Rock and radio in the United States

Radio and rock and roll needed each other, and it was their good fortune that they intersected at the exact moment when rock and roll was being born and radio was facing death. Radio had experienced a “Golden Age” since the 1930s, broadcasting popular swing bands and comedy, crime, and drama series. In the early 1950s, however, its standing as the electronic centre of family entertainment slipped. America had discovered television.

With a mass exodus of both the listeners and the stars of radio’s staple programs, radio needed more than new shows if it was to survive. It needed something that would attract an entire new generation of listeners, something that would take advantage of technological advances. While television replaced radio in the living room, the invention of the transistor set the radio free. Teenagers no longer had to sit with their parents and siblings to hear radio entertainment. Now they could take radio into their bedrooms, into the night, and into their own private worlds. What they needed was a music to call their own. They got rock and roll.

They got it because radio, forced to invent new programming, turned to disc jockeys. The deejay concept had been around since Martin Block, in New York City, and Al Jarvis, in Los Angeles, began spinning records in the early 1930s. By the time the founders of Top 40 radio—Todd Storz and Bill Stewart in Omaha, Neb., and Gordon McLendon in Dallas, Texas—came up with their formula of excitable deejays, contests, jingles, abbreviated news, and a playlist of 40 hit records, the deejay ranks had swelled and changed.

At independent stations—those not affiliated with the networks that dominated the early years of radio—disc jockeys had played a wide range of music, and many of them discovered an audience that the larger stations had ignored: mostly younger people, many of them black. These were the disenfranchised, who felt that the popular music of the day spoke more to their parents than to them. What excited them was the music they could hear, usually late at night, coming from stations on the upper end of the radio dial, where signals tended to be weaker. Thus disadvantaged, owners of those stations had to take greater risks and to offer alternatives to the mainstream programming of their more powerful competitors. It was there that radio met rock and roll and sparked a revolution.

The first disc jockeys were both black and white; what they had in common was what they played: the hybrid of music that would evolve into rock. The first new formats were rhythm and blues and Top 40, with the latter exploding in popularity in the late 1950s. Top 40 had been conceived after Storz, sitting with his assistant, Stewart, in a bar across the street from their Omaha station, KOWH, noted the repeated plays certain records were getting on the jukebox. The format they implemented proved to be a free, democratic music box. If a song was a hit, or if enough people called a deejay to request it, it got played. Although the staples were rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and pop music, Top 40 also played country, folk, jazz, and novelty tunes. “You say it; we’ll play it,” the disc jockeys promised.

Inevitably, as teenagers grew up, the Top 40 formula began to wear thin. In the late 1960s so did rock. A new generation sought freedom, and on the radio it came on the FM band with underground, or free-form, radio. Disc jockeys were allowed—if not encouraged—to choose their own records, usually rooted in rock but ranging from jazz and blues to country and folk music as well. Similar latitude extended to nonmusical elements, including interviews, newscasts, and impromptu live performances. While free-form evolved into album-oriented rock (or AOR, in industry lingo), other formats catered to an increasingly splintered music audience. Initially labeled as “chicken rock” when it emerged in the early 1970s, adult contemporary (A/C) found a large audience of young adults who wanted their rock quieter. A/C blended the lighter elements of pop and rock with what was called “middle of the road” (MOR) rock, an adult-oriented format that favoured big bands and pop singers such as Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, and Nat King Cole.

Specialized formats such as rhythm and blues, later referred to as urban, also splintered. A wedding of urban and A/C resulted in formats such as quiet storm and urban contemporary. An urban version of Top 40 (also known as contemporary hit radio, or CHR) was called churban. Urban-based music, including rap, continued to influence Top 40 in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the focus of country music radio ranged from new music (with banners such as “young country”) to oldies and alternative country, also known as Americana.

Rock was equally fragmented, ranging from classic rock and hard rock stations to those with a more eclectic presentation called A3 or Triple A (for, roughly, album adult alternative) and alternative (or modern rock) and college stations, which provided exposure to edgier new sounds.

In the mid-1990s newer sounds became more difficult to find on the airwaves after passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act allowed broadcast companies to own hundreds of radio stations. Broadcasters previously had been limited to 2 stations in a market and 40 overall. Now a company could operate as many as eight stations in a single market and have almost unlimited total properties. Aggressive companies went on shopping sprees, bought stations by the dozens, and merged with one another to form ever bigger conglomerates. Within a few years, one company emerged as the biggest of them all: Clear Channel Communications—owner of almost 1,200 stations.

Clear Channel and other beefed-up broadcasters, faced with huge debts and wary stockholders, slashed budgets, consolidated jobs, and increased the amount of time given to commercials, which grew into 10-minute clusters. Companies used single programmers to run numerous stations. Many of those stations turned to syndicated shows and to out-of-town disc jockeys who did ostensibly local shows through voice-tracking (prerecording their comments and commercial breaks, often customized for a variety of stations in different cities) and thereby put many other deejays out of work. Companies monopolized Top 40, rock, and other formats in many markets, eliminating competiton between stations. Critics accused the biggest companies of centralizing music programming, leaving local programmers (and music) out of the process. Playlists tightened, which resulted in heavier repetition of popular songs. Broadcasters were said to be using their power to force musical acts to work with them on an exclusive basis or face being blacklisted from all the company’s stations. And many stations cut back on supporting community events and fund raisers. So much for radio’s claim that localness would keep listeners tuning in

Radio listening began to decline. From 2000 to 2007 listening among Americans aged 18 to 24 dropped by 25 percent. They were joining older listeners, whose favourite music—big bands, oldies, classical, and jazz—had disappeared as broadcasters chased the increasingly elusive younger listeners.

While commercial radio struggled, satellite radio came onto the scene and began throwing money at radio’s biggest stars. One of the first takers was the very biggest: Howard Stern, who left CBS’s Infinity Broadcasting, signing with Sirius radio in 2004. But satellite radio struggled to gain traction, and Sirius and its rival service XM ultimately had to merge. Still, the new medium continued to take both talent and listeners away from terrestrial radio, as it offered a far larger menu of programming, especially of commercial-free music formats.

By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, Internet radio had come of age. Long dismissed as little more than streams of music that could be heard only on computers, online stations persevered, especially as Wi-Fi technology freed them from their tethers to the computer and as they headed into automobiles, where many of the potential listeners are. Internet stations, however, had to deal with fees imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board for the use of music. Commercial terrestrial stations have never had to pay royalties to performers (only to composers), but Webcasters were required to pay both and mounted a campaign, culminating in a “Day of Silence”— an online strike, of sorts—to let listeners know that they were in danger of being forced out of business. Ultimately, online radio and the music industry negotiated lower royalties..

But younger people continued to stray from radio—online or over the air—to other media and time grabbers, from videos to electronic games and social networking sites, as well as a host of DIY (do-it-yourself) music options, from iPods and MP3 players to customized stations from Pandora, Slacker, and others. Commercial terrestrial radio tried to strike back with HD radio, but it was too little, too late. Despite the suggestion of its acronymic name (originally shorthand for hybrid digital), HD was not high-definition; its digital broadcasters promised more channels and clearer reception, but it offered little new programming, and it required new tuners. Far more promising, if humbling, was commercial radio’s decision to jump into the Internet itself. Now virtually every station has a Web presence and a “Listen Now” button. Commercial radio, which for years argued against online radio by saying only commercial stations could be live and local, was now global—whether it wanted to be or not.