Company News · February 9, 2005

One Night In Bangkok Makes A Rock Fan…Nostalgic?

By Edison Research

‘80s Rock Listeners Aren’t Just Used To Variety, They Were Raised With It

by Sean Ross, VP of Music and Programming

Even after the Jack/Bob format’s American inroads, some aspects of the Classic Hits/Hot AC-hybrid are still hard for programmers to come to grips with. In particular, there’s the format’s ability to draw Rock radio listeners, even though the U.S. variants of the format often include music with no rock credentials. Inevitably, in any discussion of Jack/Bob, somebody says, “But they’re playing ‘One Night In Bangkok.” (The song title itself changes, but it’s always something that no self-respecting Rock listener should be willing to sit through, at least long-term.)

Listeners’ usage has never been as focused as the radio formats offered them. A well programmed Top 40 often shares 15-25% of its cume with all of a market’s major players. Beyond that, if you look at the history of how most listeners experienced Rock music over the last two decades, it makes a lot more sense. Programmers often compare Jack/Bob to an iPod on shuffle, but the sudden marketability of broad variety and the recent resurgence of ‘80s Rock both have much deeper roots in the radio landscape of 25 years ago.

How could somebody who likes “Pink Houses” or “Panama” put up with a station that also plays “Caribbean Queen”?

In 1980, Top 40 radio wanted to be AOR radio. Or it wanted to be AC radio. Sometimes, it wanted to be both. Faced with both the disco backlash on one side and the introduction of gold-based AC on FM in many markets, Top 40 in many markets became either “Rock 40” (although the term then was “Top Tracks”) or it softened dramatically. Some Top 40 stations, like KRBE Houston, would end trying both approaches in that era.

Even those stations that stayed nominally Top 40 became, in many cases, Rock/AC hybrids. Occasionally, a WHYI (Y100) Miami, WXKS-FM (Kiss 108) Boston, KFRC San Francisco, or WZGC (Z93) Atlanta would play all the hits, including R&B crossovers. Many others set the parameters as Billy Squier on the hard end, and Air Supply at the other. And if you had an act like Toto that fit in to both food groups (or a power ballad from Journey or Styx), well, that was even better.

Rock radio, meanwhile, was getting harder and a lot more insular. Three years earlier, the format had been just as much about Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles as Ted Nugent and Lynyrd Skynyrd. By 1980, stations like WCOZ Boston and WLUP Chicago had ushered in an era of “Kickass Rock ‘N’ Roll,” to quote one much-used liner of the time. And the success of Doubleday’s heavily researched KWK St. Louis and WLLZ Detroit helped shift a once-artist-driven format to one more dependent on one-off turntable hits.

If you’d grown up with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd in AOR’s first generation, the corporate rock of the early ‘80s already represented the doldrums. But if you were 18 at the time, you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to like Pat Benatar and Journey. And if you were an 18-year-old female, it was probably your hit music. Corporate rock was hardly the only music that mattered in 1980-81. But back then, Rick James and the Gap Band were relegated to Urban radio. Songs like “I Got You” by Split Enz or “What I Like About You” by the Romantics got only a relative smattering of airplay. And in an era marked by soft pop from Christopher Cross and Paul Davis, who wouldn’t gravitate to 38 Special and Loverboy instead?

By 1982-83, of course, things were a lot different. MTV had helped propel the next spate of new wave singles-“Tainted Love,” “Don’t You Want Me,” “Rock The Casbah”-a lot further than “I Got You” or “What I Like About You.” Rick James, Michael Jackson, Prince and others had co-opted early ‘80s rock and forced Top 40 to pay attention to R&B again. Mike Joseph’s “Hot Hits” WCAU-FM Philadelphia had galvanized Top 40 in the same way that WLLZ had impacted Rock radio a few years earlier, giving the format a new confidence. Top 40, which already had an expectation for pop/rock, could still play John Mellencamp, Joan Jett, and anything important on Rock radio, leaving that format without ownership of much besides the one-hit wonders of the Doubleday era.

By 1983-84, Rock radio wanted to be Top 40 radio. The success of MTV and the now infamous Burkhart-Abrams “80/20 doctrine” urging AOR to play more new music sent Rock PDs scrambling to find a place for “I Melt With You” and “I Know There’s Something Going On.” The segregation of Rock radio that took hold in the late ‘70s was shattered by not only “Beat It” and “Little Red Corvette,” but by “Electric Avenue,” and even “Running With The Night” by Lionel Richie at some stations. WLLZ played Shalamar’s “Dead Giveaway” and several of its Doubleday brethren, such as WAVA Washington and KPKE Denver, kept going until flipping to top 40 outright. So did heritage rockers such as WPLJ New York and WLRS Louisville.

And that was how things stayed for a while. Mainstream pop/rock was abundant in the mid-‘80s-Springsteen, Mellencamp, Dire Straits, Tom Petty, Def Leppard—but it fueled the success of Top 40, not Rock radio. Even Quiet Riot and Ratt’s hits were experienced next to Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, and Daryl Hall & John Oates by many listeners.

By the late ‘80s, the landscape had evolved again. Unable and increasingly unwilling to compete with Top 40 for teens, AOR stations had begun following the new lead of a much-less-kickass WLUP Chicago to a more adult sound, based more in blues and roots music than corporate rock. And many of those that didn’t take their cues from WLUP in 1985 still ended up going older a few years later because of the success of Classic Rock.

Top 40s, by then, were having troubles of their own. KPWR (Power 106) Los Angeles had ended the 10-share era of KIIS and shifted the format’s emphasis from pop to rhythm. Even so, when Rock radio finally got something it might have owned in the late ‘80s with the success of Guns ‘N’ Roses and the hair band explosion, many of the newly adult AORs were reluctant to embrace those records. So “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Wanted Dead Or Alive” were experienced on Top 40 for many listeners as well.

It’s not until 1992-93, a decade after the Top 40 resurgence, that Rock radio regained any sort of agenda-setting primacy. By then, it helped that there was no Top 40 radio in many markets. And for several years, “The New Rock Revolution” made Modern Rock stations (or Top 40/Modern Rock hybrids) the place where women-who-rocked heard not only Pearl Jam and Nirvana but also, for a while, Spin Doctors, R.E.M., and “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran. That lasted until the women were peeled off first by the advent of Modern AC in late 1995 and then by the new strength of Top 40 a few years later.

All of which explains a lot of what we’re seeing on the landscape now:

Why is early ‘80s rock showing up at the top of so many Hot AC music tests? Because it was the pop music of the time for a woman who’s now in her late 30s or early 40s. And because Hot AC doesn’t have much current music to offer as an alternative.

Why do the hair bands test as well with Hot AC women as Rock radio’s men? Because those acts were the Top 40 teen idols of the late ‘80s.

How could somebody who likes “Pink Houses” or “Panama” put up with a station that also plays “Caribbean Queen”? Because many people experienced those songs played together when they were currents. ‘80s Rock by itself has given stations like WQBW (the Brew) Milwaukee and WDTW (the Drive) Detroit a franchise. But ‘80s Rock doesn’t have to be played by itself.

A ‘60s Oldies listener would never expect to have to go to one station to hear the Animals and another to hear the Supremes (although a few stations have tried the former approach.) But the success of Classic Rock created an expectation that in the future all new Oldies formats would be just as clearly defined. But Classic Rock was a throwback to an era when rock music had a place in the firmament that it doesn’t occupy now.

Even ‘70s AOR listeners weren’t raised on as restrictive a diet as we remember. Their Rock radio played Stevie Wonder and the Isley Brothers. Even as free-form gave way to the “Superstars” format over the course of the decade, listeners still believed that AOR was less restrictive than Top 40. Only in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s did Rock radio become the place to go if you hated “Get Down Tonight” and “Stayin’Alive.” And judging from some of today’s AC test scores, not everybody stayed mad at disco or decided not to like it anymore in the first place.

AC, of course, has become the successor to ‘50s/’60s oldies for people who grew up 10 years later. We may think the ‘70s Oldies format fizzled, but Abba, Barry White, and Seals & Crofts co-exist happily on many Mainstream AC stations. And WLTW (Lite FM) New York had already demonstrated the ability to be a mile wide and an inch deep long before that became the rallying cry for today’s broader stations.

It’s hard to know what form each generation’s Oldies format will take. Our various waves of ‘70s Oldies, Jammin’ Oldies, and ‘80s Gold stations didn’t create a template for how best to play those records, but they did demonstrate a need to hear them again. Only time will tell if Jack/Bob looks the same in five years and even its own PDs are hedging their bets by letting listeners hear some current music now. But even if the deliberately provocative segues of some of today’s Jack/Bobs go away, listeners’ ability to accommodate broad variety will not.

Sean Ross is Edison Media Research’s VP of Music & Programming and the former editor-in-chief of Airplay Monitor, Billboard Magazine’s radio programming publication. The opinions expressed here are his own and can be found on the edisonresearch.com Web site every week. Sean can be reached at 908.707.4707 or SRoss@edisonresearch.com.

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