The Infinite Dial

Okay, we've had four months' worth of headlines about the least exciting "American Idol" season ever: ratings off sharply, voting down dramatically, and those viewers who do participate now seem to be voting more for the contestant they'd most like to have a soda with. Lee DeWyze is no more guaranteed a hit record than any of the other affable-enough winners of recent seasons, and you can at least reasonably wonder if this will be the first year that making it to the finale won't even guarantee you a hearing from radio.

Top 40 owes a lot of its comeback of recent years to "Idol." In Kelly Clarkson, the show gave Top 40 its biggest homegrown core artist in many years. Moreover, it also revived the notion of all-ages entertainment so that the mother/daughter coalition seemed possible again. Clarkson's brand of pure pop never became the sound of Mainstream Top 40. Rhythmic pop continues to dominate, but in the last five years, rhythmic pop has become, well, poppier, while the notion of Hip-Hop as the only music for self-respecting teens is long forgotten.

So you have to wonder a little about what Top 40 will be like if "Idol" continues to lose momentum (and "X-Factor" doesn't pick up the slack). The good news is that Kelly Clarkson hasn't turned out to be the only person who could make a mainstream pop record. Pink quickly returned to form. Katy Perry took advantage of Clarkson's hiatus from the charts. Top 40 enjoyed having mainstream pop so much that they didn't stop at one style, but kept going to Jason Mraz, Train, and Taylor Swift, who, in certain ways, gives Top 40 both Clarkson and Carrie Underwood.

Beyond that, what Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox have the ability to do--in the best case scenario--is to turbo charge what has already happened at pop radio with Train, Mraz, Owl City, et al. Putting a ukelele over Hip-Hop beats has already given us about three more hits than we can reasonably expect. Nothing is guaranteed for either DeWyze or Bowersox at radio, but what still excites me most about them is their potential to bring to Top 40 some singer-songwriters who would otherwise be exiled to non-comm Triple-A.

At the same time, programmers in other formats have to ask themselves: what happens if "Idol" doesn't remain a force? There have been other pockets of musical activity in the last five years--younger Country, indie rock--but none of them have had the same ability to galvanize a format that "Idol" has at Top 40. Or, as likely with both younger Country and indie rock, nobody at radio has had any idea whatsoever how to build a format around them. It's strange enough that we sometimes seem to have gone back to 1966--one dominant current music format that sells records, except, of course, for those records that sell without airplay. And now it's not impossible to imagine a landscape with no current music epicenter.

If I was an Urban or Rock programmer, I would at least be considering now whether there's the possibility to create more musical excitement than Top 40. And is there some sort of musical movement afoot anywhere? Top 40 only needs a varied collection of great hit records--some of them homegrown; more narrowly defined formats seem to need a movement, whether it's Country in 1990, Hip-Hop in 1995 or female singer-songwriters in 1997. And then programmers have to ask themselves whether they'd be willing to acknowledge a movement, if it meant targeting younger demos or, in the case of Alternative, stepping out of the '90s Gold war that is currently taking place.