Company News · November 11, 2008

Organizing The ’90s Into A Format

By Edison Research

The all-’70s format exploded in 1993. The all-’80s format boom kicked in around 2000. So given radio’s penchant for latching on to every next big thing a little faster than the previous one, we should have had a large-market, terrestrial all-’90s station a year ago.
After all, the decade is nine years gone already. The “All-’90s Weekends” started as soon as 2000 at Top 40 and Hot AC. And XM Satellite Radio’s ’90s channel came along shortly thereafter. Hits from the ’90s are among the on-line offerings of AOL Radio, Radio IO and many others. In Ireland, the experimental broadcaster The90sNetwork.com has just popped up. And many of the biggest hits of the decade (“End of the Road,” “I Will Always Love You,” “One Sweet Day”) now have a marginal presence at radio, at best. It should be time to give them their own format.
But overdue doesn’t mean imminent, particularly today. In 2000, the response to the “what if all-’80s is a fad” question for many broadcasters was “so what?” But this is a more conservative, resource-poor environment for format changes. There’s also not a lot of ’90s music that tests in other formats right now – except in Rock radio, where the ’90s dominate. Even in those formats that began with the ’90s as a calling card — the new Rhythmic ACs and younger-skewing ACs – it became clear that newer music generated greater passion among more people.
Then there’s the problem of organizing the ’90s into a coherent format. CHR took a new direction every two years in the ’90s and for several years, it barely existed at all. The Country songs that weren’t played at Top 40 in the early ’90s were heard by more people than many of those that were. To hear the existing ’90s format on satellite or on-line now is to risk whiplash, bouncing from Snoop Dogg to Nelson or Tag Team to U2 to Hanson.
Yet, the ’90s still ended up as Top 40’s best period for music in 15 years. Every generation wants to hear its own oldies eventually, and that goes for both listeners and programmers. The kids of the ’90s are starting dent the programming ranks now. The launch of a Classic Hip-Hop format at KNRJ (the Beat) Phoenix last week is one indicator that those PDs will keep trying ’90s music until they find something that works.
Besides, there’s also something attractive about retroactively fixing ’90s CHR – so hapless for so much of the decade. (MTV played Nirvana and Snoop Dogg together; why was it so hard for radio?) So we decided to offer some thoughts on how a ’90s format could be made to work ‘sooner, rather than later’ (to use the expression ’90s President Clinton made so common):
1) Pick & Choose Your ’90s: The first attempts at an all-’70s format often fell into one of two traps. They either played only that music that already tested, which left them sounding like Classic Rock stations, or they threw all caution to the wind in dealing with a format that spanned “Yellow River” by Christie and “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. It took a decade, but programmers eventually figured out which ’70s songs still mattered and worked well together, although by then it was an AC, Oldies/Classic Hits or Jack format that was playing them.
The ’90s format as it exists now on The Infinite Dial is fine for radio people or for a party tape, but the ’90s won’t work as a mainstream format until programmers conquer the twin challenges of finding a core of strong music that generates passion and works well together, but not playing just Alternative or just Hip-Hop. And that’s tricky, because the people who grew up with Nirvana also grew up with Notorious B.I.G., but when you throw in Wilson Phillips and country, you’re pushing listeners, and when you ratchet up the obscurity level, you lose them again. And that’s what the current formats do.
There’s a level of ’90s nuggets that could probably disappear unmourned – particularly a lot of the early ’90s Top 40 music that nobody heard, and some of the wimpier music that people did. Then what you keep depends on which center you choose:
* The pop ’90s – Early ’90s pop (Ace of Base, Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart), the softer R&B crossovers (Boyz II Men, Whitney, Mariah), the rootsy mid-’90s (Melissa Etheridge, Hootie & the Blowfish, Wallflowers, Tracy Chapman), the Lilith late ’90s (Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan) and the rest of Modern AC (Goo Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews Band). A few ubiquitous early ’90s Country songs would probably work – even if they didn’t cross over. You would have to decide what to do about Celine Dion and Michael Bolton at one end, and the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync at the other.
* The hipper ’90s – You could get a pretty good uptempo CHR-style format out of the ’90s without going too far beyond the songs that test in some format by taking the best of Alternative, the hippest of Modern AC, and the most enduring Rhythmic music. Again, it all existed on MTV together. And it updates the Good Time Oldies concept by 25 years.
2) Give Yourself A Few Extra Years – The generational break between listeners really begins around 1986-87 with Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way” and Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name.” It wouldn’t make sense to play Guns ‘N Roses’ “November Rain,” but not “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” because one happened to come out in the ’80s, and the other came out in the ’90s. In the same way that the ’70s and ’80s formats worked best when you could do them together under the guise of Adult Hits, the late ’80s and ’90s work well together and give PDs more hits to play. For that reason…
3) It Doesn’t Necessarily Have To Be Called All-’90s (or ’90s and More) – On one hand, everybody would get it. On the other, it was never necessary to refer to Oldies as the “All-’60s and early ’70s” format. If you’re playing songs that people miss hearing on the radio, they’ll still listen – you just have to make sure you get the message out that you’re playing those songs.
4) Cultivate The “Oh-Wow”s – At the beginning of the ’70s format, nothing tested except the Classic Rock crossovers. Over the next decade, programmers finally got some of the decade’s other anthems, “I Will Survive,” “Brick House,” “December 1963 (Oh What A Night” to test. As Oldies programmers tried to migrate their format’s music further to the ’70s, another less likely layer of songs emerged: “Dancing In The Moonlight,” Pilot’s “Magic,” ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down.”
The ’90s format wouldn’t be a lot of fun without some songs that aren’t reliable testers now: Roxette’s “Joyride,” Stereo MCs’ “Connected,” Kris Kross’ “Jump.” Those songs just can’t be overindulged at the format as they are on most of the existing ’90s formats. They need to show up once or twice an hour at the most, and programmers need to cultivate them the way their predecessors did with the ’70s. As the ’90s format finds its own audience, some of those songs will start to test.
Ideally, a ’90s format would be launched with a music test, allowing PDs to start with some strength, but break format carefully, and followed up with another one six months later, allowing them to figure out which songs they had been able to cultivate into playability and which now needed to go away, having outlived their “oh wow” value.
With all that in mind, I decided to do my sample all ’90s hour. It leans heavily on tempo and on songs that are still reliable testers somewhere today, many of them still show up among the handful of Oldies that today’s CHR plays, but there are indeed a few spikes. (See if you can figure out which they are.)
2Pac, “California Love”
Third-Eye Blind, “Semi-Charmed Life”
Guns ‘N Roses, “Sweet Child O’ Mine”
Montell Jordan, “This Is How We Do It”
Sublime, “Santeria”
Goo Goo Dolls, “Slide”
C&C Music Factory, “Gonna Make You Sweat”
Spin Doctors, “Two Princes”
Green Day, “When I Come Around”
En Vogue, “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)”
3 Doors Down, “Kryptonite”
Stereo MCs, “Connected”
That’s my sample hour. How about yours? Or your overall thoughts on how the ’90s might be made to work?

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