Jackie Greene got yelps and cheers even before the bar officially opened at the NON-COMMvention. (Photos: January Jones.)
Not just a way to win younger listeners
What Triple A is all about: music discovery
Noncommercial Triple A radio, the public radio format defined by eclectic, localized mixes of contemporary music, defies easy categorization.
Yet when its colorful band of some 250 practitioners gathered in Philadelphia for the eighth annual NON-COMMvention May 29-31 [2008], the something that unites them was immediately obvious — passion for discovering new performers with that electrifying combination of chops and charisma, and for sharing those discoveries with fellow music lovers.
“The beautiful thing about NON-COMM is — despite the fact that we’re in radio and we all have our egos — this is a community,” said Jon Hart, music and program director of KTBG in Warrensburg, Mo. “When you get these people together, there is a sharing that goes on — conversations that go into the wee hours about what you’re doing, how you’re doing and how to make it better. There’s a willingness to help and share and strengthen the format as a whole.”
According to NPR, the format is programmed full-time by just 33 noncommercial stations. But it is increasingly considered as a growth strategy for public radio, according to Erik Langner, acquisitions manager for Public Radio Capital, a nonprofit consulting group that helps put new pubradio signals on the air.
“As opportunities open up in various markets, station managers are asking us to model around how a Triple A format would do,” Langner said. He is working on several deals that will put more noncommercial Triple A channels on the air in coming months, but couldn’t disclose specifics. “We’ve got a few really big ones we expect to be announcing soon,” he said,
Philadelphia's WXPN “is a great example we hold out” for the possibilities of engaging new audiences with Triple A, Langner said.
In the 1990s, WXPN pioneered the contemporary music format Adult Album
Alternative and created World Café, a flagship national show for Triple A. It continues as a leading advocate for the format on public radio stations. In 2004, a private-sector partner of WXPN opened World Café Live, a café and concert hall where most of this year’s music showcases were staged.
Most recently, WXPN bought the NONcommvention from founding station WFPK in Louisville, Ky., after hiring Dan Reed, cofounder and organizer of the event and former WFPK p.d. This year’s conference was the first under WXPN’s ownership.
Along with WXPN’s version of Triple A, the loosely defined format encompasses the genre-bending “eclectic music” mix created by KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif.; the blends from Seattle’s KEXP that attract a younger audience; and a new twist from Radio Milwaukee that adds urban vibes.
With performances by 29
musical acts — few if any mainstream enough to have their personal lives followed as celebrity gossip — NON-COMM was overwhelmingly a showcase for artists with potential for wider recognition.
The performers represented the singer-songwriter and rock-
based foundations of Triple A, from the harmonized country-folk melodies of the Watson Twins to the precocious jazz vocal stylings of Ingrid Michaelson. The Hold Steady brought manic punk energy to a May 31 music marathon that ended in the very wee hours of the next morning with the blues-infused rock guitar of Back Door Slam virtuoso Davy Knowles.
With an eye toward bolstering the format and sharing the expertise of its veterans, WXPN expanded the agenda of this year’s conference to include several radio-focused panel discussions and a keynote speech on the future of radio by Kurt Hanson, editor and founder of RAIN, the Radio and Internet Newsletter, and owner of the 320-channel Internet radio service
AccuRadio.com.
For stations that want to present music electronically, Hanson advised, the future is in streaming, the only media platform that enables programmers to super-serve narrow segments of the listening public. Within the next few years, listeners will have devices that let them tune to web streams in their cars and at home, he said, and will come to prefer streaming to FM radio because it can be personalized to their tastes. The good news for Triple A is that it and other niche music genres will become more popular.
Home for the yet-to-be discovered
The music-discovery aspect of noncommercial Triple A is one element of the format that public radio veterans don’t quite get, according to Roger LaMay, WXPN g.m.
Those who “just see it as a way to attract younger listeners are missing the point,” he said. “Triple A radio, as it’s called, is becoming increasingly important to our culture as commercial radio formats get narrower and narrower. There are long lists of both new and emerging and long-established artists who simply do not have a home on the radio anymore except on Triple A noncommercial radio. Artist after artist will tell you that.”
Unlike their commercial counterparts, public radio Triple A outlets gave substantial airplay to rock superstar Bruce Springsteen’s latest record, LaMay noted. Dr. John, Ani DiFranco and James McMurtry were among the established artists who performed songs from their latest releases at NON-COMM.
“Having been on the inside of commercial radio, I know how far they’ve strayed,” said KTBG’s Hart during a May 29 panel on the public-service rationale for Triple A programming. Commercial radio programmers “don’t care about the listener or the product—just the return on the advertiser’s dollar.” Hart spent nearly three decades in commercial radio before joining KTBG, one of four pubradio outlets reaching into Kansas City, when the station was struggling to remain viable with a hybrid NPR News/jazz format.
“We didn’t have to fight too hard to get to go to Triple A,” Hart said. “We had already tried everything else and failed miserably.”
Compared with public radio’s traditional music formats of classical and jazz, Triple A is a “living culture,” Hart said. “I don’t mean to be pejorative,” but Triple A stations can connect today’s musical talents to listeners, he said. “You can enable people to feel like they’re participating in things that are living and growing.”
A music-mix analysis presented by NPR Research chief Jackie Nixon on May 29 found numbers confirming Triple A’s emphasis on new music. Commercial Triple A stations, which outnumber the noncomms four to one, draw primarily on hits from the 1980s and 1990s for their music mixes, throwing in a smattering of 1970s popular fare, Nixon said. “They play more old songs to get a degree of familiarity, and they rely more on it to sell ratings,” she said.
Alternative-rock stations and noncommercial Triple A outlets, by contrast, primarily program music from the current decade. Nearly half of the songs programmed by pubradio Triple A stations are new releases, according to the analysis.
Nixon advised programmers to work on maintaining “stationality,” the combination of presentation style, personality and musical selection that differentiates a station’s sound, and “pay attention to every minute, every second to hold on the audience.”
Mixing your own musical niche
Hanson’s predictions for radio’s future ran counter to the Triple A spirit of fostering music discovery. “Streaming is where the action is,” he said, and consumers will gravitate to services that allow them to personalize their listening experience. Give web listeners a skip button, he advised radio programmers, because “no matter how good you are, you can’t please all your listeners at once.”
Rather than betting on a musical genre, Hanson favors building a brand around a graphical user interface that gives listeners access to a broad array of music. “Once consumers get to know the interface, it doesn’t matter what your musical taste is — the experience is consistent.” Future listeners will want to mix playlists for their own tastes, as they can do with the AccuRadio channel of swinging pop standards. Users can choose a mix of female vocalists and specify those that they don’t want to hear, such as Debbie Boone, in Hanson’s example.
This all sounds like the death of the 13-million-selling albums that traditionally have made up for all of a record label’s mistakes, commented one attendee, who asked: “How do you view being able to create enough critical mass to influence pop culture and break through on a larger level?”
Hanson, a proponent of Wired magazine Editor Chris Anderson’s long-tail theory of future media consumption, said music won’t break through on that level anymore, but a lot of releases will sell 200,000 copies.
The new media culture will allow people to explore many different genres, and niche formats such as world music, reggae and Triple A will become more popular. “It’s going to be a more diverse world,” he said.
Hanson encouraged broadcasters to build on the live and local aspect of their core business over the next few years. “That is what radio has been and what it does best.”
Wowing the gatekeepers
As for the main business of NON-COMM — appraising the chops and potential of musical acts vying for airplay — Triple A tastemakers responded enthusiastically to Jackie Greene, a lanky Californian with bluesy, rootsy songs who recorded an interview and performance for WXPN’s World Café on May 29 with NONcomm attendees looking on.
Greene displayed a Dylanesque penchant for dodging host David Dye’s questions before ripping into a riveting guitar-driven performance that got the crowd of not-easily-impressed music and radio pros yelping and cheering at 4 p.m., before the bar had officially opened.
On the closing day of the conference, Ireland’s Bell X1 accomplished a rare feat among NON-COMM performers past and present — earning a standing ovation despite a noon start time. Many in the audience were still feeling aftereffects of the May 31 late-night music marathon when Bell X1 raised the roof with “Flame”—the song, said lead singer Paul Noon, that invents the Celtic disco genre.
Starting with a chant, the song built an infectious rhythm with the drummer standing on his chair, thrashing out the final beat as audience members jumped to their feet, whooping and hollering.
The last band to get that response from NON-COMMventioneers early in the day was Los Lonely Boys, according to conference veterans. In 2004, the Texan rockers got an audience of 30 for their 9:30 a.m. showcase to their feet, LaMay said, and became the buzz of that year’s NON-COMM.
“I wasn’t there, but my colleagues told me, ‘We’re going to add their record as soon as we get back to Philly,’” recalled Bruce Warren, WXPN assistant g.m. for programming.
With the exposure of Triple A airplay, Los Lonely Boys broke through to big-time commercial success and in 2004 won a Grammy.
For all the NON-COMM camaraderie, stations vie to give the first exposure to acts that can get ovations before lunchtime. “Stations are very competitive about breaking artists,” said Chuck Singleton, p.d. of WFUV in New York. Nicole Atkins, a New Jersey native who performed songs from her new release Neptune City, is “a WFUV artist,” he said — meaning that his was the first station to give her substantial airplay.
WXPN scheduled showcases for local musicians Phil Roy, Mutlu, and Hoots and Hellmouth, while acts such as Kathleen Edwards, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and Back Door Slam thanked the station for exposure.
Ingrid Michaelson, a singer/songwriter who performed at last year’s conference and went on to sell nearly 250,000 copies of her debut release, credited early support from Scott Register, indie producer and host of the syndicated weekly program Reg’s Coffee House. “He was the first person to ever play me besides my parents,” Michaelson said during her May 30 showcase.
Since last spring, her music has since heard on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill and an Old Navy ad. “I have a knack for writing depressing songs masked by happy, upbeat instrumentation,” she said.
Reflecting on the breaks that came her way since her last NON-COMM appearance, she said: “I like doing things differently and doing more than was ever expected of me.”
Web page posted June 10, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
