For those who missed it, here is the text of Saturday's article on how
bad NY radio is. Note the mention of WYNY changing format. BTW, did
anyone listen in this morning to the new format? Gross!! The morning
slot is shock-jock, ala "How-wierd" Stern. New York radio needs this
like we need another pot-hole!! I hope Evergreen looses their pants and
what they cover. I tried calling in to complain on the 800 number they
gave out, but they were always busy. Must have been lots of people
complaining, because the main DJ took a cheap shot at country music and
the old format by referring to it as "looser music". Shockingly
unprofessional considering the grace with which the old staff departed.
The Sorry State of New York Radio
By NEIL STRAUSS
There is nothing interesting about the inside of a radio station.
The elements are the same: impersonal corridors lined with offices
and a studio with a control board, music-playback machines, banks
of compact disks, microphones, headphones, a disk jockey and
usually an engineer.
But at K-Rock last week, there wasn't even a disk jockey, and the
microphones and headphones weren't in use. It was a ghost station.
The music played, but nobody announced the songs or did any
talking. An engineer simply programmed the music of the day using
a list of songs chosen by a music director in Los Angeles and
sequenced by a computer program known as Selector.
As recently as December, K-Rock (WXRK, 92.3 FM) was the only
station left in New York City playing classic rock: the Beatles,
the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd. Today, it is one of five New York
stations playing a variation of the format known as modern
rock(bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Bush). Except for Howard
Stern, who is heard in the morning, the station gave its entire
on-air staff a few weeks off while it decided what kind of disk
jockeys should present its new sound.
A result is that in this transition period, and perhaps beyond it,
K-Rock has become a metaphor for music radio in New York: lifeless,
mechanical and remote.
Music stations all over the country, like other forms of
entertainment, are becoming more generic. This is because of a
variety of factors: the rise of outside radio consultants,
increasing dependence on market research and narrow-niche formats,
the tight correlation between ratings and the cost of advertising,
relaxed Federal regulations governing ownership that put more
stations in the hands of a few national corporations, and a herd
mentality in which a successful new idea gets copied into
redundancy.
But in the New York area, home to the largest radio audience in the
country (14 million, according to Arbitron Research), the situation
is even worse. Critics have long bemoaned classical-music radio's
adherence to excerpting familiar works as background music. But pop
radio has become just as innocuous. New York stations are among
the most conservative in the country, with the variety of formats
they offer shrinking month by month. Chicago, Boston, Nashville,
even Albuquerque, N.M.: all these cities and others offer the
casual listener a more provocative and varied spin of the dial.
Problems faced by stations around the country are worsened in New
York City. It costs nearly twice as much to own a radio station
here as elsewhere, leading to an environment that discourages
taking risks. The density of the urban landscape makes it difficult
for FM signals to travel in the city. There is no car culture
within the city and hence no captive radio audience. New York is
also home to one of the broadest arrays of ethnic groups and
musical tastes in the country, each wanting its own radio format
on a band too small to accommodate them all.
Once, things were better.New York had its golden ages of music
radio from the mid-1950's to the early 7's. In the 50's, WINS (with
Alan Freed) and WMCA (with the Good Guys) brought rock-and-roll to
the city. In the 60's, Dan Ingram and Cousin Brucie gave life to
top-40 music on WABC while WBAI and WFMU pioneered free-form radio.
In the early 70's, WNEW was still enjoying its heyday as a
progressive station, but music radio had already begun its slow
decline, one that has accelerated in the last few months.
In New York, no station takes chances," said Tom Zarecki, who has
worked in New York radio for 27 years as a D.J., engineer and
consultant and is now in charge of marketing at Radio Computing
Services, which developed the Selector computer program.
"New York is considered a conservative market in the industry.
Because moving up or down half a point in the ratings can mean a
million dollar gain or loss in advertising revenue, stations are
not going to experiment or try anything new. They have the stations
they own in other cities do the testing first."
Commercial radio stations in New York now move in packs, jumping on
whatever styles of music that analysts and advertisers perceive to
be hot or underrepresented in the market. This is best illustrated
by the recent turn of events that led to the new K-Rock, which
Robert Unmacht, a national radio expert and editor of the weekly
newsletter M Street Journal, describes as "a comedy of errors."
Long Island's WDRE (92.7 FM) was the only commercial station in the
New York area playing modern rock music in early 1994 when suddenly
Z-100 (WHTZ, 100.3 FM) abandoned its top-40 format for a similar
repertory. Immediately afterward, WNCN (104.3 FM) changed from
being a classical station to a hard-edged modern rock station,
altering its call letters to WAXQ (or Q-104) and laying off its
entire air staff (except for Candace D'Agree, whose on-air name was
changed to the more rocking Candy Martin). Last summer, WNEW
followed with a more adult-leaning mix of modern rock. Last month,
K-Rock joined the fray.
"New York suddenly found itself with a glut of rock stations," Mr.
Unmacht said. "It has got five nonadventuresome rock stations. It's
the equivalent of a backyard barbecue where everybody brings potato
salad. It was really a mistake. Nobody was looking where they were
going, and they all bumped into each other."
Vin Scelsa, a former disk jockey on K-Rock who recently returned to
his old home on WNEW, says radio has become a business where the
stakes are too high for the music to be good. "Modern commercial
radio is about real estate," he said. "It's not about art or music
or really communication. Most people own radio stations so they can
build up their equity in them and then sell them."
Occasionally, an entrepreneur comes along who wants to give New
York radio something new and exciting. Several years ago, for
example, Ken Freedman, the station manager at the
listener-supported WFMU-FM (91.1 FM) in East Orange, N.J., tried to
establish a similar station in the city.
"I wanted to set up a new, eclectic music station that was
noncommercial in New York," he said. "I wasted a year and a half
of my life trying to do that. It was more or less a disaster."
"There's a very good reason why there are so few stations like WFMU
out there," he added. "It's so difficult to do stuff with little
money. Anybody who wants to try something new in New York
commercial radio needs at least $40 million before they can even
think about it. And that's just going to buy you the license. Then
you need money to operate it."
With out-of-town corporate owners, business decisions are made that
aren't necessarily best for the local radio spectrum. Consider what
is happening at WYNY (103.5 FM), the only country station in New
York, which is on the verge of changing its format for reasons that
seem to have more to do with corporate public relations than with
music. Though WYNY has more listeners than any other country
station in the country, according to Arbitron, its ratings appear
low because there are so many other stations competing in New York.
"WYNY is owned by a company called Evergreen that is very active on
Wall Street," Mr. Unmacht said. "And every article that says WYNY
isn't working hurts the whole chain." (Officials of Evergreen
Media did not return phone calls for comment.)
Mr. Unmacht added "it's unthinkable that in New York there's no
classic rock, no country, no mainstream rock and no contemporary
hits radio."
New York, however, has several stations catering to a black
audience, which has led to intense competition among them. As
Lisa G., a morning-show host at the rap and rhythm-and-blues
station Hot-97 (WQHT 97.1 FM), says, "It's radio wars out there."
For years, Hot-97, Kiss-FM (WRKS 98.7 FM) and WBLS (107.5 FM) have
been competing in a see-saw ratings game, with one station at the
top of the Arbitron ratings one season and down eight places the
next.
In 1994, Emmis Broadcasting, which owns Hot-97, bought Kiss-FM and
changed its format to smooth soul and rhythm-and-blues, seeking
older listeners with greater buying power. WBLS, aimed at the same
audience, suddenly found its ratings plummeting. (The station's
promotional spot advising listeners not to listen to "the tune of
those plantation stations," referring to the white-owned stations
of Emmis, probably didn't help.) Three months ago, WBLS brought
back Frankie Crocker, an acclaimed disk jockey and program director
at the station in the 70's and 80's, to try to boost ratings.
But all these changes have probably served only to confuse the
stations' listeners.
Some radio consultants consider New York home to radio's top minds.
But nowadays a radio go-getter is one who can raise ad revenue and
ratings, not, as in the past, a disk jockey with taste and
creativity.
"When a station looks for disk jockeys, they look for easygoing
kinds of people who aren't going to rock the boat or inflict their
own personalities," said Mr. Scelsa, one of the few disk jockeys
still allowed to choose the music he plays. "The freedom in the
past few years has been on talk radio: those are the people who
have the autonomy music D.J.'s used to have in the early 70's. Of
course, if they stopped making money tomorrow, someone would be
telling them what to say."
Disk jockeys with musical freedom like Alan Freed, who gave birth
to the phrase "rock-and-roll" in Cleveland in the 50's, and Tom
(Big Daddy) Donahue, who ushered in the psychedelic era in San
Francisco, are no longer considered the pioneers of FM radio.
Credit for today's sound goes to Todd Storz, who, in Omaha in the
late 50's, gave birth to the play list and the heavy rotation
system (playing a few records repeatedly) after he noticed how
often the same songs were being selected on bar jukeboxes. Another
FM forefather is Bill Drake. In the 60's he narrowed radio's scope
even further by surveying thousands of teen-agers in Los Angeles to
come up with the top-40 format, in which only the hits are played,
over and over, and D.J.'s read slogans rather than talk.
But today, even top 40 is considered too loose a format. After all,
top-40 music can range from soft rock to hard rap. Consultants have
come up with designations like AC (adult contemporary), hot AC,
urban AC, soft AC, NAC (new adult contemporary) and AAA (adult
album alternative), among dozens of other splinter formats. There
are, however, no stations for those who like easy-listening as well
as world music, younger rock fans who also listen to rap, or
classic rock fans who like jazz.
Though New York is a multicultural city where people are exposed to
all kinds of music every day, its radio formats are based on
exclusion. "No rap, no hard stuff," boasts a promotional spot on
WPLJ (95.5 FM). And Q104 brags that it plays few black artists,
making announcements like: "No TLC, No Mariah Carey. Just pure
rock."
New York's only commercial station that eschews niche formats is
WPAT (93.1 FM), which ended its easy-listening days last month
after it was bought by Spanish Broadcasting Systems Inc. WPAT now
caters to an adult Latin audience, but it has extended its
definition of Latin pop to include not just Spanish-language
artists like Luis Miguel but also the band Santana. Whitney Houston
and Michael Jackson are also part of its mix.
In noncommercial radio,WFMU (91.1 FM), which was owned by Upsala
College, is often cited as the New York area's best radio station
for its anything-goes approach to music. But WFMU is in trouble.
Shortly before Upsala College went bankrupt, the station's
management bought its operating license from the school. But it was
unable to buy the building in which it was housed. In addition
to having to relocate its studio, WFMU must move its transmitter as
a result of a separate legal battle. "We need so much money
at this point that we can't even ask for that amount on the air,"
Mr. Freedman said.
In most cities, those tired of cookie-cutter commercial radio
formats can turn to noncommercial stations like WFMU on the
low-end of the FM spectrum. Free of demands of advertisers,
college-radio stations play cutting-edge music, religious
broadcasters pray for your salvation and donations, and public
stations mix everything from radio dramas to bluegrass to be-bop.
New York has its fair share of these stations, but because of the
structural density of Manhattan, most residents have trouble
receiving them. Steel and concrete impede an FM signal, and the
city's huge electrical output interferes with the AM band. An FM
signal can also bounce off buildings, doubling back and canceling
itself out, resulting in static or garbled reception. What's more,
the noncommercial stations in the city are packed so closely
together that many of their signals overlap.
New York's hope, some say, may lie in the sheer number of stations
that have been crammed onto the dial. There are now more than 60
stations, and though one household may not receive all of them,
most of these stations are painfully aware of one another.
"Sometimes the fact that there are so many radio stations forces
somebody to try something unique," said Guy Zapoleon, a top radio
consultant. "The more signals there are, the more likely someone
will try to create something with an edge to stand out."
Has anyone done this in New York lately? "Not that I know of," Mr.
Zapoleon said.
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company