Sirius Satellite Radio has turned over an entire channel to Eminem, left. Bob Dylan, middle, and Snoop Dogg, right, are among the recording artists who have their own shows on satellite radio.
IT’S the self,” David Johansen growls, “that finally reconciles effort and effortlessness, injury and forgiveness, control and surrender, conflict with others and acceptance of them, awareness of defects and unconditional love.”
His husky, wolfish voice is familiar from his years singing with the New York Dolls and masquerading as Buster Poindexter, but what he is doing on the radio is something else altogether.
“You know why the self does this?” he continues, lingering over the syllables like a hipster Zen master. “Because it is pure unconditionality, which is all-inclusive love.” He drags out the last words over the opening chords of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” which starts the next set of music in “The Mansion of Fun,” Mr. Johansen’s six-hour weekly broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio.
This is not something you are likely to hear on regular old terrestrial radio, where armchair philosophy is rarely part of the patter. But it is an example of the ways the two competing satellite networks, Sirius and XM, are using established artists to build their programming, and of the ways the artists are responding. Seemingly every week for the past few years has brought an announcement of a singer, songwriter, rapper or rocker signed to be host of a show or to program a channel. Some are marquee names: Bob Dylan and Snoop Dogg on XM, Eminem and the Who on Sirius. Others are less so, like the folk-rock duo the Kennedys, who have a three-hour weekly show on Sirius, and John McEuen, a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and thehost of a show on XM.
For the young satellite networks, it is just one of many strategies for attracting and keeping paid subscribers. But for the musicians, it represents a previously unthinkable degree of control over a medium that has tantalized and tormented generations of recording artists, and a chance to shore up their own audiences at a time of industrywide uncertainty. And it is one more opportunity for brand extension, beyond MySpace pages and YouTube videos.
“I have the freedom to play whatever I want to play,” said Christopher Bridges, better known as the rapper Ludacris, who has a one-hour weekly show on one of XM’s hip-hop channels. “You don’t have to worry about fines, you don’t have to worry about sponsors. It’s just freedom.”
Catherine Moore, director of the music business graduate program at New York University, said the satellite stations provide new marketing territory: a middle ground between the wide-open Internet, where it is hard to get attention, and narrowly programmed terrestrial radio, where it is hard to get airplay. Working within the conversational coziness of a radio show, Dr. Moore said, “the artist becomes more than just, ‘Here are my songs.’ ” And that, she added, “leads to a deeper relationship between the fan and the artist.”
Even the most established acts can benefit. Sirius has dedicated entire channels for limited runs of a few months to stars like Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, usually pegged to a new album or tour. The most recent is the Who; the band introduced a channel devoted to its music in September, coinciding with its current tour and the October release of its album “Endless Wire.” Although the band is not directly programming the channel, it is providing archival concert recordings and backstage interviews, along with access to its entire catalog.
In an interview at Sirius headquarters in Rockefeller Center, Pete Townshend, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, said that except for a few classic-rock staples, his music has difficulty getting onto commercial playlists.
“The number that do get played get smaller and smaller and smaller,” Mr. Townshend said. “And we were lucky to have a few songs on that. But it does limit us. When we introduce new material into our live show, it’s amazing how difficult people find it to accept that we don’t just play ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and ‘Who Are You?’ ”
Lee Abrams, the longtime radio impresario who as chief creative officer at XM has recruited much of the network’s talent, said hiring musicians was part of his plan from early on. But he said the idea took some selling to artists who had come to associate radio with narrowly programmed formats and label-mandated promotional appearances. “Their interaction with stations has been going on a morning show and talking about breast sizes, or really lame interviews that have nothing to do with their career,” Mr. Abrams said in a phone interview.
Lamentations about the state of commercial radio have become so standard over the last few decades that they have achieved something of the rote tedium the critics ascribe to the medium itself: how radio consultants (led by Mr. Abrams, creator of the album-oriented rock and classic rock formats) have taught station programmers to slice and dice their playlists to appeal more precisely to specific demographics; how more and more stations have come to play fewer and fewer songs; how deregulation in the Clinton years produced database-driven behemoths like Clear Channel and Cumulus, which own hundreds of stations in dozens of markets; how a newly conservative Federal Communications Commission in the Bush years has cracked down on content, issuing fines for profanity and indecency and generally making programmers shepherd their properties even more gingerly.
And so, enter satellite radio. Ever since the F.C.C. issued the first (and only) satellite licenses to XM and Sirius in 1997, both networks have promised to restore diversity and personality to the airwaves, even if those airwaves are available only to those who pay a monthly fee and purchase the requisite equipment (or an automobile that comes with a receiver preinstalled, as many now do). They have raced to sign up customers — as of October, XM reported 7.2 million subscribers and Sirius 5.1 million — and have competed fiercely for on-air talent and boldface names.
About half of Sirius’s 135 or so channels are devoted to music, and a similar percentage of XM’s 170-plus stations (exact numbers of channels fluctuate, as streams are added and subtracted). As a result the competition for music hosts has been similarly intense. Mr. Abrams has said he courted Mr. Dylan for a year and a half before landing him for his weekly “Theme Time Radio Hour.” Sirius has turned over whole channels to Eminem, Jimmy Buffett and the E Street Band guitarist Little Steven Van Zandt.
Steve Blatter, senior vice president for music programming at Sirius, said the network was aiming for “a return of the art of the D.J.”
“In thinking about that,” he said, “what better way to provide people this art form — because it really is an art form — than going directly to some of the artists themselves?”
One Way to Get Radio Play: Do It Yourself
|
|
(Page 2 of 2)
The level of involvement by the artists varies, as does their compensation. Mr. Abrams and Mr. Blatter declined to discuss the terms of their assorted deals, except to say that they depend on the artist and the nature of the relationship. In general, artists with dedicated channels tend to serve as executive producers, lending their name and making frequent guest appearances. (Mr. Buffett, for example, calls in from his boat to chat with D.J.’s on his Margaritaville channel.)
“What’s interesting about radio is there are several ways the artist can be presented,” said Dr. Moore of New York University. “It used to be just songs, with the odd interview here and there. But now you can ‘watch’ the radio, you can go to their Web site. You can look up information.”
Of course a lot of the musicians on the satellite networks talk about their shows in less marketing-oriented terms. They invoke the romance of radio, the glory days of free-form FM and the intimacy of the relationship between the D.J. and the listener.
Mr. Johansen, for example, who has been on Sirius for two and a half years, said his show gives him a different kind of platform than his various musical endeavors. “When you put on the radio, there’s so much negativity and kind of mean-spiritedness,” he said in a phone interview. “Especially on commercial radio, the people who talk are kind of like untreated sociopaths. I just figured I wanted to say things that are of kind of a positive nature. Like little metaphysical aphorisms. But they’re silly at the same time.”
There’s little metaphysicalabout Howard Stern’s talk channels on Sirius, or Mr. Bridges’s weekly XM show, “Ludacris Presents Open Mic!” But it is clear that they also enjoy the liberty to speak their minds.
“It’s different because we get to curse all the hell we want,” Mr. Bridges, who was a disc jockey in Atlanta before he became known as a rapper, said with a laugh. “It’s not like we just curse just to do it, but we can just be ourselves and not have to censor ourselves.”
Mr. Bridges records his program at a studio in Atlanta and sends it in to XM. A few hundred miles northwest, in Nashville, Del McCoury records a weekly bluegrass show for Sirius that mingles old and new music with his own deep knowledge.
“I came up at a time when Bill Monroe, and Reno and Smiley, Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers — I was kind of a young guy when those guys were in their 30s and 40s, at the top of their game,” said Mr. McCoury, 67, who sometimes records his program at his own house, with a portable unit, and sometimes at a Sirius studio nearby. “I kind of wanted to tell things on the air that I know about them. I played with Bill Monroe in 1963 and was around all those guys. I know a lot of stories on them.”
The future of satellite radio is far from certain. Although both networks continue to add subscribers, they have lost hundreds of millions of dollars so far. Both have recently announced plans to expand their presence online, betting on the growth potential of Internet broadcasting.
Such details are far afield from the concerns of Dave Alvin, the roots-rocker and former leader of the Blasters, who recently started a once-a-month hourly show on one of XM’s country channels. He records it in a studio in Los Angeles, weaving together blues, folk, rock, country and jazz spanning most of the past century.
“Terrestrial radio on the music side has gotten so bad,” Mr. Alvin said. “What it does, I think, is it chokes off dialogue. And the world, the country, we need more dialogue, whether it’s political, or musical, or artistic.
“And so satellite, I don’t know if it’s a redeemer or anything. But,” he said, pausing, “I have a radio show.”
No comments:
Post a Comment