What's My Beef!

Go ahead and blame payola and corporate radio for dishing out what basically sounds like forgettable crap hour after hour on Channel 933 and other stations. The radio music directors don't seem to be putting any effort into quality of music, which is why you hear far more hip hop and heavy rock on 91X, 933, 94/9, Z90, 98.9, and others than even before radio consolidation.

George Varga of the Union-Buffoon paper writes this past Sunday about hip hop taking over the cultural landscape of America. Talk about the decline of Western civilization right there.

None of my readers care for hip hop at all. None. I don't even have links to the hip hop stations on the Latest News page (unless somebody wishes to pony up $25 to sponsor SDN and choose which radio station link to put on the page.)

So many of the radio music directors are so overinfluenced by hip hop that they're forgetting other genres of music to play, such as electronica, dementia, and traditional rock, all three of which I listen to on a regular basis on XM satellite radio and the Internet. Comedy hip hop and hip hop dance are okay with me as long as it's good. It's the bad stuff that the music directors at 91X, 94.9, and 933 that bothers me a lot. Songs that strike a negative mood. Songs that are nothing more than noise or talking over a monotonous beat. Can't we get any good music directors for radio anymore? Not even Finest City Broadcasting can get 91X as right as it once was before Jacor took over in 1995.

If you think that music in general is getting worse all the time, then you're not listening to dfsxradio.com where I, David Tanny, is not only the propreitor of the streaming music station, but I'm also the music director where I play whatever is fun to listen to, and I would like to play some 50s and 60s oldies where possible, not just the novelty funny songs. I've been complaining for a long time that the music directors are not picking the good songs to play and they're almost always choosing to play bad songs that I just can't stand. Now we have a survey to back up what I've been saying.

According to an Ipsos poll for AP and Rolling Stone magazine, he writes that 3 out of 4 fans complain that the price of CDs are too expensive, 58 percent say that the music in general is getting worse.

The CDs are expensive if all they have is just one good song on the CD, and if radio doesn't play it, then we won't know that the track even exists. Bring back the 99 cent single. Manufacturing CDs are cheap. If you can go to Fry's and get a 100-pack of CD-Rs for what is effectively 20 cents a CD-R if bought in a pack of 100 at retail, then it's possible that when you add in the cost of making a label and jacket for the CD single, you can still make a reasonable profit. If all I want to buy is the Black Eyed Peas' "My Hump" song for 99 cents for a CD single, then we should be able to do so.

As for music getting worse, it's because there's so many fly-by-night music hacks who get just one mediocre song on the top 10 and are never heard from again. This has been happening since the 80s when radio very music eschewed nurturing newer acts over time and gave up on an artist if their followup song didn't hit with the listeners.

Another reason that the sales of CDs are down is because the fans are revolting against the big four record labels by boycotting their records and choosing to purchase independent music heard on the Internet, Pirate 96.9, dfsxradio.com (yup, I'm vertically plugging my station here), satellite, and their friends. The major labels have been hiring lawyers to sue people for illegally sharing mp3s of music through Kazaa and other p2p networks, as well as deploying decoy mp3 files full of silence or Madonna saying to the downloader "what the f--k do you think you're doing?" Now the big four are selling some CDs with anti-piracy software that inadvertently turned your computer against you. These tactics may have turned off many music fans to a point where they simply won't put up with this kind of bullshit from the big four record labels anymore.

The music industry needs to wake up and smell the coffee. CDs are still too expensive. People want to buy a song for a buck. CD sales for Amazon and other sites are down. People want to pay a buck to download a quality song.

Radio's music directors need to get a grip on reality that older fans just don't care for hip hop, and they're the ones with disposable income to spend for the advertisers on the radio stations. You're not going to get David Tanny to listen to crud aimed at the so-called teenager, but if you have somebody like Raymond & Scum, Big & Rich, Neil Diamond, or Marc Gunn (look him up at marcgunn.com), then you're going for the right kind of listener. There's better music for the older music fan.

The younger music fans aged 18-34 in the Ipsos poll say that the music is getting worse, yet the music directors at Z90, 98.9, and 933 continue their ways of picking a lot of crud to play on their radio stations, which is why the younger folks prefer their iPods and downloads over radio, which says they're supposedly serving their demographic.

Letters have been steadily coming in over the past few months from listners as young as 12 lamenting the loss of Fabulous 690 and KOOL 99.3, and laying the blame on Clear Channel for selling the programming rights (or planning to) to Spanish-language broadcasters who won't compete with them for English-language listeners. Many say that they enjoy the music on KOOL and Fabulous because it's mature, relaxing, friendly, and warm, while also complaining that what they hear on the hit stations are infantile, upsetting, mean, and cold to put it mildly.

Don't forget in 1998, when Jacor wanted to buy the stations at the frequencies of 94.1 and 95.7, they sold two of their stations at 102.9 and 106.5 for Heftel (now owned by Univision) who flipped them Spanish, with the same purpose of ridding Jacor of English-language competetion.

Without competetion for the stale rap-infested playlists of Z90, 933, and 98.9, it looks like that the music and radio industries are getting a bad rap from the younger music fans who sense that there's nothing for them to listen to. What San Diego needs is a CHR station that appeals to all age groups, playing anything that sounds upbeat, fun, mature, friendly, and hip, very much like the good old days of Boss Radio, KCBQ-AM, KDEO, KSEA, B100, the progressive days of KPRI and KGB-FM in the 60s and 70s, and other stations that were once the vanguards of popular radio music for the masses. Because it's BROADcasting, you have to appeal to a BROAD audience, not just playing stuff that nobody likes to hear, which is why payola radio continues to ruin CHR radio run by corporate radio today. The teenagers sense it. What do the younger music fans like if they don't like rap? Write me and the newspapers and let us all know what you listen to. Would they lie about this? Listen for yourself and judge like I did.

Today's CHR music sucks! Today's hit radio sucks! Fire the music directors, put the payola agents into jail, and sell your stations to true independents, not start-ups that run stations inside a building shared by Clear Channel.

Navigate To Another Page!