The Infinite Dial

There's no question that the changing new media landscape and radio's need to repatriate (or claim in the first place) 12-24 listening has changed the language of Top 40 radio. Got a request? Text it to the jock. Want another clue on the station's contest? It's on the jock's blog. Or the jock's MySpace page.

All of which is oddly reminiscent of the Top 40 radio of the early '70s and its attempts to couch itself in youth culture--much of which manifested itself as vocabulary. The weather forecast was recast as the local "environment" and caller No. 9 got to "rip-off" concert tickets.

That was hardly enough to stem the rise of Album Rock radio. Or keep the Top 40 guys from looking like, well, jive turkeys. There was, of course, the rise of a new body of music that Top 40 couldn't pre-empt, although it did make an equally ill-fated attempt to acknowledge it in some markets by throwing on a lot of album cuts at night around 1971-72.

Patronizing the kids by talking to them in what you think is their own language never gets them back on the radio. But finding out if there's a body of music that radio isn't adequately serving might. For many programmers, that now seems to take the form of surfing MySpace pages looking for mentions of music. And, gee, if you were a record label, wouldn't you have your street team now seeding those?

So maybe it's time to have 13-17-year-olds back in callout in some meaningful way at some format other than Rhythmic. Or represented in the next market study. As became clear at this year's NAB and R&R conventions, there are a lot of people who would like to be your intermediary in this "what younger listeners want" question. But there's something to be said for asking them yourself.