DESPITE MTV'S BOOM, RADIO PICTURE IS BRIGHT David Hinckley - Daily News
Twenty-five years after MTV signed on the air with the Buggles' satiric "Video Killed the Radio Star," it's pretty obvious that didn't happen. Radio is a far bigger business today than on Aug. 1, 1981 - a multibillion-dollar industry increasingly run by national corporations.
On MTV itself, you're hard-pressed to find any videos at all, though its children, competitors and knockoffs play plenty.
What MTV did do is change the radio star, and not entirely for the worse.
MTV, says Sean Ross of Edison Media Research, helped spawn the mid-'80s golden age of top 40 by expanding the range of artists known to mainstream listeners.
"MTV is responsible for artists like Michael Jackson, Prince and Eddy Grant being played on rock radio," says Ross. "It helped New Wave get onto the radio. In the late '80s, it was part of the hip-hop explosion, though it was reluctant at first."
Ross also cautions that MTV didn't do this alone. "You could almost trace a Michael Jackson or Prince more to Frankie Crocker. But MTV was one more piece of reinforcement for a lot of records."
"MTV definitely affected radio," says morning co-host and program director Scott Shannon of WPLJ (95.5 FM), whose WHTZ was one of the golden-age top-40 stations in the '80s.
But "top 40 from the beginning was affected by a lot of things," Shannon points out. "It picked the cream of the crop from different places, and MTV was another influence that affected it. So were dance clubs, right around the same time."
Shannon says one subtle effect of MTV was bringing pop songs to the parents of its original audience, which was very young.
"We forget that when MTV started, most parents treated it like they treated rap," he says. "It was, 'Turn that noise down.' But if you heard a song enough times, you might start to think it wasn't so bad. Kind of like secondhand smoke."
That softening certainly didn't hurt a mainstream top-40 like Z100 in 1984.
MTV helped promote a generation of pop stars whose primary talent was cutting a flashy figure on camera rather than, say, singing. But record companies had already been marketing hunky teen idols like Fabian for years.
One star that's dimmed on radio since MTV, notes Ross, is the deejay who's also a music expert. While some remain, like Funkmaster Flex of WQHT (97.1 FM), stations today prefer their jocks to be pleasant hosts rather than music gurus.
But that process, too, was already under way in 1981, Ross says, and the dialing-down of the deejay has been driven less by MTV than by corporate cutbacks.
In any case, Ross suggests, radio and MTV became much more partners than adversaries. Nothing has replaced "radio's primacy as the place where most people learn about new music," he said.
Sirius Satellite Radio marks MTV's anniversary today at 10 a.m. with a special on its '80s channel featuring original veejays Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn.
AD TWIST: Listeners to WCBS-AM (880), WCBS-FM (101.1), WFNY (92.3 FM) and other CBS stations may have noticed that a few recent hours have been sponsored by a single advertiser.
The TD Banknorth deal is interesting to listeners because it cuts down on the number of ad spots per hour while also sounding a little less like traditional radio ads and a little more like the "underwriting" on public radio.
AROUND THE DIAL: Bob Fass returned to his early Thursday show on WBAI (99.5 FM) last week after a two-month break for medical problems. ... Opie and Anthony have been picked up in Chicago, where CBS' experiment with Rover as a replacement for Howard Stern didn't work out. ... WOR (710 AM) has put its 4-6 p.m. team of Ellis Henican and Lynne White into syndication. ... Anthony Cruz, formerly at WTJM, WWPR and WNEW, is producing the morning show for Freddie Colon in Denver. |