Anatomy of a Black Radio Merger

A Radio Merger in New York Reflects a Shifting Industry

by Ben Sisario | New York Times

On its surface, the merger last week of WRKS and WBLS, longtime rivals in the R&B radio format in New York, was business as usual for the broadcast industry. Two struggling competitors combined operations, and a deep-pocketed third party — Disney — came along to lease the leftover frequency.

But radio executives and analysts said the deal also reflected a broader trend in the business that has taken a toll on black and other minority stations. Since the introduction five years ago of a new technology for tracking audiences, many such broadcasters have experienced shrinking numbers, forcing radio companies to consolidate stations or switch to general-audience formats.

Arbitron, the standard radio ratings service, has long had sample audiences record their listening in a diary. In 2007, it began using the Portable People Meter, or P.P.M., a small electronic device that tracks radio signals, offering broadcasters far more precise listening data.

The technology, now used in 48 markets, has already had significant effects — for instance, increasing ratings for news and oldies stations. But many black stations have suffered under the new scheme, including WRKS, known as Kiss-FM, (98.7 FM) and WBLS (107.5 FM). While both were once ranked near the top of their desired demographic — adults ages 25 to 54 — since P.P.M.’s arrival they have slipped to between sixth and 11th place, said Jeff Smulyan, chief executive of WRKS’s parent, Emmis Communications.

“The recent economic downturn has affected the profitability of everyone in radio,” Mr. Smulyan wrote in an e-mail, “but the decline has been much more pronounced in adult African-American targeted stations, largely because of the impact of P.P.M.”

The deal to merge Kiss-FM and WBLS involves several broadcasters. Emmis sold Kiss’s intellectual property for $10 million to YMF Media, an investment group that is taking over WBLS. Disney, eager to expand its ESPN franchise, will lease Kiss’s old frequency for 12 years, paying a fee that starts at $8.4 million and increases 3.5 percent each year. The changes were scheduled to take effect at midnight on Monday.

Political figures, broadcasters and other industry observers have expressed concern over how the loss of stations will affect minority communities.

“I am saddened that an important black voice is going silent in New York City, especially during this important election year,” Tom Joyner, the syndicated talk-show host, said in a statement on Friday. “Although social media currently gets a lot of credit and rightfully so, nothing can replace the role black radio plays in empowering, informing and entertaining black people.” Mr. Joyner’s show was on Kiss-FM in New York but will not be on WBLS.

Last year, Radio One, which owns 53 stations, mostly in so-called urban formats — hip-hop, R&B, gospel and other genres popular with black audiences — changed stations in Houston, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, from black to more general-interest formats, largely because of P.P.M. results, said Alfred C. Liggins III, the chief executive.

In response to complaints that P.P.M. undercounted minority listeners, Arbitron has settled lawsuits in New York and California, and pledged to improve its methods to find diverse sample audiences. But the company also stood by the accuracy of its ratings.

“Arbitron’s point of view is that P.P.M. is a more reliable and granular look at the marketplace,” Thomas Mocarsky, a spokesman, said on Friday. “Unlike the diary, which depended on recall, P.P.M. records what people are actually exposed to.”

Whether Arbitron’s new system will result in more changes for black stations is unclear. Emmis still owns WQHT-FM, (97.1) known as Hot 97, a top hip-hop station in New York, and Mr. Smulyan, the chief executive, said it had no plans to sell. Paul Heine, a senior editor at the trade publication Inside Radio, noted that some urban stations had been thriving under the system.

“There are a number of cities where we have two well-performing urban stations,” Mr. Heine said. “I don’t know if there’s going to be a domino effect.”

The companies behind WRKS and WBLS have also had troubles beyond simple ratings. Inner City Broadcasting, the previous owner of WBLS, went bankrupt last year. (YMF, the company buying it, is a new investment group including Ron Burkle and Magic Johnson.) WRKS’s revenue fell 32 percent in the last three years, according to a recent regulatory filing by Emmis Communications, and Mr. Smulyan said the station’s profit had fallen 90 percent.

Emmis, which has sold off a number of stations as it struggles with a heavy debt load, said its deal in New York to sell Kiss-FM and lease 98.7 to Disney was worth at least $96 million, and that it would help stabilize its balance sheet.

Some broadcasters rued the loss of black stations and the reduction of services to black communities that would result, but said the change had simply become an inevitable part of business.

“The economics of this business have changed so drastically,” said Mr. Liggins, of Radio One. “It is a shame. But something’s got to give.” 

Left of Black S2:E27 | ‘Black Radio,’ Philly Soul & Hip-Hop with Robert Glasper Experiment Bassist Derrick Hodge

Left of Black S2:E27 | April 9, 2012

‘Black Radio,’ Philly Soul & Hip-Hop with Robert Glasper Experiment Bassist Derrick Hodge

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in person by Philadelphia’s own Derrick Hodge, bassist for the Robert Glasper Experiment and longtime musical director for R&B artist Maxwell at the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies.  Hodge discusses working as a musician in high school with few resources, and recounts his experiences working with various artists’ including Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, J-Dilla, Common, and Kanye West.  Hodge’s talks about his biggest influences as a musician, including that of the Philadelphia sound, and the significance of the Experiment’s new recording Black Radio.  Hodge may be most well known, among Hip-hop fans, for the bass solo that open Common’s “Be.”

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U

‘Black Radio’ and the State of Contemporary Black Music on the April 9th Left of Black

Bassist Derrick Hodge on the far left

‘Black Radio’ and the State of Contemporary Black Music on the April 9^th Left of Black

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in person by Philadelphia’s own Derrick Hodge, bassist for the Robert Glasper Experiment and longtime musical director for R&B artist Maxwell at the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Hodge discusses working as a musician in high school with few resources, and recounts his experiences working with various artists’ including Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Common, Kanye West, and J-Dilla.  Hodge’s talks about his biggest influences as a musician, including that of the Philadelphia sound, and the significance of the Experiment’s new recording Black Radio.  Hodge may be most well known, among Hip-hop fans, for the bass solo that open Common’s “Be.”

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Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/left-of-black. Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive. 

Left of Blackis recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Follow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

Follow Derrick Hodge on Twitter: @DerrickHodge

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Liberating ‘Black Radio’: The Robert Glasper Experiment

Liberating ‘Black Radio’:  The Robert Glasper Experiment

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

As a medium, Black Radio was historically critical to the Black freedom struggle.  The infusion of Black thought and musical expression onto the radio airwaves, particularly after Memphis’s WDIA, broke the color barrier and began programming Black music 24-7 had dramatic impact. In this sense Black Radio literally helped shape decades of American culture and politics, whether it was Robert Williams, in exile, programming his “Radio Free Dixie”  show from Havana, Cuba in the early 1960s, young White kids consuming Ruth Brown, Big Mama Thornton, or Little Willie John as if it was contraband, or Black owned radio stations opening up its studios to the Civil Rights movement.  In its most classic forms, Black Radio, was charged with expanding the minds and listening taste of its core audiences, recalling WBLS’ well known adage (circa 1972) that it was “The Total Black Experience in Sound.”

One would be hard-pressed to think of contemporary Black radio in such a context, even with an entity like Radio One and personalities like Michael Baisden and Tom Joyner achieving unprecedented national visibility.  Nearly two decades ago, The Family Stand more aptly described Black radio as “plantation radio” or “Knee-grow” radio as Soul-Patrol co-founder Bob Davis often describes mainstream Black media. Indeed Public Enemy even gave instructions on “How to Kill a Radio Consultant.” Thus it is hard not to think of pianist Robert Glasper’s compelling new recording Black Radio (with the Robert Glasper Experiment) as anything other than a major intervention.

Growing up in New York City, I was fortunate to be exposed to legendary radio jocks such as Hal Jackson, Vaughn Harper, Vy Higginson, Jerry Bledsoe, Chuck Leonard, Lamar Renee and Frankie Crocker. I didn’t just tune in to listen to music, but the radio—Black radio—served as a learning lab; Their playlists served as the very foundation for, not only my love of music, but my vocation as a scholar and critic of Black music.  I imagine that Robert Glasper might have similar memories of Black radio.

The genius of Glasper’s new recording is its willingness to expand the range of what we consider Black music and what Black radio might consider as appropriate for Black or so-called “Urban” audiences.  Thus Glasper’s decision to cover tracks as wide-ranging as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (with auto-tune in tow), Mongo Santamaria’s  “Afro Blue” (with lyrics from Oscar Brown, Jr.), Sade’s “Cherish the Day” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” is not as far-fetched as it seems; These are the sounds of a Cosmopolitan Blackness, that Black radio, and Black artists, particularly given their travels, have historically been on the cutting edge of. Equally cosmopolitan is Glasper’s collection of collaborators. 

Though most well known as a jazz pianist, Glasper has long frayed the edges of the pristine space that “serious” Jazz currently inhabits in the American imagination.  Like his invocation of Black Radio, the project is a reminder Jazz was once a popular form within Black communities—listened to alongside Motown, Doo-Wop, and southern Soul in ways that rarely raised an eyebrow.  Glasper is part of a nearly two generation effort—think about the work Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, the late Keith “Guru” Elam and Branford Marsalis (Buckshot LeFonque)—to re-introduce Jazz as a vital popular sound, and not as a museum art that is neither accessible or affordable to the very communities responsible for its creation (not naming no names…Wynton).

Like his older Texas peer trumpeter Roy Hargrove, Glasper likely had little choice but to hear the burgeoning rhythms of Hip-hop, and has sought to cultivate creative spaces that acknowledge such influence.  Glasper have done so on all of his major label releases, including 2009’s Double-Booked, which was premised on the idea that Glasper’s trio was booked to perform at a club with Terence Blanchard, at the same time that Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson wanted the Robert Glasper Experiment to jam with The Roots.   Black Radio is the first Glasper recording that grounds his music in an expansive context of contemporary R&B and Hip-hop, as opposed to bringing those genres into a more traditional jazz context

Erykah Badu, sounds perfectly at home singing “Afro-Blue,” much the way Dianne Reeves was when she recorded it twenty years ago, and Abbey Lincoln was more than fifty years ago when she recorded those original Oscar Brown, Jr. lyrics.  The still underrated and vastly overlooked Stokely Williams, long-time lead of Mint Condition, shines on the trippy “Why Do We Try.”  The inclusion of Williams also highlight’s Glasper’s desire to work with artists, generally in high regard for their artistry—like  Lalah Hathaway and Meshell Ndegeocello—but  who are often not afforded the same level of visibility as some of their more traditional R&B peers.  To this point, both Hathaway and Ndegeocello released exceptional recordings last year, Where It All Begins and Weather respectively, that were largely ignored by so-called Black Radio.

Glasper’s longtime collaborator Bilal Oliver, shows up on two tracks “Letter to Hermione” and the affecting “Always Shine,” which also features Lupe Fiasco.  As Glasper recently told the New York Times, he takes great pride in the fact that he was in the studio when the late James Yancey—J-Dilla—created the track “Reminisce” from Oliver’s  stellar debut First Born Second. 

The title track, featuring Yasiin Bey (the rebranded Mos Def) speaks volumes about Glasper’s intents to pursue what some might call, “post-genre” Black music; a term that would strike older listeners as an oxymoron.  Indeed scholar and musician Guthrie Ramsey, whose own release The Colored Waiting Room shares Glasper’s “post-genre” sensibilities, perhaps sums up the project best, writing that Black Radio “plays with sonic, social, and iconic symbols in a way that recalibrates calcified, boring ideas about genre and turns them on their head, all with a good sense of funky adventure.”

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Robert Glasper: "Black Radio" feat Yasiin Bey (video)

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Real Music Is Crash protected. Black Radio, the new album from Robert Glasper Experiment in stores now.