Industry Rethinks ‘Urban’ As A Genre Term for Black Music

As protests against racial injustice sweep the world, efforts to root out discrimination in the music industry have coalesced around a single word: urban.

Bloomberg reports Warner Music Group Corp., one of the three major record companies, plans to stop using the term to refer to music by black artists, according to a person familiar with the matter. IHeartMedia Inc., the largest radio company in the U.S., also will phase out the expression, opting for hip-hop or R&B instead.

They’re following Republic Records, the home of Drake, Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, which said Friday that it would ban the term from company communications. Republic, part of Universal Music Group Inc., is one of the most successful record labels in the world and counts many of the biggest black stars among its artists.

Categorizing black performers as urban has been a sore point for many artists and executives, who see it as a subtle but pernicious form of racism. It groups together a range of genres -- including rap, R&B and pop -- but the main purpose seems to be to separate that music from the work of white artists.

The music industry has scrambled over the past two weeks to show its support for the black community, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to fight racism and promising to hire more black executives. There wouldn’t be much of a music industry without black artists, who helped create jazz, rock, hip-hop, R&B and just about every other popular genre.

While some changes will take months -- if not years -- banning urban can be done now.

Frankie Crocker

The use of urban in reference to music stems from the radio industry, which initially excluded black artists from its most popular stations. The medium started playing more black music during the late 1940s and 1950s, inspiring acts such as Elvis Presley, and eventually it dominated radio -- but divisions remained.

Frankie Crocker is credited with first applying the term urban to music. Crocker, a DJ for New York’s WBLS, used the term “urban contemporary” to describe the range of music he played on his station, which included everyone from James Brown to Doris Day. Urban then cropped up all across the music industry. Record labels hired executives to promote their artists to urban radio, while booking agencies enlisted people to book urban acts.

The word enabled radio stations to sell advertisements to companies that were put off by the word black, and also served as a way for black executives to get promoted. That history is why many black executives, particularly industry veterans, have been reluctant to eliminate the word.