`Top 40 radio is becoming a dying art form. If we don`t start to see more creativity at the programming level there will be fewer and fewer Top 40 stations in the future.”
Even though they may not always like what he has to say, Top 40 radio stations listen when Barry Fiedel speaks.
Fiedel publishes Hitmakers, a Los Angeles-based weekly trade publication read by about 3,000 radio-station and record-company executives.
He also moderates regional seminars sponsored by the magazine in which radio programmers and record people discuss such hot topics as the
fragmentation of the Top 40 format, the use of audience research, and programming trends.
”We have our seminars because people in the radio and record industries have largely stopped talking to each other,” said Fiedel, whose Chicago conference last May attracted more than 200 Midwest industry executives as well as artists such as Pebbles, Safire and Marc Cohn.
”We`re trying to bring back the art of communication in what is a communications-oriented business.”
Fiedel`s credentials seem impeccable. He started his career at New York`s WABC-AM in the `60s before moving on to record promotion jobs with several major labels.
In the late `70s, he published the Confidential Report and Album Network tip sheets before starting up Hitmakers in 1982.
One of Fiedel`s biggest beefs when he speaks at seminars is with the quality of the people who program Top 40 radio stations.
”The reason why Top 40 radio is in such disrepair today is that most of the people who are programming it are inexperienced,” he said. ”They don`t have a really firm education in the music that makes up Top 40. Owners will spend a lot of money buying a station, but they won`t pay what it takes to get an experienced programmer.”
Much has changed in the last 30 years in Top 40 radio, also called contemporary hit radio. Where mass-appeal AM giants like the old WLS-AM once drew huge numbers of listeners by playing a broad spectrum of music, today`s Top 40 stations aim at a narrower audience.
These days, the Top 40 heard in Chicago on WBBM-FM and WYTZ-FM is dance-oriented, dominated by artists such as Paula Abdul and C&C Music Factory almost to the exclusion of rock acts.
”When Top 40 radio started on AM there were maybe two such stations in each market and they had to cover a huge audience,” said Fiedel of the days when a station might play the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and James Brown in succession.
”Along came FM with more frequencies and better sound quality and, all of a sudden, that allowed radio to target a specific audience. Over the last 25 years, we`ve seen the growth of that fragmentation.”
Fiedel singles out WBBM as a Top 40 station he admires.
Although he may sound like a prophet of doom, Fiedel says he`s optimistic about Top 40`s future.
”In the 1970s, Top 40 radio had no personality,” he said. ”We learned in the 1980s that people want to be entertained by air personalities. Because of that regeneration, I`m confident that Top 40 will once again evolve into mass-appeal radio.”
