“Agification” is not a word. If you try to Google it, this blog post may pop up, but that’s it.
Search engines will probably think you mean to look for “magnification,” and will direct you there.
Nope, “agificaiton” is not a word…but perhaps it should be. I would define it as a trend signifying something that was once fresh and mainstream is now getting older. This AARPing process is becoming especially common in pop culture these days. It is most associated with nostalgia, a deep-rooted psychological force I’m more than familiar with as a result of my launch of the Classic Rock format on FM radio back in the 80’s.
Thanks to the power of the music, the trend has permeated other cultural institutions, especially TV and films. The latest episode of the “Plain English” podcast hosted by Derek Thompson maps out this trend with special guest Ted Gioia, who wrote an article you read about here: “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” That post titled “Are Rumors About The Death Of New Music Greatly Exaggerated?” was published late in January, based on an article Ted wrote in The Atlantic.
These are two bright dudes of different generations – Thompson is a Millennial while Gioia is on the younger edge of the Baby Boom – intelligently talking music and pop culture in our anomalous times.
The through-line of all this is the continuing theme that old is trumping new. It’s the case with the movie industry where the big story of the year is likely to be the NEW “Top Gun” movie, starring Tom Cruise who turned 60 years-old last month. As Gioia points out in the podcast, films are dominated by sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and spinoffs. There’s simply more “box office” with the tried and true.
But it’s the music industry where nostalgia rules. And it’s been that way for many years now. There are fewer big hits, outside of artists like Taylor Swift, Adele, and Bad Bunny. That prompted this recent headline from the Wall Street Journal:
“Beyoncé Releases Album ‘Renaissance’: Can She Break the New Music Curse?”
Journalist Neil Shah write about the struggles to produce hits, even in the Pop music genre, where they were once abundant. But a curse?
When you think about how the music industry is investing its capital, it’s almost all skewing old. Thompson and Gioia discuss the $5 billion that’s been spent on classic artists’ catalogues – a belief in the power of old money and old music.
And of course, there’s considerably fewer dollars being allocated to new music and emerging artists. Why? The money’s just not there. Once sales of physical music took the back seat to “all you can eat” $10 a month streaming platforms, the once lofty profits that breaking artists could generate are a thing of the past.
As Gioia suggests, it’s the old “Deep Throat” adage:
“Follow the money.”
But it runs deeper than that because the retreat to nostalgia is also about fiscal safety. Gioia aptly refers to it as “the risk aversion doom loop” (let’s call it “RADL” for short). There’s a palpable fear of innovation when you can simply make “Jurassic World Dominion” or buy Stevie Nicks’ catalog of big hits, and reap huge profits.
And that bring us to broadcast radio, where these same trends hold up very well. due in large part to the aforementioned “RADL” that defines an industry wide fear of rolling the dice.
The end result is an industry that’s continually aging, like it or not. Every year we roll out Techsurvey where the average age ticks older with each passing year. It’s now just south of 56 years-OLD.
When stakeholder stations complain about why their samples skew so old, I offer up this scientific fact:
That’s who’s in your database. That’s your core audience.
So, I felt validated when I saw Edison’s info chart from their most recent “Share of Ear” study. You probably saw coverage of it earlier this week. The infographic below shows the median age of those who use radio, podcasts, and streaming point. And then the median age where there’s as much time-spent listening above as there is below.
As Larry Rosin told me, there is still lots of radio listening among younger consumers. But there’s not a lot of engagement – or “stickiness.” Broadcast radio’s median age is a very ripe 46 years-old. That places it right in the 45-54 cell – the upper-third of the coveted 25-54 year-old “must have” demographic.
And the median by TSL is a lofty 51 year-old – two whole decades older than for streaming audio and well north of podcasting’s TSL median.
After conducting more than 100 focus groups and 1-on-1’s via Zoom in 2020-21, I firmly believe the rush to nostalgia accelerated during COVID. People found their comfort in the familiar and the comfortable, whether it was watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or listening to “Dark Side of the Moon.”
For broadcast radio, these numbers aren’t likely to turn around. Like so many other pop culture trends, radio listening is like a slow moving locomotive, heading inexorably older.Now, if you’re a radio broadcater, and you buy into Gioia’s advice to chase the moolah, you jump on the age train and ride it out. Problem is, radio simply has no demonstrated ability it can monetize 35-64 year-olds, much less any listener who has turned 55. As meter watchers in PPM markets will sadly tell you, once a panelist celebrates that 55th birthday, they may as well have moved into a nursing home. They are not the least bit accretive to radio revenue.
It is digital revenue that floats their boats now. And the Edison data illustrates what that looks like. In the earnings calls that we’ve seen covered in the past week or so, radio’s CEOs have pointed to their growing digital revenue.
Townsquare has led the charge here, having heard the digital alarm before the others. Today, radio’s interpretation of “follow the money” is to develop digital assets – websites, apps, SEO, podcasts, streams. If they could monetize ringtones at this point and count it as digital revenue, they would.
So, does that mean radio should give up the ghost, and jump on the bandwagon as the medium heads for those gated retirement communities? In the same way that Gioia and Thompson look at the folly of record labels placing their chips on artist catalogs rather than developing new artists and seeking out new genres, radio’s leadership might benefit from an analysis of the listening trends above.
While Boomers may have the fattest wallets – for now – Gen Z is a force to be reckoned with both by size and by their pop culture influence. Mature digital brands like Facebook now struggle to compete with the bite-size offerings on TikTok, but they are still well-positioned for a future that isn’t all that far away. Most experts believe that by 2030, the hot spot will have gravitated away from Boomers, and will firmly be centered in the Gen Z zone.
Larry Rosin put it this way:
“When radio station sales departments meet, they talk about ‘top of the funnel’ development, creating awareness in the marketplace and identifying new leads. And
yet, American radio stations (and the radio industry as a whole) engage in very little such ‘sales’ development when it comes to new listeners. There is no outreach to high schools or colleges, or even strategies for attracting young adults. In that radio had a functional monopoly for so many decades, radio people learned how to fight between stations for newer listeners as they came along, because they could just depend on them coming along.
But the ‘muscles’ for pushing new people into radio’s funnel were barely developed. Radio stations, and the radio industry, need to understand that they are in a brutal competition for new listeners entering the pipeline. If ‘radio’ doesn’t fully enter this competition, it can probably expect the average age of its listeners and listening to continue to get older and older, to the point where the ‘average’ listener is outside of the hallowed age 25-54 sales demographic.”
And where will radio be then?
So, let’s return to that “risk aversion doom loop” in light of the data we’re all staring at. For the moment, it may seem easier to stay put, rather than experiment with
new formats whose turrets are aimed at the under 30 set.
But the radio “cheese room” (see Spencer Johnson’s brilliant book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” for reference) is beginning to take on an odor that is rapidly losing its appeal. Some things simply don’t get better with age.
Sequels, reboots, cover songs, and tribute bands will only get us so far.
The agification of radio marches on, unless we actively try to stop it.
Thanks to Larry Rosin for the data and the perspective.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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Hugely insightful and stimulating. Imagine what 45-74 looks & $ounds like. 1220watx.com
This is the first I’ve heard of THAT demo. Now I don’t feel so old.
Well, this isn’t hopeful, even if it’s truthful.
Classic hits is the format I work in, and the 80s are our center lane now. It’s the music I grew up with, and I’m in my 50s.
Makes me wonder if radio will even make it to the point where the 90s are the in the center.
I have always found it amusing that I grew up with the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s but, because of the direction my career went, I have a greater affinity for the 1980s. (No wonder that’s what I program in my own Classic Hits format.)
It’s been my view that CH is never going to be able to embrace the 90s as it has the 80s, simply because of the fragmentation of CHR after 1989. And, of course, we have been battling with Madison Avenue about whether or not listeners over the age of 54 are worth marketing to. Combining both of those thoughts, I think digital is getting all of the attention because the radio audience is still perceived as “not worth the effort to advertise to”. Now combine that conclusion with the fact that more and more of the younger would-be audience are accessing their music on their smartphones than on the air, and I have a different “I wonder” …
I wonder if CHR will make it to the 2030s.
That said, I think both the Classic Hits and Classic Rock formats will outlive the current-based formats. They’re still inexplicably attracting some younger listeners and it’s paradoxically because we can’t easily move on to the 90s.
San Diego legend Gene Knight does a lot of the tracks for my syndicated format, and he shared something from his last full-time gig which I put on my website, because it’s so telling. I share it with you all, because Gene said I could post it anywhere I like, with attribution:
“All the time we got winners and other listener responses at KXSN, from people who were born in the 80s. Like, they were just two years old when a lot of the songs that we played were currents. This happened so frequently, that I started asking, in a nice and curious way, why they liked our music. This response came back over and over again … The 80s, that’s when all the good music came out!”
Now we need to get the agencies — and more importantly, their clients — to understand this.
(Yeah, I know, I’m long-winded. But it’s Friday, BDS has been down all week so I can’t get my real work done, and this is an issue I’ve been passionate about for years. Mea culpa for taking so much space, Fred.)
K.M.
It’s purely anecdotal, but I’ve received compliments from young adults in their 20s on the music on my station. One comment really stuck with me: “This may be my parent’s music, but I like it…there’s something about it you don’t get with current stuff.”
A fellow PD who’s worked with 80s and classic hits stations for almost two decades told me that he remembers when other PDs said the 80s would never become the core of the CH format. Now, here we are.
Will it happen with the 90s? I don’t know.
In my early days as APD at K-Earth 101, my goal was to weed the station from some of the junk we were playing. My boss, and some of the staffers believed the answer to our dilemma was to also include 80s hits that, frankly weren’t very mainstream in their day. Depeche Mode, Cure, Clash. AOR “hair bands” like Van Halen, Whitesnake… and as KROQ had succeeded with Rick Caroll, it was time for us to put those songs that hadn’t been on the radio back into rotation. Finding the right songs and playing them “to death” as we were accused of put us firmly at the top of the heap a year later. Find the hits, play ’em and make the listener happy. Pretty much a formula that worked in 1960-19 70-1980 and beyond.
It’s the basics, Dave. KRTH is an amazing station with a great history that has forged an impressive path to succcess.
K.M., this space is for you, it’s cheap, and there’s plenty of it. Thanks for commenting.
K.M. Richards is right that CHR’s fragmentation might make it initially difficult for a 90’s format to emerge, but radio programmers will find the combination of hits, secondaries, and “oh wow” songs to make it work. There’s a lot of interest in this decade as the Luminate data I blogged about shows. Thanks, Don.
Just in case, Mr. Rosin went into more detail in this recent item for the European-focused RedTech…
https://www.redtech.pro/the-cautionary-tale-of-radios-future
Also, I’ve been spending more time recently on the websites of several commercial broadcasters in western Europe–with many of them having numerous specialty streams, sophisticated and extensive Recently Played listings, upvoting and downvoting for songs, and/or official song previews or samples.
Off-hand, the best overall example of that might be some of the sites for what are now Bauer’s stations in Portugal (perhaps especially that of Classic Hits-formatted M80)–although the sites themselves are still housed on Media Capital’s broader IOL portal, and probably date back to when Prisa owned the entire group. At the very least, those sites have helped me discover a lot of great Rock-leaning Portuguese songs and artists dating back to the late ’70s.
Eric, thanks for this. And Larry’s piece in RedTech that you linked in your comment is a good read. Larry is diplomatic and clear-eyed about American radio in 2022 – and he’s right.
In three years, 18-54 is down 17% and 55+ is up 20%, or nearly 6% and 7% per year. This an existential problem that was easy to predict and is the reason I’ve long believed that radio’s strategy was to run out the clock, not revitalize. The average age is growing by more than one year per year – meaning radio isn’t even keeping the listeners it has, its losing them at the younger end.
I would love to see a research study on what % of those 18-54’s (by age cell) would come back to radio if it offered something different and more focused on people their age. That could be formatics, spot loads or ideally both. I’m seriously concerned that many of them have relegated radio to short car trips and radio is vital ship has pretty much sailed…If it hasn’t, there’s no time to waste.
I hope I’m wrong and it would be beyond awesome if radio would use their translators for experimentation, rather than to bonus as a means to bring in a buy at the lowest CPP in the market. Does anyone ever show these numbers to the people making decisions about radio and ask them what their plans are? Questions like, in 5 years, when radio’s median age will be something like 58 – with more than half of its audience having aged out of their ability to generate revenue (or in starker terms, useless), what will you do? In 10 it will be over 70, what then?
I obviously think about your last paragraph a lot. As James VanOsdol pointed out in aa Facebook, I’ve gotten good at pointing out icebergs, not as so great at working around them. If operators think it will all get fixed by launching podcasts or selling banner ads on websites, they’re in for a rude awakening. The mother ship needs a strategy, and you note, there are experimental outlets – translators, HD2, streams – where they could happen. Thanks, as always, Bob.
Some time ago, back in the mid-1980s, the primary focus of the stations I managed was on the youngest.
We went to schools, we brought artists to them to sign autographs, do meet and greets, do small concerts. But, in addition, we transmitted informative bulletins every 2 hours in which we talked about student activities, sporting and cultural events, and especially parties.
We even managed to create a network of school radio stations whom we supported with records, gifts and radio techniques.
In fact, I feel that at that time we were the true influencers of young people and our broadcasts had become a kind of social networks, many years before the arrival of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The commercialization was very attractive: all the advertisers of fashionable clothes, entertainment venues, concerts, bars, school supplies, fast food restaurants, sweets, chocolates and an infinity of products were fighting to advertise on the radio.
We did massive caravans, fashion shows and all kinds of events for the youth. These stations were fighting for the first place in the whole country, but, suddenly, the radio forgot that audience and preferred to focus on adults.
I don’t know if it’s too late to try again. Clearly, as you publish in your article, the younger segments no longer believe in radio.
But I suppose that there is an opportunity to continue making attractive, vibrant radio, close to people in other age segments. I hope so…
It’s open for debate whether it’s too late to bring teens back to “a radio.” But I will maintain they will check out music, talk, and information relevant to their lives and their interest if it can be simply accessed on platforms and gadgets they use. And I’m in full agreement with you final statement. It could be done if broadcasters invest the time, money and resources it will take to do it. Appreciate the comment, Tito.