Less
than a year ago, the Indianapolis radio station WRWM, then known as
Indy’s i94, was the 15th-most-popular station in the Central Indiana
market. It played a forgettable mix of Maroon 5, Sam Smith and other
staples of what in radio lingo is called hot adult contemporary — the
sort of stuff that drivers might alight on for a song or two but rarely
add to their presets. For the last six months of 2014, among listeners
ages 6 and older, the station’s Nielsen ratings hovered around a 2.0
share, meaning roughly 2 percent of radio listeners in the market tuned
in.
I94’s
corporate parent, Cumulus Media — a conglomerate that owns about 460
radio stations in 90 U.S. markets — thought it could do better. Last
fall, Davey Morris, a Cumulus program director at one of the company’s
branch offices in Providence, R.I., called Jay Michaels, the station
program director at i94, to discuss a number of ideas for revamping the
floundering station, up to and including a format change. Changing
formats is something radio stations avoid as best they can: It’s
expensive and, for corporate-owned stations, usually involves extensive
market research. If i94 changed, it would be the station’s 10th switch
in 21 years.
The
93.9 slot in Indianapolis hadn’t enjoyed any real success since it
first went live in 1993. That year, it began as Ecstasy (WXTZ), an
independently owned easy-listening station. It switched to a solid-gold
soul format in 1996, then to smooth jazz the next year. It switched
again in 1997, to country, and that year it was acquired by a
conglomerate called Susquehanna Radio. Susquehanna moved its country
station (104.5 the Bear, WGRL) down the dial to occupy the 93.9
frequency, before switching it to ’80s hits in 2001, and from that to
contemporary Christian in 2004.
The
station became syndicated talk radio in 2006, and later that year
Susquehanna was acquired by Cumulus Media. Along the way, there were
dalliances with stunt formats and place holders: Christmas music and
TV-show themes for days on end; nothing but construction noises at one
point; at another, ‘‘The Lonesome Road,’’ by Dean Elliot & His Big
Band, and ‘‘Swans Splashdown,’’ by Jean-Jacques Perrey, played on a
loop. Late in 2007, Cumulus switched to the somewhat gross call letters
WARM, with 93 hours of commercial-free easy listening and soft-rock. In
July 2009, after the station finished 21st in the local ratings, it
switched to a Top 40 format and changed its name to i94. Two years
later, the station became ‘‘Indy’s i94’’ and added older hits to its
mix, thereby becoming hot adult contemporary. ‘‘We’d [flipped] so many
times, it was really hard to build a fan base,’’ Morris said. ‘‘We were
never anybody’s first choice. We were their fourth choice.’’
Morris
and Michaels started talking about what Indianapolis radio needed. The
market was saturated: Emmis Radio had country, news/talk, soft
adult-contemporary stations and sports; iHeartMedia had classic rock,
alternative and sports covered; Radio One had a gospel station, plus
three contemporary hits stations; Entercom had two of those, plus
sports. One of the ideas the two came up with was a variation on a new
format: classic hip-hop, pioneered just a month earlier by a Radio One
station in Houston called Boom 92.1. By playing hit ’90s rap records,
Boom tripled its audience, and Radio One had begun to duplicate the
strategy in other markets.
The
two men brought the idea to Cumulus’s executive vice president of
content and programming, John Dickey. Around the same time, Dickey
caught word that Radio One was planning to launch a Boom clone in
Indianapolis. He was determined to beat them to market. He told Morris
to do a ‘‘classic hip-hop holiday weekend,’’ to test listener reaction
and stake their claim to the format in Indianapolis.
Michaels
dropped the needle on Naughty by Nature’s ‘‘Hip Hop Hooray’’ at 3 p.m.
on Dec. 19. LL Cool J’s ‘‘Around the Way Girl’’ followed, then ‘‘Move,’’
by Ludacris. ‘‘We set up a voice-mail box for listener feedback,’’
Michaels said. ‘‘I was expecting lots of complaints. We went from
playing Maroon 5 to ‘Me So Horny.’ ’’ The phone rang so much they had to
clear the mailbox every day. Callers were ecstatic. The station never
returned to its old format.
In
three weeks, 93.9 made the improbable jump from 15th place in Central
Indiana to first. Two weeks later, i94 officially became 93.9, the Beat.
Ratings for January showed 93.9 with a 7.7 share. It ranked first among
people ages 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54; women 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54; and
men 18-49 and 25-54. ‘‘Literally nobody in the Top 50 markets in this
country has ever done a format change, then in the next full month shot
to No. 1,’’ Tom Taylor, the publisher of a popular radio-industry
newsletter, told Indianapolis Business Journal. ‘‘Certainly no station
in the last decade has done what [WRWM] has.’’ The Beat stole a huge
piece of the listenership of Radio One’s top urban stations in
Indianapolis, too: WTLC-FM 106.7, ‘‘Indy’s R & B Leader,’’ dropped
to 4.5 in January from a 6.6 in December. WHHH-FM 96.3, Radio One’s
mainstream urban station, saw its share plummet to 3.9 in January from
5.1 in December. Meanwhile, the Beat’s advertising rates grew by 150
percent.
Ever
since the earliest days of rock ’n’ roll, time has corroded yesterday’s
musical radicalism into today’s pabulum. Thirty years ago, young
listeners of hip-hop, with its predilection for violent imagery and
unprintable language, might have thought it impervious to this process.
But radio conglomerates are proving them wrong. As its listeners grow up
and memories of Tipper Gore grow dim, hip-hop is now taking its final
step toward respectability: It now qualifies as oldies.
I sat with Jay Michaels one
morning this spring while he worked on the Beat’s weekend playlist. His
office is tiny, airless and cluttered with Hello Kitty lunchboxes,
promotional teddy bears, novelty coffee cups and rubber duckies. On his
computer, he had loaded Stratus, Cumulus’s proprietary music-scheduling
software. He pressed a button, and dozens of songs populated a grid on
the screen, color-coded in a pattern that Michaels refused to explain.
Michaels and Morris are cagey about Stratus, which is used companywide
but customized by each station. They refer to the software as their
‘‘secret sauce.’’ What I gleaned through later conversations is that
Michaels has broken hip-hop down by region and into subgenres, and the
Beat uses these metadata tags to keep its playlist diverse.
On
Cumulus’s version of the format, you’ll never hear back-to-back-to-back
Southern rap hits or a cluster of R & B songs with female
vocalists; the Beat will break up a block of tunes by harder artists
like Ice Cube or DMX with a Mariah Carey track. ‘‘Without flow, this
format is a train wreck,’’ Michaels said as he sifted through the
computer’s selections, massaging the playlist. ‘‘It’s me being overly
anal. I have my own rules.’’ Among them: Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac
should never be played back to back (it might call to mind their deadly
feud), and a Biggie song should never be played before or after ‘‘I’ll
Be Missing You,’’ the tribute song Puff Daddy recorded after Biggie was
killed. Michaels also won’t play Outkast next to Ludacris — it just
feels weird.
The
Beat is just one of several stations experimenting with the format now,
and certainly such rules differ in each city. But the basics of the
formula are the same that were developed by Radio One in October. That
was the month the company unplugged a failing news station in Houston,
92.1 KROI-FM, dismissed all the employees and started playing Beyoncé
songs, commercial-free, 24 hours a day. Beyoncé’s fans — the BeyHive —
went bonkers. News outlets from all over the country called with
questions about the odd format. On the afternoon of the fifth day, the
station paused for a commercial and then played ‘‘Mind Playing Tricks on
Me’’ by the Geto Boys, arguably Houston’s most famous contribution to
rap music. Notorious B.I.G. followed, then Tupac, then Salt-N-Pepa.
The
early ratings returns were astounding. The station’s audience shot to
802,000 from 245,000, and its Nielsen share went to 3.2 from 1.0.
Shortly after that, Radio One started similar stations in Philadelphia
and Dallas and saw a gain of 200,000 listeners in each of those cities.
Soon, 15 more stations, including 93.9, made the switch.
A
cynical but not inaccurate way of thinking about radio formats is as a
tool to segment the population for advertisers. Ancient and unglamorous
as it may be, radio remains a potent vehicle for advertisers to access
consumers. According to a 2015 Nielsen Audio Today report, 91 percent of
Americans age 12 or older listen to the radio each week, and the vast
majority of those listeners are in the work force (which means they have
money to spend). According to another Nielsen study, advertisers
achieve more than $6 of incremental sales for every $1 spent on the
radio. For radio-station owners, the business plan is simple: Attract
the broadest possible audience to your programming and then do
everything you can to keep them listening. This is why radio
professionals talk about musical genres in ways normal human beings do
not; no one believes she listens to rhythmic adult contemporary, but in
aggregate, millions of people between the ages of 25 and 54 do.
The
Beat, and stations like it, target listeners in their mid-20s to
mid-40s: people who grew up during rap’s golden era. This is a subset of
the population that is outgrowing contemporary hip-hop radio (which
targets the 18-34 demographic) but is mostly too young to be nostalgic
for ’70s and ’80s stations and too hip for adult contemporary. They are
also entering the prime spending years of their lives — marriage,
children, car buying and homeownership — and radio, like all forms of
media, is figuring out how to catch them.
In
a sense, classic hip-hop is following a radio trend that began in the
early 1970s, when the first dedicated FM oldies stations started up in
Phoenix, playing records by old crooners and doo-wop quartets. The
format was a hit, and it quickly spread to Los Angeles and New York, and
everywhere else. Oldies reached its zenith in the 1980s, just as
classic rock — a new iteration of the same concept — was born. Same
story: The format grew as programmers looked for new ways to keep
grown-up baby boomers tuned in.
Over
the years, people in the radio business have discovered that even these
seemingly static formats are quite pliable. Davey Morris told me about
B101, a once-venerable oldies station in Providence, R.I. ‘‘When I first
started listening, they were playing hits from the ’50s and early
’60s,’’ he said. ‘‘Now they’re playing the Police.’’ The Crests, the
Platters and the Chordettes are being shoved aside, saved for
Saturday-night specialty shows. At the same time, the leading edge of
classic-rock stations continues to slide forward, and many are adding
’90s acts to their rotation: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day and others.
‘‘If classic rock wasn’t careful, it was going to age itself out of the
buying demos,’’ Jon Miller, vice president of audience insights at
Nielsen, told me. ‘‘It would be left with an aging audience that isn’t
appealing to Madison Avenue.’’
One
person at the Beat told me that the station’s ideal listener is a woman
between 35 and 44 who is a homeowner and her family’s decision maker.
As of now, around 50 percent of the Beat’s audience is white, 45 percent
is black and 4 percent is Hispanic (just 10 percent of Indianapolis is
Hispanic). By contrast, the city’s top contemporary hip-hop station,
WHHH, has an audience that is 68 percent black, 6 percent Hispanic and
around 25 percent white. With the Beat, Dickey said the station had
achieved universal likability. ‘‘The format is multicultural,’’ he said.
‘‘Anybody — black, white or Hispanic — can claim ownership of this
music.’’
Though they’re in
the odd position of creating something like a canon for rap music,
Morris and the other programmers I spoke with made it clear that they
don’t see themselves as stewards of the genre. Their job is to play the
hits. Morris, in particular, is looking forward to the summer, when he
thinks the Beat’s true potential will be realized. ‘‘People are going to
drive around with their windows down and this music blasting,’’ he
said. ‘‘They’re going to play it at the beach and at parties. It’s going
to be like popcorn and bonbons: We’re just going to keep feeding them
hits.’’
Today,
that’s easier than ever. Using something called a Portable People
Meter, which looks like a beeper, Nielsen collects listening data from
its survey participants by detecting hidden tones in a station’s audio
stream. The meters can tell which station the panelists are listening
to, whether they’re at home or away and how long a listener stays on a
station. Independent analysts can provide even more granular data than
that, allowing radio programmers to gauge which songs people respond
well to and which tracks push them to change the station.
Nielsen
recently analyzed four months’ worth of airplay data at 11 new classic
hip-hop stations all over the country (including Boom), from
Philadelphia to the San Francisco Bay Area, to determine the Top 50
songs in the format. The songs cover the 13 years from 1991 to 2004,
with a pronounced feel-good bent and subtle West Coast bias. The Top 5
are: Luniz, ‘‘I Got 5 on It’’; Ice Cube, ‘‘It Was a Good Day’’; Snoop
Doggy Dogg, ‘‘Gin and Juice’’; Notorious B.I.G., ‘‘One More Chance’’;
and 50 Cent, ‘‘In Da Club.’’ Tupac’s ‘‘How Do U Want It,’’ ‘‘I Get
Around’’ and ‘‘California Love’’ are in the Top 25; his more barbed
songs, like ‘‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’’ and ‘‘2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,’’
aren’t even in the Top 50. The Wu-Tang Clan is represented only by Ol’
Dirty Bastard’s crossover hit ‘‘Got Your Money.’’ Somehow, Chingy’s
‘‘Right Thurr’’ has the No. 33 spot.
There
has always been a tension in hip-hop between those songs that are made
for radio play and songs that were made for the real fans. But the
classic hip-hop format seems to act like a sieve that catches only the
most radio-friendly of the past’s radio-friendly records. Take, for
example, ‘‘It Was a Good Day.’’ That song wasn’t even Ice Cube’s biggest
hit in 1993, the year it came out; ‘‘Check Yo Self’’ was. But ‘‘Check
Yo Self’’ is a song typical of early ’90s Ice Cube — angry and violent,
with jokes about S.T.D.s, guns and prison rape — and ‘‘Good Day’’ is
downright happy go lucky. In it, Ice Cube eats a halal breakfast; wins
at basketball, dice and dominoes; and sees his name written in lights on
the Goodyear blimp.
In
May, I visited WRWM and sat in on its drive-time program. Notorious
B.I.G.’s ‘‘Juicy’’ played as we approached the 3 o’clock hour. Manning
the boards was Zack Babb, a.k.a. Zakk, who hosts a show, weekdays from 3
p.m. to 7 p.m. Zakk, who is 27, tall and blond, wore board shorts and
canvas sneakers and spent his downtime watching the traffic on
Interstate 465 out the window. He watches it stack up every day, he told
me. He seemed thrilled by it.
There
are just three on-air personalities at the Beat, including Zakk, who
did just about everything but decide which song came next. While the
music played, he recorded and edited the other elements that go into
radio: sweepers, bumpers, ramps, promos. In preparation for a
prescheduled spin of Mark Morrison’s ‘‘Return of the Mack,’’ Zakk
recorded a ramp: ‘‘Remember hearing this one at United Skates of
America? Some guys at the rink used to do a cool backward shuffle to
this song. Every time I tried it, I fell on my butt.’’ (Roller-skating,
he explained to me, was huge in and around Indianapolis in the 1990s.)
As
hours in the studio glided by, so did the utterly irresistible blend of
rap and R & B hits: Outkast’s ‘‘Hey Ya!’’ led to Wreckx-N-Effect’s
‘‘Rump Shaker.’’ Then Keith Sweat’s ‘‘Make You Sweat’’ played into
Coolio’s ‘‘Fantastic Voyage.’’ When ‘‘Still Fly,’’ by Big Tymers, came
on, Zakk fondly recalled blowing out his dad’s speakers as a kid. Each
hour was announced by a new classic hip-hop standard. At 4 p.m., it was
Tupac and Dr. Dre’s ‘‘California Love.’’ At 5, as traffic on Interstate
465 slowed, it was Jay Z and UGK’s ‘‘Big Pimpin’.’’ Snoop took us into
cocktail hour with ‘‘Gin and Juice’’ at 6.
The
traffic on the Interstate had halted by then, and I marveled out loud
at the symmetry of the scene. We were sitting in a radio station, gazing
out at people held prisoner with nothing to do but listen. I asked Zakk
to look out the window and tell me the first thing that came to mind.
He grinned widely and said, earnestly: ‘‘I imagine all of those people
in their cars dancing.’’