Kid Kelly On The 'Very, Very Bad State of Radio'

Kid Kelly

After losing his 18-year SiriusXM job as vice president of pop programming, Kid Kelly has spent the last two weeks "chillaxing" and binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm at his home in Florida, reports Billboard

Kelly, who has worked at 30 radio stations, engineered the satellite-radio giant's influential pop format: "The Hits 1 build I envisioned reapplied the (then crazy) theory of playing the most passionate music of ALL genres, besides the typical ones played on external Top 40/CHR stations at that time," he wrote in an open letter this week.

"I'd add select Country, Alt-Rock, Active Rock, Teen-Punk and Euro-Pop, most of which were not then playing on FM Top 40 and also not yet available or coalescing on DSP Pop Playlists... It disrupted most major Top 40 stations that ignored or swore off this mix." 

Your departure came not long after iHeartMedia laid off hundreds of DJs, programmers and others. What do these events say about the state of radio?

"The state of radio, in my opinion, it's very, very bad. Radio companies, or radio stations, need to have respect for the audience. If program directors are forced to play songs that they're uncomfortable with, or know they're not going to work, or there are group ads crammed down, or there are 20-minute blocks of commercials, the audience doesn't want that. Maybe somebody has to walk away and take a loss… Do you understand that nobody's ever going to listen to your station again, under a certain age, because of that? It really needs to be fixed, or else it's going to be a vast, vast wasteland."

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