David Houle, an admitted futurist, tells us we are in “The Shift Age”… the one that many years from now, historians will look back and either praise our ability to clutch newness or lament our inability to move on from the past. The missing link in this statement is the median. Can we build our future, with lessons of the past fully in mind?
Take the model of hip-hop: a completely new and exciting musical genre (not to mention, a cultural phenomenon) built from literal scraps of music that had come before it. What is to be learned from Hip-Hop?
Hip Hop was created out of lack and fat. There was a lack of resources: alongside a shortage of Music Education in inner city schools, there was limited access to instruments (but a wealth of recorded matter). Conversely, there was a fatness in community… hip hop was born at a party, it was a communal happening that united a neighborhood through sound.
Lesson learned?
Lack and Fat is where we’re at. We’re lacking a well defined future, but we’ve got a wealth of past. How can we take Daddy’s record collection and spin it for the people? REMIX! To create a sound that people respond to, it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Radio has done a lot of things well, but we’ve perhaps strayed from the communal (occasionally gritty) communal experience that made so many people love the medium in the first place. We MUST return to that communal experience (through events, public involvement, and radio that people care about [told relevantly]***) now more than ever.
David Houle also said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that ‘marginalization’ is a dying breed with so many media platforms catering to every group that was at one point marginalized to the corners of society.
He isn’t looking very hard. The fragmentation of media will ultimately result in an intensified desire for palpable community. Not just an avatar of some anonymous, like-minded individual; but someone who breathes your same air, pays your same taxes, and is rooted in the place you call home.
This is especially obvious in the African-American Community. They are almost completely unserved in mainstream media (unless you consider peripheral inclusion, limited choice, and one-dimensional perspective to be service).
Few mainstream publications truly grapple with problems that they deal with every day, fewer still programs on mainstream outlets reflect the diversity they see within themselves.
Radio One’s recent study entitled Black America Today highlighted no fewer than 11 distinct Consumer Groups in the African-American Community (and no Orientalistic singular “Black Experience” to be found).
Yet in Chicago, the third largest Radio market in the country, The only major offerings targeted at blacks 17% of the metropolitan listening area (and 36% of the city’s population) are:
92.3 FM Hip Hop and R&B
107.5 FM Hip Hop and R&B
102.7FM Adult Urban Contemporary
106.3FM Adult Urban Contemporary
1690AM Gospel
1390AM Urban Talk
which equates to a lot of similar programming and not a lot of conversation. Also note that out of 54 stations with the threshold listening cume of 40,000 per week to appear on Chicago’s Arbitron ratings (as of March 25, 2009), 6 stations (that’s 1/9) serve African-Americans is any consistent capacity. Fully 7 stations identify themselves as Adult Contemporary or Hot Adult Contemporary.
You top that off with numbers from Arbitron’s 2008 Black Radio Today study that testify to the fact that the weekly cume rating, on average, was a staggering 94.7% for African Americans over the age of 12 in 2007, and 94.4% in 2008. The low end of this average is the 65 and over group with about 90%, and the high is 25-44 year-olds with an average of 96%. The view suddenly gets much clearer.
What’s up with that? It seems no one wants to be the first pearl to fall from the strand.
***relevancy is a simple case of angles. Almost any topic can become relevant to a subset if said topic is treated with sensitivity to angles. The trick is to find the sweet spot (the optical illusion, if you will) that satisfies as many subsets as possible, without relying on what’s been historically deemed middle-of-the-road. We turned the corner while you were fiddling with the dial.
April 12, 2009 at 3:01 am
[...] NOTE: Just because the above groups are exceptionally plugged in, be aware, according to Arbitron, African-Americans are by far the most loyal radio listening segment. For more on this, click here. [...]