Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Format

Today's New York Times reports on the ongoing death of "active" rock radio. I've grumbled about this myself quite a bit, and they hit the nail exactly on the head:

Some radio executives said that they made a fateful choice in the last few years to jettison the pop-rock side of their genre to concentrate on heavier-sounding bands, and now are afraid to turn back. As part of that shift, many stations also decided to eliminate women from their audience research. These stations decided to aim at men almost exclusively because of the heavier sound. "You got yourself into a corner that you can't get out of," said Tom Calderone, senior vice president for music and talent at MTV, and a former radio programmer and consultant. "When you become 65-75 percent guys, you're leaving a huge audience on the table."

I'm not shedding a tear for this market drying up, although if it creates a shift away from any sort of rock, that's ultimately going to be bad. The article also points to new albums from some of the "elder statesmen" of alternative rock that are doing well out of the gate, which might wake some people up to the fact that older alternative artists are still very viable. This is something I became very sensitive to last year when I saw a friend's band get passed over by the majors because their singer was too old.

So what are people listening to? In our nation's capital, it's not talk radio, either. This could be a Sirius problem for the industy, if you know what I mean. And I think you do.

Elsewhere on the dial, Mancow Muller got some screen time in this week's episode of The Shield, when Dani and Julian stopped a car from Illinois with a "Mancow's Morning Madhouse" sticker on it, despite the unlikelihood of the passengers actually listening to the Stern wannabe. I guess there's more to those ads running in the Reader with Mancow and Shield star Michael Chiklis than just a photo op, especially when you consider that the officers seized the vehicle and gave it to Chiklis' Vic Mackey as his new ride.