The Continued Importance of Radio Play: It’s Not What You Think
Pre-internet days, getting major radio play was a big deal—it was the only way to reach a large audience all at once, save for getting a spot at one of the big music festivals. Obviously, getting a video on MTV or VH1 also meant global reach—a viable excuse for spending ridiculous amounts of money on headline directors, special FX, and whatever else might elevate those five minutes on a godlike pedestal. As a musician and from major label perspectives, you were a success if you landed a Top 10 hit.
For music snobs, however, getting instant replay on the radio was reason enough to abandon a previously unknown band/musician (or at least unknown to the masses) as you retorted, “Sellout!” because they suddenly weren’t considered “independent music.” Getting play on the college station or NPR was still cool and respectable and all of us music snobs still fished for new tunes at live shows/concerts/house parties, mixtapes, and digging around on forums like Discogs once our internet connections were morsels faster than dial-up.
So what happened when everything went digital and online?
Our listening habits went digital and online. Why listen to the radio in your car when there’s SiriusXM or your iPod or a mix CD of tracks you lifted illegally from file-sharing services like Napster? (Not encouraging illegal downloads here. Pay for your music.) If you’re hip, you know about We Are Hunted, Hype Machine, and music blogs in general—you don’t need the radio. College stations like Radio1190 started streaming online, podcasts were invented, Pitchfork launched, and YouTube allowed for an influx of DIY music videos. In short, the internet facilitated discovery of spectacular unknown music and made more accessible the coolness factor associated with one’s music taste.
Fast forward to early 2011 when Arcade Fire took Album of the Year at the Grammys with the distinction of not being signed to a major label. Surprising? No. It was only a matter of time. That so many people in the industry and general population were blindsided was surprising. Where on earth had THEY been and what were they listening to?
Point: Radio play remains important—if only to understand the overlap of popularity between the internet and whatever Clear Channel is slinging. Does that change the opinion of a band receiving “airplay” on both mediums? Maybe. Maybe not. For music snobs, however, it might prove enlightening about their status as music snobs. Oh, no. Heaven forbid you might enjoy some of the same tunes that the lowly general public likes.
Technology Killed the Engaged Listening Star
Okay… I am playing off a certain song by The Buggles. Seriously, however, technology has most certainly made us the most passive information consumers—we don’t even necessarily have to be awake to receive it by our “I-can-do-everything” tracks-everything, super-mega, hyper-cool communication devices. We’re tuned in, turned on, and connected twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Technology and its ability to grant access have allowed everything in our lives to become overwhelming oversaturated. We reblog. We retweet. We re-post.
We hear the songs played over and over again on Last.fm, run to Hype Machine to download the “sample tracks” to our heart’s content, and then fail to buy the album and really suss out the details of the lyrics.
We follow dozen of people on Tumblr—most of whom simply recycle the same old posts over and over—but do we ever take the time to read the sometimes exceptionally long or beautifully original posts from Roger Ebert? Or the random blogger we found by accident?
Twitter has conditioned us to hang on the value of the anecdote and the link. Do the majority of us actually click through to read the full story or have we defaulted to Tim Ferriss’s “low information diet” tactic of subsisting on the headlines alone?
If we’re working towards consuming more “quality” in less time, is the consumption itself even worth it? Are we ever truly listening—whether it be to a song, a story, or a moment expressed as an image?
You listen to the words being said, but do you hear what is being said?
Charting the Most-Blogged Music
When I was a kid, every Saturday meant tuning into Casey Kasem to hear the weekly rundown of the top 40 songs on the charts. If we weren’t listening to our parents’ old records, then we were rocking out to whatever was available on cassette tape (and sometimes that was whatever we could stay up to bootleg off the radio on our boombox). Later, upon becoming a culture snob, “radio” meant listening to the college station out of Boulder while tooling around in my 1975 Chevy Malibu and the “charts” were a hell of a lot different than the manufactured pop of mainstream radio. My car didn’t come equipped with a CD/cassette player, much less the FM radio signal, so I was fortunate to hear only the tunes that we might now label as “hipster cool”. However, that was close to ten years. I remember getting a survey call at some point asking me what radio station I would listen to and the woman on the other end couldn’t believe that I didn’t listen to the radio. Perhaps ten years ago that was a little uncommon -most of my music came in the form of old vinyl, mix CDs, or DJ mixes from some house party or rave. Internet radio was available, but didn’t exactly have a place in every vehicle and mobile device, as it does today.
The last time that I actually listened to the radio was cruising down the highway en route to Napoli, Italy from Roma back in 2007. How many people actually listen to the old school radio now? Nearly everyone I know listens to some sort of Internet radio -whether it be Last.fm, Pandora, Sirius, or something else. Most of us will purchase our tunes (for those of us actually buying our music) from iTunes or Amazon or Lala (which is also owned by Apple now). A good chunk of us acquire our tracks via blogs through the use of Hype Machine and other venues and still, vinyl wins out at records stores everywhere… you just can’t beat the gritty, imperfect sound that wax tracks have. Tracking music popularity has moved to a seemingly intangible level as traditional radio continues to die out.
So who will win the battle of charting the most-blogged, most-listened to music?
We Are Hunted is one of the more obvious competitors in the chart industry -they track the “99 most popular emerging songs in the world”. They comb blogs, Twitter, and other venues to create the list and do the same for most-Twittered songs, most-requested Remixes, and genres. Users can even create their own personal “hunted” list, if they like. WAH also recently launched their Hunted Research section, which provides a more than comprehensive overview of music-related stats for sixty artists for the second half of 2009 and the option to email the team for info on other musicians not already listed. The data includes everything from Twitter stats to article shout outs to providing information on the top publisher mentions from the likes of Pitchfork and Clash.
The Hype Machine comes in next, as their purpose is to serve as an MP3 & music blog aggregator. I used Hype Machine quite a bit before WAH launched last year and while it not only links to blogs posts & allows you to stream the blog posts in a playlist, its servers are down more frequently than I like. HypeM employs similar features such as Spy, which provides a live feed of songs being blogged about right now, as well as Twitter tracking. A couple of days ago, I tweeted a link to an Autechre song on HypeM and got a reply from @hypem_scorebot telling me that I’d added 7 points to the track on Hype Machine. Further investigation tells me that Hype Machine has created a new charting method for music based upon a Twitter user’s popularity -the more influence a user has, the more points they contribute to a track within HypeM. I have mixed feelings about this new system of tracking -there is black hat Twitter & white hat Twitter, if you will. Some people have a lot of followers legitimately (e.g. Ashton Kutcher) and some just have a lot of followers/follow a lot of people out of spam purposes. Beyond this, just because you have X-reach on Twitter with the amount of people you follow and the amount that follow you, does not equate to guaranteed exposure for the song (or blog to whom your linking to via Hype Machine). It seems very speculative and thus, this type of isn’t very credible.
Last, but not least is a new startup out of Boulder, CO: Next Big Sound. Next Big Sound’s entire purpose is to provide the same type of data that WAH has recently provided -except that they have made it more accessible. Not only can you track data for one artist, but you can compare it against three other artists at the same time. NBS tracks fans, comments on pages, and plays via Last.fm, Hype Machine and others. While Next Big Sound doesn’t have near the coverage that We Are Hunted provides in their PDFs, it’s a bit more user-friendly and I love the fact that I can compare multiple artists at the same time on the same charts. NBS has funding from several VC firms, including Boulder’s own Foundry Group and their VCs (like Jason Mendelson) are really talking them up, so it should be interesting to see what changes over the next year.
Honorable mention includes Last.fm, although they seem to only chart the number of times a track/artist has been listened to.
Beyond who will win out in the music charts, come questions about how this will effect the music industry and musicians in general. Will these data services remain free? When you apply this information to the monetary value of a musician as seen by labels? Will record labels remain relevant to current and future markets? How will this effect the positions of music supervisors and the budgets with which they have to work for film and television?
