What's Playing on Your Radio - DJ Drama Talks About the Hip Hop Game

Is this what radio listeners want to hear? Thoughts on radio content.

This video features Midday Host Jenny Boom Boom of Hot 93.7 in Hartford, CT talking with legendary mixtape producer DJ Drama about a lot of industry stuff on the radio. The topics discussed are RIAA, Feds cracking down on music licensing, and the legality of Mixtape DJs making money on the product they put out, the Internet, downloads, etc., etc.

I love this interview, I find this stuff very interesting... but

But then I ask myself, would the average radio listener really want to know this stuff, much less even care. Unless the entire audience tuned in are aspiring to become a part of the record industry I don't think this would be appealing. This is not an indictment on Hot 97.3, but the above type of interview happens at many stations across the country everyday. I couldn't imagine the average radio listener not wanting to flip the dial to another station to hear music instead of hearing this 10 minute interview.

Alan Burns & Associates, a radio consulting group, recently released a study of radio content titled - "What Does Music Radio Communicate When It’s Not Playing Music? Is it talking to its audience?"

Here's their purpose for the analysis and its conclusions:

-We have felt for some time that music radio has come to be dominated by talk about the station, rather than talk that is driven by a focus on the audience. So we set out to discover whether our opinion was accurate.

-Music radio does need to find ways to make what we do more about the listener and the music, and less about the station. It’s a lot like trying to interest a newly-met girl when you were single: the more you bragged about yourself, the less interested she became; but the more you talked about her interests, the more interesting you became.

Here's the entire Alan Burns & Associates analysis, read only if you're interested.

Their conclusions seem to make sense. And this analysis can also apply when on-air host talk about industry topics, albums release dates, and other drama (no pun intended) behind the scenes. Many radio station execs have read this study, but urban radio listener be aware, it's still not safe just yet to put your iPods away.