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FM Stations Try to Talk Their Way Out Of Trouble
Pay satellite radio is putting additional pressure on commercial broadcasting, forcing many FM stations to abandon music altogether.
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The only music formats that are growing on free commercial radio are those that appeal to black and Latino audiences.
In city after city, rock stations are dying off, but talk is by no means the only growing format.
FM stations are finding success with "Hurban" (or Hispanic urban) music formats such as reggaeton, featuring Latino rap in markets with Hispanic populations whose taste in pop music diverges from the rap that dominates black-oriented outlets such as Washington's WPGC (95.5) and WKYS (93.9).
Rock itself is not dying; it's thriving over on satellite radio, the pay service where both XM and Sirius devote more channels to various forms of rock than to any other type of music.
And there's even some success left in rock radio. In cities where several of the various strains of rock radio have gone silent, the one remaining rocker sometimes diversifies its offerings, as DC101 has here.
These stations have become, as industry analyst Sean Ross of Edison Media Research puts it, "middle of the rock," playing more of a mix of current and past songs, with less of a hard edge and a bit more pop sensibility.
If new technologies take listeners into micro-niches, radio's response may be yet another step forward into the past: A broadening of playlists.
Evidence of a new eclecticism is popping up not only in those "middle of the rock" stations but also in the Jack FM stations -- Washington's Mix 107.3 is a modest version of this format -- that add literally hundreds of songs from three or four decades of music to playlists that used to top out at 30 songs.
All of this is subject to change, and swift change at that.
By this time next year, the price of digital radios may drop to a level that makes the units popular, giving every station on the dial the chance to put two or three streams of programming on one frequency.
That could open up whole new vistas of sound.
