Music Radio And The Record Industry

Popular Music and Society
Vol. 34, No. 4, October 2011, pp. 455–473

Music Radio and the Record Industry:
Songs, Sounds, and Power
J. Mark Percival

The nature of the economic, social, and cultural relations between the radio industry and the record industry is most often characterized by both academics and practitioners as symbiotic, that is, both parties benefit from the interaction. Music radio needs records to fill airtime and to attract audiences and the record industry needs the kind of pervasive exposure that airplay still provides to sell product and to build artist profiles.1 The rewards, it has been suggested for decades, are mutual and equivalent. This article argues that the symbiosis argument is an over-simplification of a complex
Music Radio and the Record Industry
In the late 1920s and early 1930s the record industry in the United States realized that it had been wrong in its assumption that the availability of “free” music on radio would cannibalize sales of records. What seems in retrospect obvious (that increased airplay would tend to increase record sales) only slowly became an accepted industry convention (Barnard; Frith). This period marked the beginning of an informal, but enormously significant economic relationship between radio and the music industry, a relationship whose consequences for popular music culture have been far reaching.
By the 1950s, with the emergence of Top 40 “jukebox” hit radio formats in the US
(and later in the UK) radio had become central to creating regional and national hits for the record industry (Denisoff). Indeed, the record industry has at times sought more direct, if covert, ways of persuading radio programmers or DJs to play specific releases. The term “payola” has been around since the 1930s, allegedly as a contraction of “payment” and “Victrola” (a brand name of RCA-Victor, one of the biggest jukebox and turntable manufacturers of the first half of the 20th century). According to
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J. Mark Percival

This leads to a further point: that the construction of “audience” as “market”
(through research) must be, as Denis McQuail argues, “from the media . . . and within the terms of media industry discourse” (7). This audience is not a community of people listening to radio, as individual members of that audience might see themselves—it is a heterogeneous group, structured in terms of classic market research characteristics: age, social class, income, preferences in media consumption, and so on. Both BBC and commercial music radio stations understand their audience primarily in terms of demographics, a term Barnard correctly suggests is somewhat overused in the radio industry, even when more qualitative data are available.9
The BBC radio station programmers I spoke with as part of this research were responsible for music policy at BBC Radio 1 and at BBC Radio 2, both of which are broadly hits radio stations by day with more specialist output in the evenings and weekends.10 The commercial station programmers in this research worked in mainstream hits radio stations with playlists ranging from current hits to