The New York Times > Arts > Music > Fade-Out: New Rock Is Pass� on Radio
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April 28, 2005
Fade-Out: New Rock Is Pass� on Radio
By JEFF LEEDS
ajor radio companies are abandoning rock music so quickly lately that
sometimes their own employees don't know it.
Troy Hanson, the program director of WZTA in Miami, said that he first
learned that his station's owner, Clear Channel Communications, had ditched the
rock format - and his staff - when he tuned to the station one morning in
February and heard talk-radio. His rock domain, known as Zeta, had vanished.
"We didn't even get to play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It,' " the
R.E.M. anthem, as a sign off, he said.
In the last four months, radio executives have switched the formats of
four modern-rock, or alternative, stations in big media markets, including WHFS
in Washington-Baltimore area, WPLY in Philadelphia and the year-old KRQI in
Seattle. Earlier this month WXRK in New York discarded most newer songs in
favor of a playlist laden with rock stars from the 80's and 90's.
Music executives say the lack of true stars today is partly the reason.
Since rap-rock acts like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit retreated from the scene,
none of the heralded bands from recent rock movements, be it garage-rock (the
Strokes, the Vines) or emo (Dashboard Confessional, Thursday), connected with
radio listeners or CD buyers the way their predecessors did.
This sudden exit of so many marquee stations has not only renewed the
perennial debate about the relative health of rock as a musical genre, but it
also indicates that the alternative format, once the darling of radio a decade
ago, is now taking perhaps the heaviest fire in the radio industry's battle to
retain listeners in the face of Internet and satellite radio competition. Many
rock stations may be in for another blow when the shock jock Howard Stern
departs for Sirius Satellite Radio next year.
There are still signs that a fervent alternative scene survives. This
weekend, for instance, 50,000 people a day are expected to visit Indio, Calif.,
for the sixth-annual Coachella Valley Music Festival, the biggest rock event of
its kind in the United States, to cheer bands like the Arcade Fire and the
Secret Machines. Moreover, while alternative programmers are searching for a
solution, for the moment they have the benefit of new music by a clutch of
reliable stars from the genre's heyday: Nine Inch Nails, Weezer and Beck are
releasing their first albums in two years or more, and songs by each rocketed
to the top of Billboard magazine's modern-rock airplay chart.
But many musicians in the newer bands on the alternative playlists "could
be your waiter tomorrow night and you wouldn't know the difference," griped a
radio promotion executive at one major label, who requested anonymity for fear
of offending bands on his label.
Ratings for rock radio stations have been languishing for years. The
share of the 18-to-34 age group that is tuning in to alternative stations has
shrunk by more than 20 percent in the last five years, according to Arbitron,
while stations playing rap and R&B or Spanish-language formats have enjoyed an
expanding audience.
As a result, many rock programmers aren't sure what to play.
"The format in the last couple of years has gone through an identity
crisis," said Kevin Weatherly, program director of KROQ, a closely watched
alternative powerhouse in Los Angeles. "You have stations that are too cool,
that move too quickly and are only playing the coolest music, which doesn't at
the end of the day attract enough of the audience. Or you have the other
extreme, dumb rock, red-state rock that the cool kids just flat out aren't
into."
Such scrambling to strike a balance has cost many alternative programmers
large chunks of audience. Some radio executives said that they made a fateful
choice in the last few years to jettison the pop-rock side of their genre to
concentrate on heavier-sounding bands, and now are afraid to turn back. As part
of that shift, many stations also decided to eliminate women from their
audience research. These stations decided to aim at men almost exclusively
because of the heavier sound. "You got yourself into a corner that you can't
get out of," said Tom Calderone, senior vice president for music and talent at
MTV, and a former radio programmer and consultant. "When you listen to
alternative stations do their 90's flashback weekends, you can hear something
as meaningful as Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden to something as silly and
quirky as Harvey Danger and Presidents of the United States of America. When
you become 65-75 percent guys, you're leaving a huge audience on the table."
At WZTA in Miami, the decision in 2003 to remove women from the equation
"was definitely when we started to see Zeta's attrition," Mr. Hanson said. Days
after Clear Channel took Zeta off the air, a rival company, Cox Radio, flipped
the format of one of its Miami-area stations to rock.
Mr. Hanson also suggested that land-based radio had been too slow to
respond to satellite radio, which offers access to dozens of commercial-free
music channels for a monthly subscription fee and to digital music players,
like Apple Computer's iPod. He said that he balked when a supervisor suggested
running an on-air contest to give away an iPod loaded with 949 songs. (Zeta's
frequency was 94.9-FM.) "I was like, 'Then they don't need to listen to Zeta
anymore.' " Mr. Hanson wound up forgoing the contest.
"The people that are leading-edge technology consumers are not being
embraced by terrestrial radio," said Jim McGuinn, who was program director of
WPLY in Philadelphia, known as Y100, before its corporate parent, Radio One,
flipped the station to rap and R&B in February. "The outsider image
disappeared," Mr. McGuinn said.
Mr. McGuinn and a handful of other former WPLY employees have started an
Internet radio station, y100rocks.com, to play music they say the terrestrial
version had been missing, including songs by Interpol, Moby and Queens of the
Stone Age.
But for now, Philadelphia has no terrestrial alternative-rock station.
Some analysts fear that, when radio stations switch from alternative rock
to programming aimed at older listeners, they may be making a sacrifice. "Radio
has ceded the younger demographic to other media," said Fred Jacobs, president
of Jacobs Media, a radio consulting company in Southfield, Mich., specializing
in rock. "I just don't know how we're going to get back people who didn't get
into the radio habit in their teens," he said, adding, "It really becomes
problematic down the road."
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