said Mike Henry, CEO of Paragon Media Strategies, a Colorado-based consulting firm.
Two decades ago you could make an excellent living off rock radio, Henry said.
“But now you’re dealing with a changing audience profile, and it makes sense for major operators to look at Hispanic formats and ‘hurban’ (the term for Hispanic/urban music),” he said. “A lot of people will blame the record labels or the artists or whatever, but they have a greater problem that isn’t more specific to rock.”
While these are all good points, radio executives bear much of the responsibility. We know what alternative-rock radio means now. It’s where execs push a narrow band of big- selling artists who are no more alternative than contemporary country radio is country. But misnomers aside, let’s remember modern rock’s roots: entangled and cross-referenced, varied and genre-bending, mining mass appeal and musical subcultures alike. appeal.
Now it’s more cotton ear candy than it is the challenging alternative, often sharing hits from The Killers with Top-40 radio and Eminem tracks with hip-hop stations.
A recent set on KTCL went from Goldfinger to Tool to Jimmy Eat World, Sum 41, Cake, Linkin Park, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Eve 6, Soundgarden and onto The Killers. It’s a respectable mix of old and new, of punk-pop and reggae, of grunge and synth-pop, of nu- metal and emo.
But is it cool? Or modern? No.
KTCL’s playlist is chosen by its audience via controlled tests, according to O’Connor, who heads Clear Channel Radio’s programming efforts out of Denver. He saidclaims by e-mail that to the best of his knowledge, “we’re the only station in the U.S. that has completely turned over the decision-making to the audience.”
“The labels hate it because our selection does not often follow lemming mentality that is expected from commercial radio. Most pitches to me about new music are about what KROQ in L.A. has decided to do. I say, ‘Who cares?’ It’s about what the audience wants us to do, not what some other program director in another city thinks.”
This utopia would be ideal, but critics don’t buy O’Connor’s reasoning.
“They have this whole thing, ‘Oh, you get to choose what gets played,’ but the problem is, if I really had a choice, I wouldn’t have to choose from the following criteria of the songs you’ve given me,” said Deshazer, who runs DenverRadioSucks.com. “Requests are one of the major things a radio station has lost in the last decade.”
In a recent 12-hour sampling of KTCL’s broadcast, it was clear the station relies too heavily upon its core artists – none of which is truly alternative – often playing them and their songs into the ground. From midnight to noon on Wednesday, the station played Green Day 10 times, The Offspring on nine occasions, Jimmy Eat World seven times and The Killers six times.
To its credit, it didn’t always play the same song from those bands. That repetition is are very typical for a modern-rock station, says Billboard’s Teitelman, pointing out one notorious Philadelphia Top-40 station that played a certain hit 132 times in a week, or every 90 minutes. Typical or not, numbing repetition is what drove Cody Ryan away from KTCL almost a decade ago.
“I used to listen to (KTCL) all the time, but then at one point there just wasn’t enough diversity,” said Ryan, 30, as he loaded the five-disc CD player at the downtown Hot Topic store where he works. “With the advent of cheaper CDs and all the online radio stations that allow you to hear exactly what you want, suddenly KTCL was totally useless to me.”
Digging from his own personal stash, he finished his self-catered mix for the next few hours with some help from Johnny Cash, Le Tigre, Nine Inch Nails, an electronic compilation and the “Lost Highway” soundtrack.
“It’s pretty great being able to listen to the music you want to listen to when you want to listen to it.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
