Party Time on Florida Radio (Apr 19, 2002)

PARTY TIME
Ever since WTMI died and was reborn as a dance-music station, ratings are soaring

BOB EIGHMIE / HERALD STAFFBEHIND THE DIAL: Mike Disney, left, and Phil Michaels Trueba have channeled their energy into making Party 93 one of the hottest radio stations in South Florida. Mike Disney is either a genius or a villain, depending on whom you talk to.

''It's unbelievable the way they changed the face of the scene in the last three months,'' Gordon Chin, dance music buyer for Uncle Sam's Music in South Beach, says of Disney's move to turn classical music radio station WTMI-FM (93.1) into dance music station WPYM-FM, Party 93. ``They are educating and making the South Florida dance community much more aware.''

Jack Firestone, a financial planner and a former manager of the Florida Philharmonic, disagrees. ''I'm furious,'' he says. ``It's corporate greed at its highest.''

Disney is not surprised at the passion on either side. As the man Cox Communications hired in January to turn Mendelssohn into Madonna, Disney knew he'd become a lightning rod for controversy. What he didn't anticipate was the new format succeeding so quickly.

February's ratings trend -- the second for WPYM's dance music format -- ranked the station as the third most-listened-to outlet in South Florida, behind urban music stations WEDR-FM (99.1) and WHQT-FM (105.1). And in its target demographic -- adults 18-34 -- Party's February numbers showed the station drawing more than 10 percent of all listeners in the market.

''We'd like to say we knew it was going to catch on this fast, but we really had no idea,'' Disney says. ``It's exciting and it's gratifying. The amazing thing is we're still in our rollout phase. It's only been three months.'' Still, program director Kid Curry of rhythmic music station WPOW-FM (96.5), Party's most obvious rival, remains unconvinced.

''There was a time that there wasn't a [dance] station and now there is,'' he says. ``There's going to be a bump. OK, congratulations. But where it goes after this, we'll have to wait and see.'' History favors Curry. The party music format has been tried in other cities, and while it drew fervent audiences in major markets such as Los Angeles, its popularity has generally failed to expand beyond a small band of loyal listeners.

But from K.C. and the Sunshine Band to Miami Sound Machine to the Winter Music Conference in Miami Beach, South Florida might have the nation's dance-friendliest audience. ''Where else but Miami Beach?'' says Jim Tremayne, editor of the New York-based dance-music magazine DJ Times. ``It's all about dance music there.''

And, Disney says, that makes all the difference in the world.

''This format is perfect for Miami. We see nothing but growth,'' he says. Across the United States, music-industry ears are tuned to Party. The station's success could set a national trend, inspiring others to follow suit and giving dance music the larger audience observers have been saying it deserves for years.

''It would be huge,'' Tremayne says. ``At Winter Music Conference, I haven't seen so many people excited about a new development in dance music in a long time. A lot of people who have crossover-oriented projects are looking to South Florida for this station to succeed.''

Disney, 48, a bearish man with close-cropped hair, a trim beard and a penchant for business suits, doesn't seem to fit the stereotype one might associate with the young, hip dance crowd. But he has a South Florida pedigree, having once run local talk station WIOD-AM (610). In fact, he's spent most of his radio career managing talk stations -- he lured Neil Rogers to WIOD and most recently worked for FM talk station WCKG-FM in Chicago. Disney, who also manages adult contemporary station WFLC-FM (97.3), says Cox's decision to flip WTMI from classical to dance music was supported by exhaustive research, then backed by the hiring of a staff with knowledge of the format.

''We saw a hole in the market,'' Disney says. Cox doesn't ``just go out and jam a format into a market that doesn't need it.''

Key among the hires was program director Phil Michaels Trueba, whom Disney is quick to credit for WPYM's early success. A Miami native, Trueba, 30, was most recently program director at Cox-owned rhythmic station WPYO-FM in Orlando.

Disney and Trueba have had to do more than simply switch programming since introducing WPYM -- they've had to

reinvent the station.

When the publicly traded broadcasting company bought WTMI for $100 million nearly two years ago, it needed to justify the purchase to stockholders who saw an underperforming station that consistently ranked in the top seven in audience size but -- with 2000 revenue of $8.8 million -- ranked only 17th in the market in earnings. Near the top of that money list were pop and urban music stations such as WEDR, WHQT and WPOW, whose listeners fell well within the 18-49 age demographic favored by advisors. WTMI was drawing listeners as much as a generation older. So when Cox flipped formats on Jan. 1, WTMI was drawing just a fraction of a percent of its new target audience; two months later, the station had 10.5 percent of listeners aged 18-34 -- a 2,000 percent increase. ''I daresay we didn't hold any listeners,'' Disney says.

That new audience came from virtually every music station on the FM dial, in English and Spanish. The February trends showed WPYM's growth caused WHYI-FM (100.7) to take a major hit, and WPOW and a number of Spanish-language pop stations lost ratings points as well.

Arbitron, the company that conducts the radio audience surveys, cautions that one-month trends can be unreliable, often varying widely from the quarterly ratings ''book'' stations used to set advertising rates. In addition, radio stations that switch formats generally experience an immediate ratings boost as listeners sample the new programming.

So whether WPYM can hold those listeners will indicate the format's true success.

One reason for the format's failure in other markets is the genre's penchant for producing ''one-hit wonders'' -- artists who turn out one popular song then are never heard from again. And without recognizable artists, audiences tend to gravitate back to the pop stations from which they came.

''I personally don't believe there's any way the dance format is going to sustain itself because there's no product feeding it,'' Curry says. ``There are no hits to sustain the listeners.''

Trueba has attempted to address that by concentrating on a skintight playlist that features fewer than two dozen songs in regular rotation -- a strategy that has proven successful at WPOW -- as well as remixes of songs by name acts such as Shakira, Mary J. Blige and Pink.

''I think we're a hit music station. A dance and music station,'' he says. Meanwhile, classical music fans continued to mourn WTMI's passing.

''Look at the numbers in some of the other markets. It's not that people don't listen to classical music,'' says Firestone, who moved a computer into his living room so he can listen to classical stations from Seattle and elsewhere over the Internet. ``I've made my peace with this. [But] for me to have to be locked at home to listen to [classical music] is a tragedy. It's a travesty.''

Another classical fan who's had to alter his listening habits since January is Disney. He says he has made his peace with the changes.

''I happen to enjoy an awful lot of that music, and I listen to it in my personal collection,'' he says. ``But you look at classical music across the nation and it's a dying [radio] format. We can entertain many more people this way then we ever could have as a classical music station.''

Commercial Radio Sinking

Rocking radio's world

Commercial radio may be in its worst shape ever, with listeners tuning out and legislators calling for investigation into corporate control of public airways

The soundtrack to the hit Coen Brothers movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", with its mixture of vintage bluegrass, country and blues, recently won the most prestigious prize in music -- the Grammy Award for album of the year. It has sold more than 5 million copies, was recently the No. 1 album on the pop charts and has been the top-selling country album for the last half-year.

Yet if one listens to commercial radio stations across the nation, the album might as well not exist.

Though the video for the Soggy Bottom Boys' "Man of Constant Sorrow" was a hit on video channels and a tour promoting the album sold out theaters across the country (and will be playing larger venues this summer), commercial radio programmers have deemed the album too risky to foist on their listeners.

That play-it-safe attitude has turned commercial music radio into a wasteland of inertia, a medium afraid to change or challenge its audience. Once the primary vehicle for exposing consumers to new music, tightly formatted and commercial-saturated radio stations now find themselves losing listeners to the Internet and other media that offer listeners a wider variety of songs and artists. Once consumers hungry for new music tuned in their favorite radio station. Now they are just as likely to download and swap MP3 files on the Internet or tune in one of the thousands of net-streaming or satellite radio music stations, many of them playing a wide variety of songs -- from techno instrumentals to vintage blues ballads -- uninterrupted by commercials.

Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the radio industry, the nation's public airwaves have come under the dominating control of a handful of corporations. These conglomerates -- including Clear Channel, Infinity Broadcasting, Cox, ABC Radio, Entercom and Emmis Communications -- claim that deregulation has been a godsend for listeners, saving them from the idiosyncratic programming whims of independently owned "Mom and Pop" stations.

"I think that putting stations in the hands of people who are committed to public service and who are top broadcasters is good for the public," says Randy Michaels, the CEO of Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 stations nationwide. "When we were in the Mom-and-Pop era, half the radio stations were owned by people who were as interested in playing what they liked as opposed to really serving the public. When you have professional management, who is focused on serving the listener, then of necessity we are obsessed with what the public wants, and we work every day to give them what they want."

But the numbers say they're doing a lousy job of it. Since 1996, Arbitron surveys show that the average time spent listening to radio by consumers 12 and older has dropped 9 percent. In the last two years, listenership has dropped more than 7 percent, Arbitron says. The young especially are tuning out: Teen-age listeners are down 11 percent, and people between the ages of 18 and 24 have declined 10 percent.

"The next generation is not interested at all in radio," says Jerry Del Colliano, a radio veteran who publishes an industry newsletter, Inside Radio, and lectures at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "You have a generation of people who can store music on computer hard drives and have Internet accounts. They don't need radio to find out about music anymore."

Indeed, there is evidence that radio stations don't so much try to give listeners what they want but instead fret about giving them what they don't want for fear of chasing them off.

Playlists at stations across the country continue to shrink, with only about 20 songs a week played with any regularity, most from the best-funded major labels. Many commercial stations say they play only records approved by their audience through extensive market-testing, but this practice has led to a numbing sameness of programming, with many of the same records played in the same formats from Miami to Seattle. In one week recently, the 40 biggest modern-rock stations in the country opened a total of 16 slots for new records, and the 45 biggest top-40 stations added a total of 20. That means that even though more than 30,000 CDs are released annually, the vast majority of the songs played at these stations is the same week after week, a pool of a few dozen artists who are also seen extensively on video networks such as MTV and VH1.

The intimate connection between the best-funded major-label artists and corporate-radio airplay is no coincidence. Commercial stations receive $100 million a year in big-label money funneled through independent radio promoters, a legal variation on the old pay-for-play "payola" that was stamped out in the '80s. "The airwaves are a public trust, but we have given that up and let one small group of people heist all the country's programming decisions," charges Miles Copeland III, former manager of the Police and Sting and current chairman of the independent Ark 21 label. And that small group of decision-makers appears increasingly out of step with the public's desires.

"You can't say rock radio is the center of the rock universe anymore," says rocker Tom Petty, whose acclaimed 1999 album, "Echo," was virtually ignored by rock radio, even though his 2000 tour played to 15,000 people a night and pulled in $14.4 million in revenue. "A lot of my audience, and the rock audience in general, has given up on radio and moved on to other things, like MP3 downloads. Radio has very little to do with rock anymore, but people still want rock."

Legislators take action

The widening disconnect between commercial radio and its audience in the consolidation era has raised an unusual amount of attention both inside and outside the industry:

- Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has requested a Judiciary Committee hearing "to investigate issues surrounding consolidation in the ownership of radio stations and allegations that stations are inappropriately charging record companies to play their own music (known as `payola')."

- Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) has formally asked U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and the Federal Communications Commission to investigate how Clear Channel consolidation has "negatively affected artists, owners of sound recording copyrights, consumers, advertisers and competitors in the radio and television industries." Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) has also called for a Justice Department investigation of possible antitrust violations by Clear Channel.

- The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has filed a legal brief with the FCC accusing Clear Channel of expanding its dominance to such a degree that "there is concern both the radio and sound recordings industries have been forever transformed and destroyed" and urging the FCC to hold public hearings.

- Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record labels, is calling for an FCC examination of "legal payola," saying that the record industry is spending so much money lining the pockets of radio stations and independent radio promoters that consumers are getting shafted.

But it remains to be seen how effective these initiatives will be in the face of a Republican-dominated House and federal government. The National Association of Broadcasters, which represents the radio industry, and Clear Channel were the 2nd and 10th largest contributors, respectively, out of all media organizations to the Republican Party in the 2000 election. Clear Channel Communications, based in San Antonio, is an $8 billion corporation that owns 1,200 stations, covering 247 of the nation's 250 largest markets, and two years ago acquired the nation's largest concert promoter, SFX Entertainment. The merger of the two operations was hailed by company spokesmen as a triumph of synergy, using Clear Channel stations to promote concerts in Clear Channel concert venues.

But while such a strategy clearly benefits the company's shareholders, less clear is how consumers, radio listeners and bands would benefit. Last August, Clear Channel's lock on concert promotion and radio airplay was the subject of a suit filed by an independent concert promoter in Denver, Nobody In Particular Presents. The suit accused Clear Channel of "unlawful and anticompetitive practices," including forcing bands to play at Clear Channel concert venues or else risk losing airplay on Clear Channel stations nationwide. No trial date has been set in U.S. District Court, but Clear Channel has filed a 50-page brief denying the charges.

Alternatives to radio

Meanwhile, Clear Channel's grip on the nation's music listeners is being challenged by a alternative media.

"We have a Web site that attracts 10,000 people a month," said Rob Sacher, a New York City record label and club owner who last year started the Internet station RadioIndiePop.com, which net-streams the songs of independent rock bands who don't have enough marketing muscle to get played at commercial radio. "We'd been up only a week with the station when we started getting e-mail from Australia, England and New Zealand. We're telling people if they're tired of hearing 'N Sync played 10 times a day, come to our station, we'll play something cool, something they don't hear everywhere else, and we're getting a response."

The volume of content streamed by Web radio broadcasters has increased 70 percent since January, according to MeasureCast Inc., which monitors online listening habits. According to Nielsen NetRatings.Home, 40 million people were streaming Net stations in the year's first quarter. Jupiter Media Metrix predicts that by 2005, 5 percent of traditional radio advertising -- approximately $1.1 billion -- will have moved onto the Internet.

But even as Internet listening is skyrocketing, the U.S. Copyright Office is preparing a fee structure for Internet stations that threatens the existence of many start-up stations. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Proceeding has recommended that the U.S. Copyright Office impose a $0.0014 royalty for each listener tuned in on a Web station each time a song is played. Such fees aren't paid by traditional broadcast radio, but apply only to digital transmissions.

Webcasters contend the fees will force many of them to shut down. "This might be fair if it were being applied to large webcasting corporations whose stations were loaded down with lots of expensive ads," says an Internet broadcaster, William Smith, in a letter to listeners and the media. "But, given the state of webcasting today, the highest fees would be owed by stations like ours that are in no position to pay them."

But the Recording Industry Association of America, which pushed for imposing the fees, struck a conciliatory tone recently. "In the next two years we'll see the impact of royalties on these businesses, and if the rates need to be adjusted, we will," said Rosen at the recent South By Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas. "The impulse [of Internet radio] is to break the stranglehold of traditional radio and retail on consumers, and that should be allowed to happen."

In addition, disaffected radio listeners now have the option of tuning in 100 channels of commercial-free music in their cars, broadcast by satellite radio corporations for a monthly subscription fee of $10 to $13.

XM Satellite Radio signed up 76,000 by March 2002, and it aims to have 350,000 customers signed up by the end of this year, when General Motors Corp. is expected to have factory-installed XM radios in 23 car models. A second satellite radio company, Sirius Satellite Radio, has partnerships with BMW, DaimlerChrysler and Ford Motor Co.

So many choices

Joe Capobianco, senior vice president of content at Sirius, doesn't expect people to abandon conventional stations. But, "there's still a dearth of choices even in larger markets in commercial radio," he says. "There's several billions of dollars of recorded music that doesn't appear on the radio anywhere. Try finding a reggae channel or a Broadway channel."

Pat DiNizio, singer-guitarist in the Smithereens and a programmer at XM in Washington, D.C., says demand for the satellite stations will increase because they're filling a void. "When the audience is listening to us, they're looking into a mirror," says DiNizio, who programs a satellite station devoted to independent music. "We're playing music sent from people like themselves, the garage band down the block, their friends and neighbors. We're modeled on the way radio used to be, where you could hear Otis Redding, Cream and the Beatles back to back."

That sort of chance-taking is rarely found in commercial radio anymore, in part because the cost of promoting new or unknown acts to radio stations has become prohibitive for all but the largest record labels. Record companies pay indie promoters for getting new songs added to radio playlists, in amounts as high as $1,000 or more per song. The indies, in turn, set up what amounts to bank accounts with the stations, funneling some of that record company cash to programmers in the form of listener giveaways such as concert tickets and vacation trips. In exchange, the independent radio promoters gain access to station managers and information about programming decisions.

"We have to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to even get to the starting line with most radio stations," says Donovan Finn, head of radio promotion for Matador Records, an independent label that has nurtured the careers of artists such as Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo and Pavement. Like most indie labels, Matador hasn't had a song get significant commercial airplay in years. "It's rarely worth it. Maybe four or five years ago it was financially viable for a smaller label like us to get airplay on commercial radio, but not anymore."

Clear Channel's Michaels argues that listeners don't want adventuresome music chosen for esoteric tastes; they want hits. "We all have nostalgia for the way things were, but radio is experiencing the same kind of consolidation that every other business has seen," Michaels says. "I love to visit small towns and eat at the Mom and Pop restaurants. But more and more it's getting harder to do, because there are a million choices and the chain restaurants are nudging out the Mom and Pop places. There are people, including me, who think that's bad. But people want to eat at the chain restaurant, for some reason."

The local approach

A handful of locally owned stations, such as WMPS in Memphis, are hanging tough by reviving some of the adventurousness and eclecticism of FM-radio's free form Golden Age in the '70s. WMPS' playlist blends Ben Harper, R.E.M. and Ani DiFranco with hard-core country acts (Rodney Crowell), Tex-Mex roots groups (Los Super Seven) and independent local artists.

"We play records based on gut instinct," says WMPS program director Alexandra Inzer. "The problem with radio today is that corporations have paid a tremendous amount to buy these properties, so they can't afford to take a risk, which makes for really boring radio. Our approach is risky, and our audience is smaller because of it. But the ones who do like it stick with us. They have the station on for long periods because they're not going to hear the same songs over and over."

A similar philosophy prevails at locally owned WWCD, an alternative rock station in Columbus, Ohio, that works records by indie artists and local rockers into its rotation in a town where rigorously programmed playlists by Clear Channel and Infinity stations predominate. A few years ago, the station fought off a challenge from a corporate-controlled alternative-rock station. The competitor, now owned by Clear Channel, has since switched formats.

"This conglomeration thing has totally ruined our industry," says WWCD program director Andy Davis. "I think people are listening to radio less and disappointed more when they do listen. We are fortunate to be owned by a local guy who loves music, who has a passion for new and progressive sounds. But always lingering in the back of my mind is that the next quarter could be our last, because there aren't many of us left."