Devils' Background?

[Torsten]

Sometimes I wonder how exactly the music industry works. I mean, here in Germany all the private radio stations play pop music all day long and it seems that they use a very limited number of current "hit singles" many of which pretty much sound the same. On the other hand they seem to ignore more solid materials. For example, none of the songs on Billy Idol's latest album Devil's Background has ever made into the German single charts. I find that this album is Billy Idol's best one.

So can you explain how those radio stations select the music they play?

Many thanks,
Torsten
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[Jamie (K)]

This is a complaint in the US music industry also, except that here we have 25, 50 or even 100 radio stations in the same city that all cater to a specific clientele. So in my city we have several types of rock stations, one for people whose heads are stuck somewhere around 1975, one for "alternative" rock, etc. There's also a country station that plays contemporary music in that genre and one that mixes old country "classics" in with the new music. We have a station that plays various ethnic shows all day, such as a Polish one in the early morning, then a Serbian one, then a Hindi one, etc., so you can hear all the latest tunes from Bollywood musicals every Saturday.

The only thing we're missing is a station that plays that type of European pop that's done by a singer and one other guy playing on seven or eight overlaid synthesizer tracks, that thumps loudly and contains one line of easy English that people everywhere can understand and remember.

I don't know how it works in Germany, but in the US each station (if it is operated locally) or each network (if it is operated centrally) has a program director whose job it is to choose the playlist for each station or all the stations of that format. What they want to play, and what the record companies are pushing, is pretty much what you get. Often this list is partially generated by computer.

As the broadcasting and entertainment industries in the US have consolidated more, this system has caused some problems. Before the 1980s it was possible for an American musical group to succeed from anywhere in the country. There were very successful popular music scenes in Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, for example, and you could actually hear a song on the radio and be able to tell where it was recorded. This is because the playlists were all locally determined and varied from region to region. Now whatever is recorded and whatever is played on the radio pretty is much determined in LA, or also in Nashville in the case of country music, and it's almost impossible even for a really good local group to get on the radio in their own home town, let alone nationally, if they don't come to the attention of people in LA. (This is why so many American songs are ABOUT Los Angeles, which gets annoying to the rest of us after a while.)

Even with so many different kinds of stations, it's been noted in the broadcasting industry that the repetitive sameness of the playlists bores people, so now there are stations that say they "play everything". You might hear a heavy metal song, then the next one might be Frank Sinatra, followed by some pop song, then some light classical music, etc. Interestingly, some of these wildly eclectic playlists are also generated by computer.