If that sounds awesome to you, you’re going to love a recent Boom 92 playlist, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
In many ways, this is an idea whose time has come, which is another way of saying that hip-hop, and its first-wave fans, are, well, old.
Dre will be 50 in February; Ice-T is just 10 years away from his first Social Security check. Licensed to Ill topped the Billboard charts in 1987; three years later, hip-hop made up one-third of the Hot 100. By 1999, it was the country’s best-selling genre, with more than 81 million albums sold. The fans who propelled the early boom probably don’t know Young Thug from Rich Homie Quan, and don’t want to.
The obvious parallel is to classic rock radio—a format that emerged in the early-1980s as baby boomers rejected punk and disco, and radio execs realized it was easier to serve up old songs than convince their aging audiences to try new music.
Not that advertisers minded. Older listeners are generally wealthier and better educated than younger audiences, says Mark Fratrik, who studies the radio industry as chief economist at consultancy BIA/Kelsey: “That’s why adult contemporary always does well on revenue share.”
That makes the format attractive to Radio One, a Silver Springs, Md.-based “urban media specialist” that owns Boom 92 and 51 other broadcast radio stations nationwide, and generated $448 million in revenue last year. “This is not an urban radio station; it’s general market,” senior vice president Jay Stevens told industry website Inside Radio. “We did extensive research to find the sweet spot of crossover hip-hop from that period.”
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Radio One bills itself as an “urban media specialist” but that appears to be an untrue statement. Its previous all news format that it just shut down was a complete failure. Now its trying another format. I hope this one works for the "specialist". Its like most program and news consultants who are advising stations what to do and how to do it yet most of the consultants have never had a #1 station.
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