No, No, No - Not A Second Time!

WRXP-FM is off the air again.

New York's only alternative rock station returned to the airwaves in July after the previous news format on that station bombed.  We rock fans - most of us white males over 40 - rejoiced at its return. The jubilation was short-lived.  CBS Radio bought the station to simulcast its New York AM sports station, WFAN, to reach even more listeners, beginning last Friday (November 2).  WRXP has since been re-relegated to Internet radio - which, last time I checked, you can't listen to in your car without special software or an application on a sophisticated cell phone.    

So why did WRXP go off the air again in New York?  Perhaps you weren't paying attention: Most of us rock fans are white males over 40! I don't mind that Tuesday's election results proved that we are irrelevant politically, but it's also becoming obvious that we're becoming irrelevant culturally.  Maybe I didn't get the message the first time; I now think that's what my pal Karen Hunter was saying when she dissed Paul Ryan's musical tastes.  

In any case, younger white guys increasingly love rap, and female and non-white listeners increasingly prefer Top Forty, R&B, and dance-pop.  And, lest you think my rant has some sort of racist or misogynistic subtext, it's not just the gradual disappearance of rock radio from the terrestrial airwaves that has me up in arms.  WBGO-FM in Newark, New Jersey bills itself as the greatest jazz radio station in America, and it is an excellent station, but part of the reason it's America's best jazz station is that it's fast becoming America's only jazz station.  Jazz, the most socially egalitarian musical form ever conceived, a musical genre with enough racial and gender diversity to keep it living forever, has outlived its commercial appeal on radio.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a decent jazz station anywhere outside the New York area, and while WBGO, as a public radio station, enjoys broad-based financial support, a struggling community jazz station in Atlanta or Des Moines would obviously not be so lucky.

Anyway, I don't blame hip-hop entrepreneurs like Russell Simmons and Shawn Carter for pushing rock off FM radio, though I do think some of the blame ought to go to Lady Gaga and any pop singer named Justin.  No, I mostly blame the radio conglomerate executives - most of whom are white males over 40 - who have been trying to maximize profits from terrestrial radio even as satellite and Internet radio have become more popular.  I noted that WRXP was replaced by an FM simulcast of an AM radio station to expand the AM station's range.  Back in 1967, the Federal Communications Commission banned such a practice (allowing FM rock radio to be born), but in 1992 the rule was rescinded to allow AM stations to broadcast the programming of its sister FM stations.  But with AM signals weakening, the opposite trend is happening - not just in New York but all over the country.  (Rock stations aren't the only ones affected; in New York, soul station WRKS-FM, as noted in an earlier post, was displaced by a simulcast of New York's local ESPN AM station.)   

So what are we left with? Simple: If you want to listen to music on the radio, especially in your car, but you don't want to listen to music that's focus-group-tested to appeal to fashionable demographics, you'd better be prepared to invest in satellite radio, because that's where the future of American radio is.  Yes, it would be nice to have a national public radio network of several stations that play decent music of different genres without regard to profit, like BBC Radio, or at least have more local public music stations like WFUV-FM in New York, but that is so not going to happen.

I knew I should have gotten Sirius XM for my Golf.