June 21, 2006 Music » Music Features

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Pop Radio Eats Itself 

TV, emerging technologies prove audio diversity still matters nothing adventurous please

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Lost amid the pointless hand-wringing and finger-wagging that accompanied recent pay-for-play scandals at Clear Channel, Citadel and other radio conglomerates was more statistical proof of FM radio's imminent demise. In the first quarter of 2006, radio adds (new songs added to play lists) were down a whopping 27 percent from just the year before.

Critics of the 1996 Telecommunications Act always argued that deregulated radio airwaves would limit audio diversity, and that is precisely what transpired. That conglomeration would be the death of FM radio was also widely assumed. That the sinking ship would drag down the corporations with it may be the silver lining.

"Clear Channel and those guys are digging their own grave," says Jay Faires, ex-Mammoth Records chief and now the President of Music & Publishing at Lion's Gate Music. "Not only are musicians and labels going to alternatives like satellite radio, iTunes or digital radio stations where there's more choice, but the advertising dollars are going elsewhere as well."

Faires is in a good position to judge these trends because Lion's Gate Music is at the knife-edge of one of them. As FM radio becomes more monolithic and homogenized, it's Faires' job to find music for his company's 100 hours of television and the 16 feature films that Lion's Gate produces each year.

"We get swamped with stuff because they know that this is where bands are breaking these days," he says, citing the relationship Lion's Gate has with independent labels like Matador as well as the majors.

Given our TV-centric culture, that may come as no surprise. But that doesn't make it any less freaky sometimes. What a few years ago would have been nothing short of surreal -- Sonic Youth appearing on the season-ending episode of The Gilmore Girls, for instance -- is simply a smart career move nowadays. Not only are musicians licensing their material, they're even recording theme songs for shows. Faires cited Showtime's latest hit series, Weeds, for which different acts provide the theme song each week, including Elvis Costello and Death Cab for Cutie, among others.

TV spots may be an even bigger boon to lesser-known bands, like those on Chuck Morrison's local MoRisen label. Morrison signed a publishing deal with Lion's Gate last year, and since then MoRisen acts have had more than 30 song placements in TV shows, films and DVDs. The results can be immediate or long-term. When a song from the Sammies played on the show Wildfire in April, the band's Myspace hits jumped exponentially. The Talk is scheduled to have a song on The O.C. in December, and the compilation records put out in conjunction with that series have sold 1.9 million copies worldwide in five years.

TV shows are just one of the emerging platforms musicians use to fill in the gap where FM radio used to be. Digital and satellite radio, Myspace, Internet radio stations and even commercials all play a role in breaking new artists or making old ones new again. US sales of Nick Drake's Pink Moon jumped from 6,000 in 1999 to 74,000 after the title track appeared in a VW advert the following year. On the other end of the spectrum, the self-titled debut from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah became a grassroots indie blog sensation last year to the extent that NPR featured them as an example of the emerging phenomena of Internet Buzz Bands.

As Wilco's Jeff Tweedy told me a couple of years ago regarding his decision to stream Wilco records for free months prior to their release, "I'd rather have people listen to our music and decide they don't like it than never hear it at all."

Clear Channel's solution? Ask congress for fewer restrictions on station ownership. Disturbingly, they've also sunk their teeth into XM satellite radio. Meanwhile, in a nice twist of irony, the FM stations that resisted the cyber DJ, Top 40 format model of Clear Channel are the ones poised to survive via the net. Stalwarts like LA's influential KCRW and Seattle's KEXP -- whose play lists embody eclecticism -- are among the most popular Internet radio stations.

"It's actually a great time if you're a band, you just have to be smart about it and take advantage," Faires says. "It's going back to what it was. You've got these beautiful new mediums of iTunes and all the 9,000 other Internet outlets where you can build up grassroots stuff that used to be like indie mom & pop record stores or college radio stations. If you're on KCRW today, people all over the world can hear you."

An editorial in the LA Times summed it up succinctly: "Radio programmers have lost their stranglehold on the nation's musical tastes ... If commercial stations insist on following the money, instead of the shifting tastes of music fans, they'll lose their audience."

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