\nAlong with a playlist more heavily steeped in \u201990s alternative rock \u2014 including a promised bump in Minnesota acts such as Soul Asylum and the Replacements \u2014 KQ\u2019s corporate operators Cumulus Media announced the addition of new on-air personalities who will be familiar to listeners of other Twin Cities stations.<\/p>\n
Longtime 89.3 the Current midday jockey Jade Tittle and former Cities 97 host and music director Paul Fletcher have joined the remade KQRS staff, a clear attempt by Cumulus to pick up some of those competitors\u2019 audiences.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The classic rock crowd is angry.\u00a0 The 90s alt rock crowd is chanting “it’s about time”. <\/p>\n
Me?\u00a0 I’m surprised it took this long.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Here’s why.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like the (not remotely hypothetical) bar band in my example at the top, radio isn’t about music (or sports, or even conservative talk.\u00a0 Radio is a delivery system for advertising.\u00a0 Nothing more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Advertising focuses on people who have money – specifically, money to spend on an advertiser’s products.\u00a0 A station’s “format”, whether talk or sports or some genre of music, is pretty tightly associated with a demographic group that is in some way desirable to advertisers, and the products they sell.\u00a0 Whether pitching nightclubs to 20-somethings (KDWB in the ’90s) or lifestyle products to women from 25-40 (KS95) to stuff for harried moms (ChickTalk 107) to mental red meat for men 35+ (conservative talk), you can tell who the station is trying to reach by the products they’re trying to sell.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it gets to them via the emotions.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
One of the little secrets radio programmers know is that people form deep, lifelong, intense\u00a0<\/em>emotional bonds with the music that they were exposed to between, roughly, puberty and the time the brain stops growing – usually the mid-to-late 20s.\u00a0\u00a0 Doesn’t matter what the genre – the music of that part that you associate with that part of life when so much else about peoples personalities get formed, and they start noticing and getting noticed by the opposite sex, has an intense <\/em>emotional connection for them.\u00a0 More or less intense, maybe, but still, it’s a a powerful hook into a person’s psyche.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cClassic rock\u201c is music of the baby boom.\u00a0\u00a0 For the past fifty years, they’ve been the biggest, wealthiest demographic surge in history.\u00a0 And “classic rock” is the music of the people who were born between 1945 and sometime in the early ’60s.\u00a0 Who were entering puberty between the late ’60s and the mid-seventies.\u00a0 And whose brains became more or less fully formed between 1970 and 1980 or so.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And for most of the past 45 years or so, KQRS has prospered by cracking the emotional response of one of the biggest, wealthiest demographic groups in the area – white men (remember – mens and womens brains are different!) whose brains started forming in the mid-sixties, and pretty much switched to emotional, and thus musical, cruise control sometime during the George HW Bush administration.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The baby boom starts turning 80 this year. The younger ones start retiring. They don\u2019t have the money or the clout anymore. Advertisers are moving on.\u00a0 Which is the same reason the last of the Big Band and Beautiful Music stations (KLBB, WLTE, KMFY) left the air 30+ years ago, and why KOOL108 switched from Elvis and Carl Perkins to, well, the stuff KQRS was playing until two weeks ago; because their audiences aged out of the prime advertising years.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not about the music. It\u2019s about business.\u00a0 You gotta sell the beer.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the truisms of playing in a bar band (as I do) is that bar bands aren’t musicians.\u00a0 They are beer salesmen.\u00a0 And if you’re playing an American Legion in Anoka, and you bust out some Parliament or Sonic Youth, or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, you’ll make a few hipsters and fanboys happy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89476,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89473\/revisions\/89476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}