Downright Upright

Setting The Tone For 2010

Now that we have wound down 2009 and as we move forward, there are lessons from the past that can help us in the future. First, let's take a brief look at the current state of our industries. We find in spite of everything that happened, we still have much to be thankful for, including a career that most can only dream about. And yes, there are many among us for whom the past year was a tumultuous one. But even they must keep their spirits high, their hopes and dreams alive. Ours is that kind of business.

Too often people squelch their talent, trash their opportunities, blame the industry and fail to count their blessings. Some feel held back by layoffs, needless firings, self-doubt and even imagined difficulties. Few people have it easy and almost none of us feel that we have gotten all we have paid for, regardless of the price or even how payment was made.

If you want to have success in the radio and music industries, you're going to have to be willing to push forward and not let other people's delusions, faith or inability to perform hold you back, put you down or make you feel bad about the career decision you've made. Even family and those who claim to love us may not fully understand what drives us. You must learn to move forward and keep the people with you who really want to stay.

What have we learned? Well, some of the lessons we already knew; we just reapplied them. For example, we came to realize and fully understand that whether it's done with the paper diary or the Portable People Meter (PPM), Arbitron is in the business of measuring listening.

Another lesson we already learned and one that got reapplied for Urban AC stations centered around "familiar favorites." The definition changes, depending on the age of the target listeners and their preferred musical styles. For Urban formats, it's the newest "now" songs that matter most. Research show that from 6 to 24, that young audience wants only new music. By age 24, listeners want about 80% new music and little gold. That new/old ratio reverses by age 40. Older audiences prefer a music format that is up to 70% gold and recurrent.

This year, 2009 was also the year in which everyone realized they would have to get more done with less. There would be little or no budget for callout research, part-timers or contests. So, exactly when did our formats come to a crossroads? The answer to that question is that many stations, formats and markets came to the crossroads in 2009. And is the honeymoon really over? In most markets, the answer is yes.

Let's look back at what has happened with Urban radio. In some major markets, there were two or three different versions of Urban and Urban Adult formats. Then Arbitron launched PPM. Because of the early results in which several Urban stations dropped significantly, several large groups have plans to research the viability of Urban and Urban AC formats. The result is that there will be some changes. Some companies are simply going to move their Urban formats to HD channels or eliminate them altogether.

Eventually Urban formats are gong to be whittled down and the strongest player or players will survive. The others will change formats. This kind of thing will continue in the new year.

The reason for changes is simple. Cost reduction dictates that syndication, voicetracking and shift stretching are absolutely necessary. These procedures are going to continue. But it's important this time that the new solutions come from within. This time they need to come from those of us who are in the format. Who better to know and articulate the changes that will keep us on top? It's up to us to keep trying - to keep experimenting because if we discover something newer, faster, more compelling and less costly, we all benefit.

Jockless Mornings?

But wait, speaking of benefits, the new thinking is that just as is the case in some other music formats, maybe we don't really need a morning show. For the most part, maybe Urban or Urban AC stations could go music-intensive in the morning with an expanded playlist, reduced clutter and commercial load, and an aggressive marketing effort. Does this mean the start of trend where stations eliminate staff and just voicetrack? Yes. This year, 2009, was another year in which there are seemingly more questions than answers.

One of the ongoing axioms of our industry is "as mornings go, so goes the station." Yet while most formats have developed either a local or syndicated morning show, the blueprint or personality archetype for Urban radio is still developing. In other words, we have not yet developed a complete system for developing strong local morning shows for the future. Like those in other formats, Urban programmers continue to say things like, "The music is really the product. We'll get the music right and let it do the talking. We can hire or import a morning show and we'll be all right."

That philosophy and attitude in a world with no competition might have been able to generate some numbers in the past, but for those of us dealing with the real world where there are strong, well-financed stations hammering at us from all sides, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you got to have a "killer" morning show to be competitive. And not all morning shows work in all markets.

There's really no question about the power of a strong morning show on Urban radio, though. But what changed this year was the recognition that morning humor really comes from character. Nationally syndicated morning shows from Steve Harvey, Tom Joyner, Doug Banks, Rickey Smiley and Russ Parr to local morning shows featuring hosts such as Donnie Simpson and Frank Ski continue to work.

There was a time in Urban radio, just like general market radio, when we obsessed on morning show benchmarks. We were totally into games and bits. Games and bits may be icing on the cake, but they're not what makes great morning shows work. Everything that's funny about successful Urban morning shows comes from the characters of the individuals and the way they mesh, or even clash. Humor comes from truth, reflecting on life and the way these morning shows relate to the audience they were designed to reach. The harder your morning show has to try for laughs, the fewer laughs it deserves. Character doesn't come in a can. It must be kept fresh and it comes from truth.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's funnier. Truth avoids the perils of patterns. Although we kind of always knew it, in 2009 we rediscovered that noisy neighbors, a series of canned jokes, stale contests and forced phone topics just wouldn't get it whether it was delivered locally or syndicated.

The other thing that emerged is that humor often comes from editing. In this less-is-more age, the new "Generation Jones" audience wants their humor condensed and packaged. This means edited. Editing is a role that the morning show producer must play. Unfortunately, although that's a role that really came into its own, now that role may be eliminated because of cost-cutting. Regardless of who does it, editing really means making choices and that requires that there be a lot of stuff to choose from. It also means the few local morning shows left need the freedom to try a lot of new things.

Not all morning shows work in all markets. You could import a syndicated morning show that got great numbers in a similar market and it could fail. Audiences are fickle and might not take to a new morning show right away (if they take to it at all). That's happening right now in all markets. What happens in mornings affects the state of the format.

For Urban and Urban AC stations in particular, what also emerged in 2009 were statistics that showed in spite of the economy, there is a tremendous buying power that still exists in the estimated $300 billion consumer market created by African-Americans. The total black population has increased at twice the rate of the majority population in the last decade. Projections for population growth by the end of this decade show increases to at least 35 million consumers. Spendable income should grow at the same pace to exceed the $300 billion now available to advertisers, including record and CD purchasers.

The size of the African-American population, coupled with its propensity to spend a disproportionate share of their disposable income on music, make marketing to African-Americans essential to the music industry.

Keep On Believing

As we look back at 2009, we find that it was a year in which some Urban stations found they had to make some adjustments to remain viable and keep its people employed. The question is how will upcoming listeners respond to the down-going economy? These new listeners who self-consciously became members of an ingenuity and drollery-loving generation, weaned on the Internet, iPods and feature- loaded cell phones are not the same as the generation they replaced. They don't think the same. They don't party the same. They don't listen the same.

What we see is not always what they hear. Sonic tricks of the trade can defy reality and flaunt the truth. Clever radio programmers have played into these clever deceptions over the years with engaging works that insist we look at the familiar with a new point of view. The results are often disappointing and have been known to cause cascading cume.

While most general-market stations have found their formats fragmenting in recent years, Urban and Urban Adult radio has its own set of unseen problems. The decline of total audience in some markets is also affected by the increasing disaffection for our core audience of women 25-49 in middays. This trend is not related so much to the vagaries of research, but to improper programming.

Programming that may have once worked in a diary world, but simply has no chance in the world of Arbitron's electronic measurement. Some Urban AC stations are suffering from image problems. They were perceived as being too laid back, much like the Smooth Jazz-formatted stations that realized that if they were to remain true to their causes, they would have to accept a much smaller slice of the ratings pie.

So what we have to do as we prepare for 2010 is combine all these elements and then leverage what the audience remembers best in order to get the attention of those meter carriers and diary mentions from Arbitron.

The past year, 2009 was downright upright. It was a year in which, despite the obstacles, an endless recombinant and fundamentally social process generated countless hours of creative product and people. It is that product and those who created it that gives us hope.

As we begin another busy year here at All Access, we ask you not to get discouraged and don't stop believing ... in yourselves or in the format.

Word.