In an era of increased consolidation under the guise of synergies and cost savings and the ever-present disruptive forces pressuring the full breadth of the entertainment community the once venerable Radio & Records magazine saw its run come to an end this week.
Nielsen Business Media shuttered the trade publication established in 1973 to cover the music business’ increasing reach and roll, what it calls, the majority of the coverage into its flagship Billboard imprint. In many ways, the decision is not surprising considering both the current state of the music and the publishing businesses and R&R’s position straddling them. The old leverage assets line was pulled out, the brand is being shuffled over and the end of an era has come.
Although R&R was never really intended to be a consumer-facing publication, it is not without its pop culture merits, including being the reference point for Casey Kasem’s countdowns, the TV show Solid Gold, several CMT countdowns and on any number of local radio and video shows, fanzines and other publications, and of course retailers over the years.
Before the era of BDS (whom contributes the R&R the spin counts now, and other electronic radio monitoring services who compete in the space), hand compiled charts dominated the radio industry with R&R establishing itself as the de facto guide for commercial radio (it’s little brother by trade, not by owner is the non-comm CMJ). The formalization of the charts not only began to garner credibility to emerging radio formats, the magazine began influencing airplay itself by documenting trends and opinions and disseminating them throughout the industry. The commentary eventually would become as important as the chart compilation itself, formalizing the community of DJs and programmers nationally and went far beyond shared knowledge in the broadcast industry to influencing the entire entertainment community, right down to the fan level for those truly fanatical types.
This is often overlooked when considering the role of trade publications in their industries and due to the diversity of changes over the years in how music was disseminated to the public R&R’s underpinning on shaping the consumption habits of consumers is hardly documented. However, without some of R&R’s finer moments covering airplay and industry events, it is hard to imagine how the music industry might have turned out. Could someone else have stepped in and done what R&R did? Sure, but until then, no one had on that scale, and since then most who tried failed to accommodate the range R&R succeeded at.
Artist’s success on the airwaves and, hence, in mainstream culture could easily be attributed to any number of sources. When, however, a song started to become popular on the airwaves, R&R was among the first to document that success. As the song rose on the charts from increased airplay programmers saw that and not wanting to be left behind began playing it more as well. The more R&R reported on the airplay and the programmer buzz the more the snowball effect would begin to occur. It is a very understated value in a culture of follow-the-leader to be able to provide direction on who the leader is.
It is indeed a sad day knowing this once prized bellweather will be absorbed into its sister franchise and eventually become a faceless entity or forgotten sidebar column. That’s the MO for many publishers these days, but that does not make the nostalgic factor any less painful to have to swallow.
Once of the struggles in modern day is generating quantifiable charts that define the broad range of music listening possibilities. Broadcast isn’t even broadcast anymore, as it now encompasses the traditional analog signal, the HD-sub-signals, the web-streams, the downloadable apps and more. Add into the mix, “radio style” listening being generated by non-broadcast resources such as internet sites streaming feeds (not user-generated play lists, but pre-programmed feeds) and duplicating the experience in apps for mobile devices, plus cable and satellite providers as well as in some cases mobile carriers increasing their music bandwidth for programmed music content, all of which exist without the same tracking mechanisms R&R used to rely on to compile its charts.
Is knowing the depth and breath of programmed listening important to the music industry? Absolutely. That type of information is the lifeblood of how marketing exists. The more of it that can be compiled in a meaningful way and interpreted accurately the greater a use it is.
Is it important to other people too? Sure. Radio charts since their invention always have influenced things like retail and consumer music consumption, additional music placement (such as in TV, film, commercials, etc.), sponsorships and endorsements, advertising spend with music related properties the charts represent (both the content providers but also with the artists and related entities themselves), and much more. It would not be unheard of for an advertising agency to pitch to a major corporation a popular song for a commercial because it skyrocketed up the R&R chart that impacted a specific demographic, or a corporate sponsor to reference the R&R chart when pitching an endorsement deal for an artist – product combination, or even a sports arena referencing the R&R chart to determine some of the hipper songs to interject into their in-game promotions and tie-in events.
R&R was still useful insomuch as it did all of those things well for broadcast, but expanding its coverage to all pre-programmed music dissemination is a greater task than they could take on in the economy and existing publishing and music markets. The scale it could be done on is too overwhelming, the range of resources and technologies needed to collect and verify in the information too great and the payoff for the information probably not enough to warrant such a grandiose task in reinventing itself.
Change is coming slowly, despite the increasingly disruptive nature of technology, and this is yet another change in the way information is being consumed in the industry. Change is good sometimes. And, despite the sad feelings of loss that go with this change, we will always have those archived articles and printed charts, the broadcast archives referencing them and those fond memories sifting through pages and pages of contents where we made hand written notes in the margins about what we liked, wanted to add ourselves to the playlist or purchase in our spare time. Depending on how Neilson and Billboard incorporate the R&R content, perhaps we still might be doing some of that for many years to come.
~ by thedoormouse on 5 June 2009.
Remove and Relocate R&R
In an era of increased consolidation under the guise of synergies and cost savings and the ever-present disruptive forces pressuring the full breadth of the entertainment community the once venerable Radio & Records magazine saw its run come to an end this week.
Nielsen Business Media shuttered the trade publication established in 1973 to cover the music business’ increasing reach and roll, what it calls, the majority of the coverage into its flagship Billboard imprint. In many ways, the decision is not surprising considering both the current state of the music and the publishing businesses and R&R’s position straddling them. The old leverage assets line was pulled out, the brand is being shuffled over and the end of an era has come.
Although R&R was never really intended to be a consumer-facing publication, it is not without its pop culture merits, including being the reference point for Casey Kasem’s countdowns, the TV show Solid Gold, several CMT countdowns and on any number of local radio and video shows, fanzines and other publications, and of course retailers over the years.
Before the era of BDS (whom contributes the R&R the spin counts now, and other electronic radio monitoring services who compete in the space), hand compiled charts dominated the radio industry with R&R establishing itself as the de facto guide for commercial radio (it’s little brother by trade, not by owner is the non-comm CMJ). The formalization of the charts not only began to garner credibility to emerging radio formats, the magazine began influencing airplay itself by documenting trends and opinions and disseminating them throughout the industry. The commentary eventually would become as important as the chart compilation itself, formalizing the community of DJs and programmers nationally and went far beyond shared knowledge in the broadcast industry to influencing the entire entertainment community, right down to the fan level for those truly fanatical types.
This is often overlooked when considering the role of trade publications in their industries and due to the diversity of changes over the years in how music was disseminated to the public R&R’s underpinning on shaping the consumption habits of consumers is hardly documented. However, without some of R&R’s finer moments covering airplay and industry events, it is hard to imagine how the music industry might have turned out. Could someone else have stepped in and done what R&R did? Sure, but until then, no one had on that scale, and since then most who tried failed to accommodate the range R&R succeeded at.
Artist’s success on the airwaves and, hence, in mainstream culture could easily be attributed to any number of sources. When, however, a song started to become popular on the airwaves, R&R was among the first to document that success. As the song rose on the charts from increased airplay programmers saw that and not wanting to be left behind began playing it more as well. The more R&R reported on the airplay and the programmer buzz the more the snowball effect would begin to occur. It is a very understated value in a culture of follow-the-leader to be able to provide direction on who the leader is.
It is indeed a sad day knowing this once prized bellweather will be absorbed into its sister franchise and eventually become a faceless entity or forgotten sidebar column. That’s the MO for many publishers these days, but that does not make the nostalgic factor any less painful to have to swallow.
Once of the struggles in modern day is generating quantifiable charts that define the broad range of music listening possibilities. Broadcast isn’t even broadcast anymore, as it now encompasses the traditional analog signal, the HD-sub-signals, the web-streams, the downloadable apps and more. Add into the mix, “radio style” listening being generated by non-broadcast resources such as internet sites streaming feeds (not user-generated play lists, but pre-programmed feeds) and duplicating the experience in apps for mobile devices, plus cable and satellite providers as well as in some cases mobile carriers increasing their music bandwidth for programmed music content, all of which exist without the same tracking mechanisms R&R used to rely on to compile its charts.
Is knowing the depth and breath of programmed listening important to the music industry? Absolutely. That type of information is the lifeblood of how marketing exists. The more of it that can be compiled in a meaningful way and interpreted accurately the greater a use it is.
Is it important to other people too? Sure. Radio charts since their invention always have influenced things like retail and consumer music consumption, additional music placement (such as in TV, film, commercials, etc.), sponsorships and endorsements, advertising spend with music related properties the charts represent (both the content providers but also with the artists and related entities themselves), and much more. It would not be unheard of for an advertising agency to pitch to a major corporation a popular song for a commercial because it skyrocketed up the R&R chart that impacted a specific demographic, or a corporate sponsor to reference the R&R chart when pitching an endorsement deal for an artist – product combination, or even a sports arena referencing the R&R chart to determine some of the hipper songs to interject into their in-game promotions and tie-in events.
R&R was still useful insomuch as it did all of those things well for broadcast, but expanding its coverage to all pre-programmed music dissemination is a greater task than they could take on in the economy and existing publishing and music markets. The scale it could be done on is too overwhelming, the range of resources and technologies needed to collect and verify in the information too great and the payoff for the information probably not enough to warrant such a grandiose task in reinventing itself.
Change is coming slowly, despite the increasingly disruptive nature of technology, and this is yet another change in the way information is being consumed in the industry. Change is good sometimes. And, despite the sad feelings of loss that go with this change, we will always have those archived articles and printed charts, the broadcast archives referencing them and those fond memories sifting through pages and pages of contents where we made hand written notes in the margins about what we liked, wanted to add ourselves to the playlist or purchase in our spare time. Depending on how Neilson and Billboard incorporate the R&R content, perhaps we still might be doing some of that for many years to come.
~ by thedoormouse on 5 June 2009.
Posted in Entertainment, Opinion, business commentary, music
Tags: airplay, bds, billboard, broadcast, casey kasem, cmj, cmt, commercial radio, eulogy, hd radio, magazine, music, music business, music industry, nielson, play list, print media, programming, publishing, r&r, radio, radio and records, radio charts, sold gold, top 40 countdown, trade publication, web streams