Company News · June 4, 2009

The End Of R&R: Some Personal Thoughts

By Edison Research

You’re up to your elbows in Radio & Records tributes already, and though I don’t usually like to be the fifth or the fiftieth person to write about something, I still had to weigh in. R&R was too personal to me to do otherwise.

Reading R&R was my education in the business. On Friday afternoons, I took the subway to its Washington, D.C., bureau, whose staffers then included Joel Denver, to scrounge a free copy of that week’s issue. Just as Variety was the only way to get the film grosses in those years, R&R was the only easy way to see playlists — back when just knowing what a playlist was set you apart from all those other … civilians.

In an era when radio was still both show biz and (despite the protestations to the contrary) rocket science, reading R&R was like being allowed access to the set of every TV show you loved. Programmers talked candidly, or so it seemed, about making great radio, and if they probably weren’t telling all their secrets, what they did share was still new to me. Even in the three intervening years before anybody actually let me work at a radio station, it was admission to a dialogue between the influential programmers of the day.

When I graduated from college in 1983, I went to Los Angeles and kept bugging then R&R editor Ken Barnes for two months until I finally got a job taking radio stations’ then self-reported playlists two days a week. “We thought if we didn’t hire you, you would die,” said Krisann Aglio, the woman who did hire me. A month later, I was full-time. A few months later, I was associate R&B editor to Walt Love, and had a weekly “This Day in Rock History” column. A few years later, I became the first “Gold” editor, covering Classic Rock and Oldies radio as they both blossomed.

I spent four years at R&R at a time when it was the undisputed voice of the industry, the souvenir program of CHR’s mid-’80s comeback, and, in a less enviable way, the scorecard of the indie promotion game. Taking playlist reports in the mid-’80s, you could tell if a station was under the sway of an indie promoter because if one PD inadvertently reported a song by the wrong title, five other stations in the format with nearly identical “adds” that week would make the same mistake.
In an article called “Dancing On The Grave Of Radio & Records?” Radio-Ink’s Eric Rhoads takes aim at R&R’s final owners who, he says, “followed the path so many large conglomerates take.” In that environment, he contends, “R&R lost its passion and enthusiasm and became the ‘bastard child’ of Billboard.” Rhoads is right to look beyond the malaise of print and the travails of the radio and music industries for a cause of R&R’s woes. But I have to point out here that my other alma mater, Airplay Monitor thrived for the better part of a decade as part of the Billboard organization. At the most, I will concede that the shotgun marriage of Monitor and R&R a few years ago never entirely took hold–and not for lack of effort on the part of either staff.

Instead, what made R&R the groundbreaking publication of its time had been whittled down for many years and in many ways. The chart credibility that founder Bob Wilson worked so hard to establish never recovered from the paper adds and unreported airplay of the ’80s, even before BDS and Airplay Monitor came along to offer monitored airplay as an alternative. It wasn’t R&R’s fault that the labels worked so hard to game the charts, although things might yet have been different if R&R had itself partnered with BDS.

Beyond that, R&R had long slipped away from being a forum for radio programming ideas – it was not consistently “by radio people, for radio people.” And the culture that prized innovation in radio programming had been diminished as well. The advent of PPM may have restored the notion of science to radio programming, but any PD who wanted to spend too long ruminating on the art of programming in today’s climate was under orders to wrap it up because the sales promotion meeting was starting.

There was also an element of radio wackiness in the ’70s version of R&R–already fading away during my tenure as radio became, even then, big business. The first decade of R&R front pages are essentially radio people posting their goofy photos – DJs streaking (it was the ’70s), pie fights in the studio, scantily clad women in station t-shirts, jocks dressed up like Alice Cooper and Kiss. Whatever the value of that franchise, it hasn’t gone to any competing industry publication or Website. It instead exists now as the Facebook and YouTube postings and Tweets of various radio people. And just as radio has to work harder than it once did to maintain a sense of “community,” so do trade publications.

Besides, you can count on wackiness to find its own venue. Free thought and learning are something else. Media watchdogs worry any time a unique voice is silenced. This week, forty different voices at R&R are out of the discussion, momentarily one hopes, and this is no time for the dialogue on radio’s future to be under wraps. The burden of keeping the lines of information and innovation open in this industry now falls not only on R&R’s surviving competitors, but on the willingness of their constituencies to participate in that dialogue.

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