Vol. 34, No. 4, October 2011, pp. 455–473
Music Radio and the Record Industry:
Songs, Sounds, and Power
J. Mark Percival
The nature of the economic, social, and cultural relations between the radio industry and the record industry is most often characterized by both academics and practitioners as symbiotic, that is, both parties benefit from the interaction. Music radio needs records to fill airtime and to attract audiences and the record industry needs the kind of pervasive exposure that airplay still provides to sell product and to build artist profiles.1 The rewards, it has been suggested for decades, are mutual and equivalent. This article argues that the symbiosis argument is an over-simplification of a complex …show more content…
set of relationships.
Drawing on interviews with record industry promotions personnel and music radio programmers, I make a case that not only does music radio hold the dominant position in the relationship between itself and the record industry but also that this has had important consequences for record industry A&R practices (signing policy and release schedules) and the production of popular music recordings (the actual sounds on the records). The power of music radio extends far beyond simple promotion of records and artists—it has a profound influence on the sound of popular music and the shape of popular music culture.
Introduction
The nature of the economic, social, and cultural relations between the radio industry and the record industry is often characterized by both academics and practitioners as symbiotic, that is, a relationship in which both parties benefit from the interaction.2
Music radio needs records to fill airtime and to attract audiences—the record industry needs the kind of pervasive exposure that airplay still provides to sell singles and albums, and to build artist profiles. The rewards, it has been suggested for decades, are mutual and equivalent.
I believe that the symbiosis argument is an over-simplification of a complex set of relationships through which music radio has a profound influence on the sounds of popular music. Since the early days of both the record industry and the radio industry, playing records on air has been understood in terms of advertising
ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2011.601598
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(Frith, Sounds Effects). The record is, as Simon Frith suggests, simultaneously both product and advertisement and so airplay tends to make a record (and therefore also an artist) more likely to sell, or to become more exploitable in terms of licensing. The popularity of a record as demonstrated in sales charts or radio market research then feeds back into the radio industry and increases the chances of that record appearing on more local, regional, or national radio playlists. David Hendy argues that in the UK it is often (but not always) the BBC national music networks (Radio 1 and Radio 2) that tend to lead music radio playlist trends by identifying and playing new artists and new records ahead of the commercial sector. However, as Jody Berland and others have pointed out, the corporate objectives of the record industry and music radio are not so much the same as they are usefully complementary. That complementarity can be strained if music radio’s corporate interests diverge sufficiently from those of the record industry. It is here that conflict arises and must be managed, normally at the point of contact between record industry promotions personnel (or “pluggers”) and music radio programmers.
In broad terms, the research presented here draws on the production of culture perspective developed by Peterson and in particular the work of Peterson and Anand.
Peterson and Anand identify six facets in a system of production of culture, the disruption of any one of which will tend to disrupt the whole system and lead to a period of adjustment and restabilization. Those facets are technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organizational structure, occupational careers, and market. My focus here is on examining the music radio/record industry relationship in terms of the agency of the cultural intermediaries working within a loosely coupled production system, and touches on aspects of four of those facets: industry structure; organizational structure; occupational careers; market.
The first relevant facet is industry structure. Peterson and Anand note that the record industry is an “open system of oligarchy composed of niche-market-targeted divisions plus many small specialty service and market development firms where the former produce the most lucrative products and the latter produce the most innovative” (316). The radio industry is more problematic in the UK. In commercial terms it most closely resembles Peterson and Anand’s classification of an industry consisting of “a few vertically integrated oligarchal firms that mass produce a few standardized products” (316) but with elements of the more evolved, open oligarchal system which characterizes the music industry. Radio in the UK is also dominated by the BBC, whose primary objective is reaching audiences as an end in itself (Wall). This changes the commercial model of production somewhat in that a single dominant cultural organization will produce innovation (specialist music shows, for example) alongside products that compete in a mainstream mass market (like breakfast radio shows on Radio 1 and Radio 2). Overall, though, the structures of both industries remain relatively stable.
The second relevant facet is organizational structure. Record companies, and to a certain extent radio station owners, tend to adopt an organizational structure which consists of “a variegated form of large firm that tries to take advantage of the potential
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flexibility of the bureaucratic form without giving up central control by acquiring creative services through short-term contracts” (Peterson and Anand 316). The record industry in the UK fits this model closely, as does the UK commercial radio industry.
Since the 1994 structural changes imposed on the BBC by Director General John Birt, in pursuit of a more market-driven model of organization, the Corporation has also come to resemble this model, albeit with the weight of seventy years of bureaucratic, centralized control slowing the pace of structural innovation (BBC Online).
The most relevant production facet for this research is that of occupational careers.
As Peterson and Anand put it:
Culture is produced through sustained collective activity, so each cultural field develops a career system . . . and the networks of working relationships developed by creative workers make for what some have called “cultures of production”.
(Peterson and Anand 317)
There is a career structure of sorts in the record industry, but there is little in the way of formal professional qualification, controlling entry to the sector (Peterson and
Anand 317). This is also true of commercial radio in the UK, despite the increasing number of vocational courses designed to feed into both industries. Most workers in the record industry and in music radio enter those industries, as Peterson and Anand suggest, from the “bottom up” and build careers in an essentially ad hoc way. This is also true to a degree in the BBC in terms of the point of entry to the organization as a music radio generalist. Once inside the BBC, however, there are clear, bureaucratically defined career paths. The BBC also uses both its own network of local radio stations and local commercial radio as feeders for potential personnel. Furthermore, workers move not only within an industry, but across industries. Several of my informants have worked in both music radio and the record industry.
Similarly, notions of “market” are central to the cultural production of popular music and to both commercial radio and the BBC. The latter tends to view Peterson and Anand’s market as a “public,” though the same rules appear to segment both constructions. For the record industry and both sectors of music radio, Peterson and
Anand’s definition of market works well:
Markets are constructed by producers to render the welter of consumer tastes comprehensible . . . .Once consumer tastes are reified as a market, those in the field tailor their actions to create cultural goods like those that are currently most popular as represented by the accepted measurement tools. (Peterson and Anand
317)
This plays out most clearly in commercial music radio, in its obsession with research as a central tool in making programming decisions. There are differences in emphasis at the BBC, but the Corporation still uses research extensively to inform its programming, and its choice of presenters.3
In the research I present here, I draw on interviews with key industry professionals and suggest that radio, in the UK at least, is the dominant player in the apparently symbiotic relationship with the record industry. I explore the consequences in two key
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areas: first, in terms of record industry A&R practices (signing policy, release schedules, and so on); second, in the production of popular music recordings (the actual sounds on the records).
Music Radio and the Record Industry
In the late 1920s and early 1930s the record industry in the United States realized that it had been wrong in its assumption that the availability of “free” music on radio would cannibalize sales of records. What seems in retrospect obvious (that increased airplay would tend to increase record sales) only slowly became an accepted industry convention (Barnard; Frith). This period marked the beginning of an informal, but enormously significant economic relationship between radio and the music industry, a relationship whose consequences for popular music culture have been far reaching.
By the 1950s, with the emergence of Top 40 “jukebox” hit radio formats in the US
(and later in the UK) radio had become central to creating regional and national hits for the record industry (Denisoff). Indeed, the record industry has at times sought more direct, if covert, ways of persuading radio programmers or DJs to play specific releases. The term “payola” has been around since the 1930s, allegedly as a contraction of “payment” and “Victrola” (a brand name of RCA-Victor, one of the biggest jukebox and turntable manufacturers of the first half of the 20th century). According to …show more content…
Glenn
Altschuler:
[It] was coined by Variety in 1938 to refer to gifts, favors, or cash surreptitiously dispensed by record companies to get orchestra leaders and disc jockeys to play their songs. By the 1950s, influential disc jockeys were receiving hundreds of records to listen to every month. Payola was a good way to get their attention.
(Altschuler 142)
Altschuler addresses the widespread use of payola in the 1950s and covers the series of investigations throughout that decade, culminating in the involvement of the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) in 1960. By 1961 the chair of the FTC announced that the practice of payola had been “pretty well stamped out” (Altschuler 149). This was, as it turned out, either public relations rhetoric or naı¨ve optimism on the part of the FTC. Incentives, including payola in various forms from record companies to radio DJs and programmers, continued in many forms throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
(Dannen; Knoedelseder). In 2007, following a series of payola investigations, led by then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, all four major labels in the United
States and the four biggest radio-owning companies made a number of large out-ofcourt settlement payments to the US government (in one case $12 million), while denying any actual wrong doing (Leeds; Spain).4 It seems unlikely that major record labels would have risked federal investigation and major fines had they not perceived the US radio networks to be of considerable significance to their promotional activities. Popular Music and Society
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These accounts appear to suggest that radio in its many forms (AM, FM, digital terrestrial and digital satellite, and online) has been, and continues to be, the key promotional tool for record companies, despite the proliferation of old and new media options. There tends to be, however, a lack of fine-grain analysis of either the alleged symbiosis of the relationship between the record industry and music radio or the social and cultural processes at the interface between those industries.5 Here
I address the former through an empirical study of the latter—the social dynamic of the relationship between record industry pluggers and music radio programmers in the UK. It is through the interactions between and around pluggers and programmers
(as representatives of their respective industries) that radio emerges as a significant mediator of the practices of the record industry and therefore the sounds of popular music.6 Pluggers and Programmers
Record industry pluggers work as part of the promotional campaign for new and, less often, re-issue records. It is the plugger’s job to get his or her label’s “priority” releases onto as many playlists as possible, preferably on the biggest or most influential stations. Pluggers work at the sharp end of the industry—regional pluggers often drive long distances around the UK, sometimes in the company of a solo artist or band, touring commercial and BBC radio stations.7 National pluggers focus on BBC Radio
1, BBC Radio 2, and the big commercial networks based in London. All pluggers use a variety of strategies to achieve their objective, but one of the most common is the supply of the artist in person for interview or live session. Interviews generally ensure that an artist’s new record will be played on air, but the live session has a more complex role to play in promotion of record and artist. Both forms of personal appearance build a sense of the artist as a “real” person or band with whom the DJpresenter (and thus, by proxy, the audience) may interact. But the live session also works to demonstrate that an artist can authentically “cut it live,” in other words, that the sophistication of a commercially recorded version of a song is merely an embellishment of a raw, “real” talent. Beyond this construction (or reinforcement) of an aura of authenticity for the artist, the live session works for a radio station in at least three ways. First, if an artist is well known, the session may suggest that the DJ or station is important enough to be worthy of attention from a big name (or for a station to be able to claim in retrospect that they spotted a rising star on the way up).
Second, it is cheap. The station gets a live performance from an artist and because this performance is classified as “promotion,” stations do not normally have to pay artists for that performance. Third, the station owns the recording of the performance and can license that performance back to a record company for use as, for example, bonus album tracks or a free promotional download. Live sessions and interviews help a plugger to manipulate the conditions of his or her relationship with music radio programmers in order to increase the likelihood of his or her label’s records appearing on a playlist. More importantly, though, the high-profile live session on, for example,
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daytime Radio 1 works to inform audience understanding of how popular music should sound, and reinforces established narratives of authenticity.
The priorities of a music radio programmer are different from those of their counterparts at the BBC, particularly that of a programmer in the UK commercial hits radio sector for whom a live session is unlikely to be an attractive option for mainstream daytime airplay. A live session disrupts the flow of daytime commercial networks, sounding different from the music of researched playlists. This disruption could result in listeners switching stations, and so the live session format is a potential problem for commercial FM radio.
The job of a mainstream daytime music radio programmer for the BBC or a UK commercial network is to create weekly playlists which not only minimize the chances of losing listeners but also reflect the values of the station as a brand. The notion of branding matters to UK commercial radio stations in particular, partly because they cannot rely on the cross-media promotional campaigns used by the BBC (TV promotes radio shows, and vice versa, for example), but largely because good branding helps distinguish one station from another in a rather poorly differentiated and busy marketplace.
Studying Music Radio
My approach to this research was to conduct a series of interviews with record company pluggers and music radio programmers between 2004 and 2006. My own status as a radio insider was invaluable though not without potential problems in terms of interpretation of my results. I was a DJ-presenter with BBC Radio Scotland from 1989 until 2000 and I have also had some experience in the commercial radio sector, most notably during an early incarnation of London-based alternative rock station XFM in the mid-1990s. My own experience of relationship-building with record company promotions companies and with individual pluggers was particularly useful. I have never been in exactly the same position as any of my music programming informants, that of being plugged regularly in pursuit of daytime playlisting for new records. I was, however, in regular contact with specialist promotions companies and I pursued social and business contact with pluggers. It was during that time that I developed a thorough understanding of the unique relationship that exists between pluggers and programmers, or DJs.
There may then have been the possibility of subconscious bias in my discussion, but
I agree strongly with Howard Becker writing on jazz and Sue Morris writing on interactive game play, who argue that empirical researchers should, if they are to obtain meaningful results, have expertise not only in research methods but also in that which is to be studied. I also lean towards Becker’s position on the relationship between empirical and theoretical work. He says, “I have a deep suspicion of abstract sociological theorizing; I regard it as at best a necessary evil” (Tricks 3). In this article, therefore, I focus primarily on the fieldwork and a discussion of the data that has emerged from that fieldwork.
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The BBC and UK Music Radio
When studying music radio in the UK it is important to be clear about the role of the
BBC as both broadcaster and cultural institution. Figures from 2010 from UK radio ratings organization RAJAR show that the BBC has 54.6% of overall radio listening, while all commercial radio has 43.2%. The two national BBC pop music stations
Radio 1, with 11.8 million listeners per week, and Radio 2, with 13.7 million listeners, have between them more than one quarter of all radio listening in the UK across all radio formats (RAJAR 2010). Two BBC stations therefore dominate UK national music radio broadcasting and they are an unavoidably powerful influence on popular music culture in Britain. It might be argued that it is somewhat odd for a publicly owned, publicly funded national broadcaster such as the BBC to be promoting the interests of the record industry. Advertising and sponsorship elsewhere in the BBC are not permitted under the terms of its charter. Yet it is popular music’s peculiarly close association of the commercial and the creative that allows the BBC to argue that it is not in fact promoting an industry, it is promoting culture (Frith Performing Rites).8
The extent to which the BBC maintains this line is, however, contingent both on short and mid-term policy objectives and on immediate priorities for specific music radio stations. For BBC Radio 2 in the early 2000s this line was particularly blurred, and I will return to this point later.
Notions of “market” are central to the cultural production of popular music and to both commercial radio and the BBC. While the BBC tends to view a “market” as a
“public,” both constructions involve their own sense of “audience.” As Stephen
Barnard suggests, there is no point to radio broadcasting without the presence of an audience to hear those broadcasts:
A radio station may exist primarily as a profit source for its owners or as a means of serving a public, but in each instance the audience is pivotal: the ‘quality’ of the audience that the stations may deliver to potential advertisers may mean the difference between profit and loss, while an ostensibly ‘public service’ station such as a BBC local radio station might see high numbers of listeners as confirmation of its right to exist and to command a proportion of the licence fee. (Barnard 87)
Thus the resources spent by the BBC and the commercial sector on researching radio audiences suggest that radio is audience-led in both sectors and indeed this is the perception that radio broadcasters normally seek to foster. In the case of my radio informants it is clear that they understood their own decision-making processes in terms of their perception of audience. They also believed that their market research and their response to that research reflected the reality of the day-to-day lived experience both of the “target” audience collectively and of individuals comprising that audience. The research presented here is in part intended to use an understanding of radio’s perception of audience in order to illuminate the processes of music programming. Decisions on music programming are designed to deliver specific slices of consumer demographic to advertisers, or to achieve a predetermined favorable balance between raw ratings and the performance of public service principles.
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This leads to a further point: that the construction of “audience” as “market”
(through research) must be, as Denis McQuail argues, “from the media . . . and within the terms of media industry discourse” (7). This audience is not a community of people listening to radio, as individual members of that audience might see themselves—it is a heterogeneous group, structured in terms of classic market research characteristics: age, social class, income, preferences in media consumption, and so on. Both BBC and commercial music radio stations understand their audience primarily in terms of demographics, a term Barnard correctly suggests is somewhat overused in the radio industry, even when more qualitative data are available.9
The BBC radio station programmers I spoke with as part of this research were responsible for music policy at BBC Radio 1 and at BBC Radio 2, both of which are broadly hits radio stations by day with more specialist output in the evenings and weekends.10 The commercial station programmers in this research worked in mainstream hits radio stations with playlists ranging from current hits to
the more retro-influenced “80s, 90s and now” formats. These stations, both BBC and commercial networks, are the most useful in any attempt to understand the power of radio to influence popular music culture because they have the most active relationship with the record industry. These are the stations for which new record industry product matters and therefore they are the stations that are by far the most important to the record industry. This is not to say that music radio stations whose playlists are dominated by old hits (often referred to as classic or re-current songs) are irrelevant to the record industry. Those “oldie” stations whose playlists allow for occasional new material, normally from well-established artists, may play a part in sustaining the longevity of a mainstream hit song by connecting with an audience that may buy an album only two or three times per year. Nevertheless, my research suggests that, for the most part, record labels are not interested in expending promotional effort on these stations. Pluggers and Programmers: Power and Influence
Through reflection on my own professional experience as a BBC Radio Scotland presenter in the 1990s and interviews with key professionals in the mid-2000s, it became clear to me that the relationship between pluggers and programmers was the key to understanding the influence of music radio on popular music. Programmers and pluggers must balance competing pressures and demands from within their own industries, and from their counterparts on the other side of the promotional fence.
Pluggers, for example, may be required by senior management to ensure that a
“priority” artist’s record makes it onto specific radio station playlists, despite knowing that the heads of music at those stations are likely to reject that record as inappropriate to their station sound or brand. Yet a plugger must maintain a good social and business rapport with all his or her radio contacts if any future records are likely to make it onto playlists. The plugger is therefore faced with the prospect of irritating a boss or alienating an essential business associate. Similarly a radio
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programmer, as noted earlier, must construct a playlist which will deliver “target” listeners in sufficient numbers to satisfy station owners and to maintain either the financial viability of the station in the commercial sector or the political-cultural status of a network at the BBC.11 Nevertheless it tends to be in the interests of a music radio programmer to maintain a functional relationship with individual pluggers because it is the plugger who acts as gateway to specific artists, whether culturally influential, economically successful, or both. These competing imperatives underpin the dynamic of the relationships between programmers and pluggers and it is the interplay of these imperatives in shifting cultural and economic contexts that has consequences for the ways in which we hear popular music.
I have been particularly interested in how pluggers and programmers perceive the balance of power in negotiations around playlisting of records. A former regional promotions manager for major label “A” sees music radio as being the dominant partner in its relationship with the record industry. He says: “Radio . . . has become so powerful because there’s so much competition for a limited amount of plays.
[Record companies] can ask, not demand. You have to do as much as you can to get what you want, but nine times out of ten you aren’t going to get it all.” The competition for a limited number of playlist slots is such that no amount of persuasion or inducement can guarantee airplay for any record if that record is not perceived as being aligned to a radio station’s objectives.12 Part of the problem, as a promotions manager for major label “B” pointed out, is that the relationship between pluggers and programmers is in many ways a business relationship, but it is not contractual. That is, there is a lack of formal or legal mechanisms that would regulate any exchange of one good or service for another. Verbal agreements may be made but are very often dependent on any number of potential variables. A programmer may, for example, commit to placing a new release from one plugger on a playlist but find that a better or more suitable record arrives from another plugger the following day.
A plugger may offer an interview with a major name artist, but could have to renege for any number of reasons: the band gets a better offer from a more prestigious media outlet (say, a bigger radio station or a TV channel); a record becomes a major hit unexpectedly quickly with consequently increased demands on the artist to travel internationally; a band might decide it simply can’t be bothered with an interview.
This seems to be generally understood by both parties but for most of my informants there was a high value placed on being straight with their counterparts and building a relationship in which their behavior is seen as relatively predictable and honest.
The consequences of success or failure in playlisting extend beyond simple sales figures—increasingly playlisting of new records (or indeed recent hits) is as much about maintaining the visibility of an artist as it is about selling copies of the song.
A higher profile on radio tends to remind listeners that an artist is still active and making records or soon to be playing live shows. Similarly, a song with high public recognition value is more likely to be licensed for use in advertising, film soundtracks, or corporate branding or in other creative, cultural, or artistic areas such as sampling or interactive media. Regular plays of recent hits are likely to help the long-term sales
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of albums, which, despite the decline in the value of physical CD album sales in the first decade of the 2000s, are still a significant source of revenue for the record industry.13 Playlisting also matters because it has other economic implications—in the UK and elsewhere radio stations pay performance royalties to the record industry for every commercial recording played on air (Malm and Wallis). A head of music for a network of “80s, 90s and now” hits stations in the North of England explains:
[Record companies] are the providers of 80% of our content. But then again, we pay them . . . through our PPL [Phonographic Performance Licence] payments. About
10% of our revenue, depending on the size of the audience, is paid back to the music industry . . . .The more money we make, the more money they make, so it’s a very closely tied relationship. The radio industry is still the music industry’s best access to market in terms of getting records heard and getting people into action to go and buy them. And the radio industry relies . . . heavily on the music industry to give us content, to make our brands sound attractive.
The co-dependency of the relationship between radio and the record industry is thus strengthened through PPL payments. It is the major label plugger who is responsible for increasing the share of records from her or his label on a given playlist—more records from, for example, Warners Music mean greater PPL income for that label, and less PPL income for competing major labels (Sony-BMG, Universal, EMI), given the finite nature of playlists. It is, though, clearly in the interests of the record industry for the music radio industry in general to be successful, whether it is the BBC or the commercial sector. The income that record companies (and, of course, publishing companies) derive from royalty payments will remain significant and, perhaps of increasing importance, predictable, as long as music radio continues to attract large audiences. RAJAR ratings since the mid-1990s suggest that overall radio listening remains high and while this continues to be the case it is in the interests of the record industry to enable the radio industry to maintain its ubiquity as a medium for disseminating popular music. A consequence of this economic inter-dependency is that it becomes more likely that the record industry will tend towards the production of music that will be good for radio. Put another way, the record industry has more incentive to produce the kind of records that music programmers want to play—that is, music judged by broadcasters to be best suited to maintaining existing listening figures and, if possible, gaining new audiences. This is an example of the power of music radio, in this case expressed through the deployment of an indirect and externally legislated economic lever, to mediate the cultural production of popular music by major record labels. If, as the record industry fears, the value of record sales falls overall in the future, then revenue streams like PPL and other royalty and licensing payments become even more, rather than less, important and therefore it becomes more likely that the record industry will continue to attempt to meet the requirements of music radio.
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Radio and New Music
I have argued that my choice of mainstream daytime hits radio stations is justified in exploring the influence of music radio on the production of popular music because those stations are the ones most highly valued by the record industry in the promotion of new records from new or established artists. In the UK there is a qualitative difference between the BBC national music stations (Radio 1 and Radio 2) and their commercial-sector competitors in their approach to new music. The BBC often frames this difference in terms of its commitment to principles of “public service” rather than to the interests of shareholders or advertisers (Hendy). BBC
Music Policy Executive Sarita Jagpal explains her understanding of Radio 1’s centrality to the record industry’s promotional agenda, the power that she can wield as gateway to highly valued playlisting, and the distinctiveness of the service provided by Radio 1, as compared to commercial music radio. She says:
Radio 1 is still one of the few places that [record companies] can bring new music and it gets played. Generally we’re in a good place, Radio 1 and the record industry.
They need us, and obviously there will be times when we don’t playlist a band of theirs and it’s hard for them to swallow, but at the end of the day, they’ll have another band next week [whom] they need to be getting plays [for].
Radio 1 and Radio 2 share an objective with the record industry (albeit with different motivation): to break new records from new or established artists. The BBC accrues cultural capital through being able to claim that it is skilled at identifying future hit records or emerging trends in popular music. The Corporation accumulates political capital by demonstrating its commitment to “new” (usually British) music as evidence that it is supporting cultural production in the UK, and therefore further validating the BBC’s vision of public service. The synthesis of this cultural and political capital is likely to increase the chances of a favorable decision on the conditions of renewal of the BBC’s ten-year Royal Charter and thus its claim on future economic capital in the form of the license fee.
Jagpal, as a music policy decision maker, knows that the supply of new music far outstrips Radio 1’s capacity or willingness to play in daytime playlist slots, so the station is in a strong position to reject new records or artists—there will always be more new artists and new releases from the record industry. Record companies, naturally enough, seek to minimize rejection of records by Radio 1 and by Radio 2 and seem to be quite willing to modify their business strategies in order to achieve that objective. Colin Martin, former Head of Music at Radio 2, reflecting in 2005 on his turn-of-the-century policy towards the record industry, indicates just how much influence can be exerted by the most-listened-to music station in the UK:
I went along to the record companies and I said, “Look, can you . . . think about your A&R, can you . . . think about melody and good tunes?” At the time I said
“Less boy, more band. We want artists, we want all that sort of thing.” And that is what has happened. Record companies have all got behind artists, and Radio 2 got so big that it was hard to ignore. Now a lot of record companies look to A&R
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Pragmatically then the record industry is likely to co-operate with any strategy which promotes sales or potential royalty payments, regardless of the genre or sound of an artist. Therefore the record industry in the year 2000 had little reason to reject Colin
Martin’s approach, other than perhaps irritation at external interference in their core business. This raises a similar issue to one that I touched on earlier—it might be considered anomalous for a publicly owned, publicly funded broadcasting organization to be part of the promotional process for a major private-sector oligopoly (that is, the record industry). It would not be difficult to argue that equally it is not appropriate for the
BBC actively to mediate the production processes of that same oligopoly in the pursuit of its own long-term objectives. In practice this is not a question likely to attract a great deal of attention provided that the consequence of that mediation is favorable for all parties involved: first, to a record industry that needs radio airplay for the reasons I have already addressed; second, to BBC Radio 2, which gets the raw programming material it judges to be necessary; third, to the commercial radio industry, which can allow the BBC networks to take risks with new records (and new artists) before cherry-picking the most popular of those records for their own playlists. Further, if one accepts that innovation and “new”-ness are essential to the ongoing development of popular music culture, then Colin Martin’s strategy at Radio
2, and the powerful presence of the BBC in the music radio market, is a “good” thing.
Music Radio and A&R
These examples of practices at BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 reflect the extent to which there has been an ongoing development of the processes identified by Keith Negus in 1993 at a time when Radio 1 alone was regularly attracting close to 20 million listeners per week
(and the commercial radio sector was both smaller and significantly less consolidated).
Negus notes, “the influence of radio programmers, disc jockeys and producers spirals back to the decision to acquire particular acts in the first place and decisively shapes the way artists are recorded and presented to the media” (“Plugging and Programming” 66).
A former promotions manager for major label “B” remains uncomfortable with the influence that radio can have on something as apparently straightforward as the order in which singles are released from an album. He believes that there has been a collective failure of record-company nerve in over-privileging feedback from radio stations, arguing that record companies should have the vision to manage an artist’s promotional campaign without considering radio’s requirements. A London-based commercial radio head of music explains the process from the perspective of the radio programmer:
[The label] came in and played us what was going to be the first single off that
George Michael album [Patience, 2004]. And we all said, “That’s shit. That’s absolutely shit.” They said, “Well it’s not changing now—George has decided and
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the management has decided.” And I said, “Well, we can’t guarantee you any support.” Cut to two weeks later and they delivered “Amazing,” which wasn’t even on the [original version of the] album. They [had gone back to George] and said,
“Have you got any more songs?” They came back [to us] and played us “Amazing” and we went, “That’s exactly what a George Michael fan would expect to hear, whether [George] likes the song or not.” It was exactly right for that audience, it worked for us and that became the first single. The whole point is that if you can do that with someone of the caliber of George [Michael], then presumably you can be
[also] doing that with new acts.
In this case, the network’s lack of commitment to “supporting” the George Michael album without hearing a suitable lead single forced the record company to reconsider not only the order of songs released as singles but also which songs would be included on the album. Radio’s feedback overrode the decision of the artist, his management, and the record company, but probably contributed to the success of the album, which debuted at Number 1 in the UK album sales charts. This head of music is correct in reading the George Michael example as an illustration of the power of radio to influence the sounds of popular music that are made commercially available. What is perhaps more significant is his point that this influence is likely to be even more apparent if a plugger approaches a radio station with an unknown new artist.
The power of radio to affect record company processes extends to A&R signing policy, and to very early sound production decisions. Sarita Jagpal at Radio 1 says:
[Labels] do ask [what kind of things are we interested in]. Often they’ll come early, occasionally even before [artists] have been signed. We might get asked, “what do you think of [whoever]?” There have been a few bands recently [ . . . ] that there’s been big money dished out for. And before all that you do get [record companies] coming in to ask [what we think]. We’ll often get albums quite early and [record companies] want feedback on what we think should be the next single or what we think the strongest tracks are on an album. Often with dance records we’ll get asked whether or not the radio edit’s right, or what they should do to change it. We often get told that we are A&R for the record industry. Again that’s partly what we’re here for. With the record industry it isn’t just them coming in to plug a record for the playlist, it’s a much bigger relationship than that.
Radio 1’s influence on the sound of commercially released popular music thus extends far beyond accepting or rejecting final versions of singles at playlist meetings. Jagpal suggests that the record industry actively seeks advice from Radio 1 on sounds, styles, or artists that would be most likely to be playlisted. Any record label interested in signing a new, contemporary artist is likely to have an interest in first assessing the chances of Radio 1 supporting that artist. Jagpal’s point about the upfront cost of signing bands (particularly as the result of a “bidding war” between competing labels) helps to explain record company determination to exploit every possible strategy to ensure a return on that investment. Jagpal, like her commercial sector head of music counterpart, is approached early in the album release cycle to advise on choice and release order of singles. Similarly, she is able to exert influence on the sounds of dance music singles by offering feedback on which mix is most likely to be playlisted.
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The notion of different mixes of tracks is well understood in dance music culture, but it is rarely discussed in mainstream rock and pop. Decisions on final release mixes are often deferred until there has been an assessment of feedback from radio. A Londonbased commercial station head of music notes:
It happens a lot. I’ve never asked specifically for a different mix of a track. Quite often the record companies will come in with two or three versions of [a song]— there might be a track with no rap, or track with rap, or one with the guitars turned down slightly. At the end of the day, if it’s a great song, it’s a great song. There was a
Nickelback example . . . they came in with one where they’d pulled the guitars back in the mix and we actually went with the original. It was just a better song, it had much better energy in it.
This radio programmer clearly does not perceive the record company strategy of offering alternative mixes as one which will ultimately affect his decision to playlist a song. Yet the presence of alternative versions of the same song, each subtly different, increases the chances of the sound of a record matching a music programmer’s notion of what will fit the station’s brand. There is something of the authenticist in his point about going with the “original” version of the Nickelback song and this reflects an ideological position common in rock and pop which privileges particular recordings and mixes of songs as “definitive” versions.14 This point is underlined by the reference to the notion of the “great song,” although there is ambiguity about whether it is the song or the mix of the song that is actually “great.”
A northern English head of music has a slightly different perspective on the question of the Nickelback single. He says:
[In the United States] record labels, A&R departments, and even artists are very radio savvy. They do different mixes for different [radio] formats, y’know, with the guitars down, or the drums up, or whatever. Quite often, what we find is that if it’s an
American act [we] ask for the “Gold Mix” from America . . . .Nickelback’s “How You
Remind Me” is a good example of that.15 [Nickelback’s record label] Roadrunner were punting the “rock” mix in the UK and somebody said to them, “Is there an A/C
[Adult Contemporary] mix?” And there was, in America. And it was just that it was a very simple switching of one of the heavier guitars in the mix to an acoustic guitar. It became a massive radio hit, because it just opened up the scope of that song to softer, older radio stations. The texture changes—it’s in the mix, in the production. And yes, that often happens.
This radio programmer’s target demographic is described as one that prefers “softer, older radio stations” and the adult-contemporary version of the Nickelback single was, in his judgment, more suited to the sound of his network. It is significant that he sees the US record industry as particularly sensitive to the requirements of radio and that it is prepared to make various different versions of the same song available to appeal to different radio formats. The implication is that this process is not yet so developed in the UK and that there may still be in British pop and rock culture more
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of a sense of a single “definitive” version of a song. Nevertheless the impact that radio can have on the sound of records, or the “texture” to which the head of music refers, is clear and the willingness to modify or remix sounds on a specific recording can go as far back up the chain of production as the artists themselves.
This raises questions for music fans who may assume that the record they hear on the radio, a version of which they may at some point buy, is the result of an idealized, uncorrupted artistic vision. I am less interested here, however, in this challenge to rock ideologies of authenticity and more in the overall effect on the sounds of commercially released popular music. The Nickelback example demonstrates the ability of mainstream music radio, with the co-operation of the record industry, to make decisions not only on the sounds of individual records but on the texture of popular music as it is consumed through music radio.
The same northern English head of music suggests that in the United States in particular there are artists who are happy to have multiple versions of their music made available for different promotional purposes. This practice, though, is far from universal. He says:
It all depends on the genre the act is in. Y’know, no-one’s gonna tell Thom Yorke [of
Radiohead] that he’s gonna [have to] do an edit. [On the other hand] I have examples of artists that don’t know the record company has edited the tracks, and of course radio stations do their own edits constantly. [There are] great examples of
[other networks] really butchering songs to make them fit a two minute, hook-filled version of the song, using Pro-Tools. Even we do that—probably our biggest edit would be raps—we’ll take the rap out, just because we know that our target audience doesn’t have an ounce of “bling” in them. For them it can be a bit of a turn off, so admittedly we try and smooth the aesthetic of the song.
Radiohead are a good example of a band whose commercial success gives them the social and cultural capital to maintain levels of artistic autonomy (or at least to appear to maintain artistic autonomy) to the point where it would be unlikely that they would be asked to provide a radio edit. According to this head of music, less successful artists will have had edited versions made of their songs without their knowledge by their record company. Radio stations also often make edits, but he makes the distinction between “smoothing the aesthetic” of a record (at his network) and “butchering songs”
(at other networks) to strip them of non-hook content. The head of music of a UK modern rock station understands the role of pluggers as one in which they have to anticipate radio station reactions to new releases. He says:
It’s their job to know in advance what radio stations are going to say, and what they’ll be scared off by. Mainstream radio is very, very safe, so anything they can do to make people less scared of a rock record is going to help . . . .I’ve sat and watched other heads of music say, “It would be a great record if you just take that middle bit out.” I think that’s quite a hard thing to bring back to a band.
The head of music for this modern rock station shows sympathy for pluggers whose job it is to pass on music radio feedback to bands or management, but he also
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positions his station as not mainstream (despite its success in ratings terms). This suggests that he has a “rock,” authenticist ideological position on the integrity of records as artistic/cultural products—elsewhere in my interview with him he refers to himself as a music fan who enjoys going to live rock shows.
Summary and Conclusion
I have argued in this article that the ability of music radio to profoundly influence the sounds of mainstream popular music extends beyond previous characterizations of the radio/record industry relationship as “symbiotic.” The relationship is complex and dynamic, and mediated through the socio-cultural interaction between key cultural intermediaries—the record industry plugger and the music radio programmer. The dominance of music radio in this relationship has had (and continues to have) farreaching consequences for the cultural production of popular music.
My four key arguments, derived from primary interview material and participant observation, are, first, that payment of performance royalties by the radio industry to the record industry tends to encourage major labels to produce records that meet music radio programmer perceptions of what will sound good on their networks. If payments are predicated on listening figures, it is in the interests of the record industry in general to maintain a successful music radio industry, and in the interests of specific companies to out-compete their rival labels in pursuit of playlist places.
Second, the over-supply of new records and the small number of new playlist slots in any successful mainstream radio station (BBC or commercial sector) underwrites the power of music radio programmers to exert pressure on pluggers to bring them records which meet a radio station’s demand for “appropriate” new music. Third, in the UK, the dominant presence of the BBC in the music radio market has allowed its national pop music networks (Radio 1 and Radio 2) actively to participate in the cultural production of popular music by the record industry. Fourth and finally, music radio (both BBC and commercial sector) has the power to influence (directly and indirectly) specific practices normally assumed to be the exclusive responsibility of the record industry. These may include decisions on: signing and developing new artists; whether or not a specific song will be commercially released as a single; the chronological order of release of singles from albums; the inclusion, or otherwise, of a song on an album; choice of single mixes for commercial release; edits of specific songs for duration or musical content (either requested by radio stations, or performed by radio stations with or without explicit approval from artist or record company). Overall, then, my central argument is that popular music on daytime music radio is pre-formed or re-formed to meet the anticipated or expressed demands of music radio programmers, and, while radio continues to be central to record industry promotional strategies, the requirements of music radio (as mediated by pluggers and programmers) will shape the sounds of popular music. Music radio occupies a cultural space which is neither entirely distinct from the record industry nor a part of
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the record industry. Rather it exists simultaneously as a mediator, as a cultural product, and as a cultural producer, without which it is rather difficult to imagine commercial popular music culture as it emerged in the 20th century.
It is interesting that the growth of alternative channels offering access to music
(YouTube, Last.FM, and so on) has not so far damaged overall radio listening in the UK, though there is some evidence of a decline in young audiences.16 The figures suggest, though, that those younger listeners seem to return to radio as they grow a little older. New digital distribution channels (primarily through live and on-demand internet streams) seem to have helped sustain radio’s very high listening, offering greater flexibility and the increased opportunity to integrate radio into work and leisure routines (through delivery on, for example, smart phones). It is perhaps ironic that those same technologies are regarded by the record industry as damaging to their revenue streams and undermining their longestablished control over production and distribution of popular music. One might speculate that since the late 1990s digital distribution (legal and otherwise) of popular music has, in this peculiar relationship, strengthened the position of radio and weakened that of the record industry. Certainly technological developments suggest the need for continued monitoring of the relationship between the radio and record industries.
Notes
[1] UK radio ratings organization RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) in the second quarter of 2010 reported that overall adult radio listening was 91% of the total available potential audience aged 15 or older. RAJAR is the independent UK ratings organisation, jointly funded by the BBC and the commercial radio sector.
[2] In this research I refer to “the record industry” as distinct from other sectors of the music industry (the live music industry or music retailing, for example). I also use the term “record” to denote a music recording made commercially available in any contemporary format (vinyl,
CD, downloadable digital file formats such as MP3 or AAC) or historically significant formats, such as analogue compact cassette.
[3] Research interview in 2005 with Kim MacNally, Research Manager, BBC Radio 2 and 6Music.
[4] It is perhaps ironic that Spitzer himself became the focus of a sex scandal and federal investigation in 2008 (Nasaw).
[5] A good example of research that works with the symbiosis model of the radio/music industry relationship is Malm and Wallis. For examples of interesting work on US music radio programming (work which does not directly address the plugger/programmer relationship), see Rothenbuhler and McCourt, Ahlkvist, and Ahlkvist and Faulkner.
[6] It might be argued that what I mean here is in fact only commercially released popular music.
This is in part true. It would, however, be difficult to argue that popular music making as far down as the bedroom guitarist is not influenced by commercially recorded and released popular music, regardless of whether or not that local, non-commercial popular production is ever heard by any audience.
[7] In record promotions the term “regions” denotes anywhere in the UK that is not London. In business terms at least this has a certain logic—with a population of around 7.56 million
(BBC News “‘Big Rise’”) London is bigger than Scotland (5.2 million) or Wales (3 million)
(BBC News “Scotland’s Population”; BBC Wales).
[8] For more on the BBC arguments around popular music and public service, see Hendy.
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[9] An example of qualitative data is the BBC’s Appreciation Index (AI), which uses interviews and focus groups to try to assess the extent to which listeners engage with and enjoy individual programs, program strands, or presenters (BBC Trust 10).
[10] Or, as the BBC put it in the mid-1980s, “ratings by day, reputation by night” (Hendy 744).
[11] It is also true that the long-term financial status of the BBC is predicated on arguments about public service in which ratings are a significant element.
[12] As argued by Negus (Producing Pop, “Plugging and Programming”).
[13] British Phonographic Industry (BPI) figures show total value of physical sales (dominated by
CDs) of £740 million in 2009 (Clark).
[14] Alternative mixes and versions of the same song by the same artist have been around since the late 1960s, originating in Jamaica’s “version” culture in which many mixes or versions of the same song were released to maximize return on the investment in the original recording
(Best). Twelve-inch mixes and remixes have been part of dance music culture since the early
1970s development of hip hop, and continue to be so (Ogg and Upshal). Rock, however, has never really abandoned the notion of the definitive recording, despite the late-1980s/early1990s indie-dance crossover (largely wiped out by authenticist styles like grunge and
Britpop).
[15] Nickelback is in fact a Canadian band, but the point is still relevant.
[16] RAJAR (2010)
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Notes on Contributor
J. Mark Percival is Programme Leader for Media in the School of Arts and Social
Sciences at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His PhD thesis examined the relationship between radio and the record industry. He has written about Scottish indie music production, popular music and national identity, and on mediation of pop. His current projects include new work on public radio and pop music cultures and on discourses of loudness in live music. E-mail: mpercival@qmu.ac.uk
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