I have a question about rock songs on the radio please help?

This is lengthy but it may help. This is from a post I made a month ago...

There are people called Music Consultants. *OUCH* MC, that can be a dirty label. (if you want a pun, take it any way you want it.) So a corporation with a lot of money researches the radio market for buy-able top-rated Big City and "Mom & Pop" radio stations. They buy the station and hire a music consultant to see if they are playing the "most popular" songs in that music GENRE. That's another terrible destructive word.

What's a genre? That can be a: type, sort, kind, field, variety, or category. FLASHBACK: There used to be only a few on the airwaves 50 and even 60 years ago now. There was mainly only country as we know it. Then somebody to hot for country comes along like, (just for an example here) let's say ELVIS and the owner of a radio station refuses to play his music because The King does not typify the type of listeners he wishes to reach. So now the division brings rock and blues into the picture and you now a have a genre of music played by different radio stations. Country, Blues and Rock. I'm not going to include news radio stations in this example because they do not primarily play music.

Now let's just look at the ROCK genre. A radio station owner back around, let's say 1969 or '70 says "Let's keep playing Elvis and The Beatles, but we won't play Pink Floyd, Led Zepelin, The Who, The Rolling Stenes, or Black Sabbath.

Radio listener: "Yeah, but, that's all still ROCK."

Staion owner: "But those others are HARD ROCK and we don't play those bands. The Advertisement Department Report shows that the sales were at their best when we played only Elvis and The Beatles and sales dropped off after we added those other bands."

FLASH FORWARD back to now. There's now MANY formats of the ROCK genre. Rock has been split into so many different categories that a music artist may not even be aware of how the music industry categorizes his music. He may think he's playing Alternative and the industry tells him it's Ecclectic!

Music artist: "I'm playing an acoustic, how can it be electric?"

Recording Industry: "No, you're music, it's Ecclectic."

Music artist: "Yeah? Well @%#* you!"

*Artist leaves studio and seeks an Independant label*

Radio station owner: "We're only going to play artists that have signed on recording labels that are also owned by our stockholders."

Radio Listener: "Geez, this station sux! What happened to them? They used to play GREAT music.

GET READY FOR THE GRAND DISILLUSIONMENT!

Radio station owner: "The ratings show we suck! What the hell happened?!?"

Program Director: "Couldn't be what we're playing lately, after all, it's what YOU told us to play."

Music Consultant: "I assure you Mr. RSO, that's what they're playing in my teen-age daughters room! They're listening to it in all the big cities! The songs can't be wrong, if I had any question about a song, I looked it up in Billboard Magazine to see if it played the Top Forty charts in the past 35 years. If it wasn't on the list I tossed it out!"

Radio station owner: "Then it's gotta be....uh, uh...lets see...uh, THE BANDS! That's it! It's the bands fault! We're only going to play bands that play our concert venues exclusively! They can't play no place else, no bars, no joints only our halls, that way we'll know we have only the BEST BANDS!:

Radio listener: "Who told YOU that THOSE were the BEST BANDS?"

Radio station owner: "Our music consultant."

radio listener: Who told HIM that those were the best bands?"

Radio station owner: "WE did! We told him that we only wanted to play bands that were on our stockholders labels and concert venue itineraries. After weeding out those unwanteds, he made sure that they only played on Billboard Magazines Top Forty Chart and we were left with the 812 songs you hear in a regular rotaion of 270 songs every four months."

Radio listener: "O.K. but, where's the NEW stuff?"

RSO: "We add it all the time."

RL: "Yeah but it sux!"

RSO: "Deal with it buddy! I've already told you how this works! Do YOU own stock in this company? No? Then go take a dip! Our research shows we're playing all the right stuff! Do you know how many different ways we have to split up or ratings reports to make it show we're #1 in the advertising market so that we can charge our clients top price for an ad on our radio station? There's more at stake here than YOUR personal musical interests!"

RL: "Then I'll just go find ANOTHER radio station!!!"

RSO: "You can't, we own them all in your area, deal with it!"

Disc Jockey: "M-O-L-D request line, hold please... *pause* M-O-L-D, 1-1-0-3 request line, whasup?"

RL: "Dude, your music sux."

DJ: "I'm painfully aware of that, thanks for reminding me."

RL: "Can you play, Klick Klack by Dickie Doo & the Donuts?"

DJ: "Uh...sorry it's not on the playlist."

RL: "But they play it on KRAP in Fairbanks, ALaska! They play rock music!"

DJ: "Yeah, but they play a different genre. Klick Klack is Ecclectic and we don't do that."

RL: "It couldn't be electric, Dickie plays an acoustic guitar!"

DJ: "No, Ecclectic. It means that Dickie found an alternative to the music he thought he was playing."

RL: "What?"

DJ: "Hey, that's the way that the "Powers That Be" explained it to me."

RL: "But why does the music HAVE to suck?"

DJ: "It's like this...people have been listening to the same whiney new crap for so long, that today's youth who are becoming so accoustomed to listening to whiney music, that they are only reproducing it. They've never been inspired by a Ted Nugent guitar solo, or have ever heard what Neil Peart can do with a percussion set. Today's music has been divided on the radio so badly, that many of today's kids never get beyond MTV and the crap that the industry THINKS we should be listening to. Some of your best new music out there today is being played in local bars, and clubs and auditoriums, but since they record on an independant label, they never get any airplay on the radio stations that are owned by the corporate giants."

RL: "Dude, that sux! What can we do about that?"

DJ: "Deal with it."

RL: "Besides THAT"

DJ: "Hang out on Yahoo! Answers Music R&P and find out what other people are listening to and hope somebody leaves a link to a groovy new song YouTube!"

PEACE

I have a good radio station in CT (connecticut) if you want to listen to them. They don't have dj's or anything, they just play music (alternative, soft rock, grunge, etc). I'll put them in my source list you can listen to them online.

It's my favorite station. They play new and old music, as long as it sounds good to the ear.

And to answer the question: It's all about what the listeners want on the radio. If the station gets listeners from playing the same songs over and over, then why change because it's already a success? Think of it like a business, such as an oil company.

Oil companies know they can lower their prices, but why would they want to make less money because they already know people will buy their product.

Hope I helped.

There are new rock songs being recorded all the time, your local alternative station just isn't playing them. Their playlist is determined by what they think most of their listeners want to hear and what they think will give them the highest ratings.

If you want them to play more NEW music, call them and request the songs and artists you want to hear -- or better yet, organize a bunch of your friends to call and request new music. If they get 10 or 15 or 25 phone calls all asking for new songs, they'll be more likely to change their playlists.

I hate it when stations do that. What is the name of the station in question because my local stations only ever play old stuff and even that is always pop, so I listen to Kerrang more but even that has gone down hill.

i use to live over there 97x gets worse everytime i go over there. there is definitely lots of new rock just not on that station. now i get lana over on orlandos 101.1 she moved fomr 98 rock when i moved she was the best from 98 rock. but 97x is just gay.

Because corporate radio plays what the record companies pay them to play. It's a business.

if your really bummed about it, try getting XM Radio if you can afford it

ldk mayby their stupid

ring and complain dude.........I would..........LOL