Friday, July 11, 2008
Kids tune into old source for new hits
Ralph Berrier
Riffs, the regional music scene as heard by The Roanoke Times reporter Ralph Berrier, will appear weekly on Sundays.
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"Where do kids hear new music?"
A friend asked that question last week. The mother of two young girls, she sees all those earbuds-wearing kids out there and understands that pop music is still important to youngsters. She knows, too, that those kids can download an album's worth of tunes faster than most adults can dial a phone, but that doesn't answer her question.
Where do kids hear new music?
"Videos?" my friend asked.
"Do they still make videos?" asked my wife, who has heard of YouTube, but can't believe that kids get their first looks at new bands on postcard-sized screens.
The Internet? Satellite radio? ITunes? All seemed possible, certainly. Heaven knows kids are all into computerized thingamajiggery, but how many 12-year-olds are scouring Pitchfork reviews or listening to Rhapsody? None of the high-tech possibilities seemed likely.
Then, I had a revelation: "Radio?"
Radio, the original wireless technology, after all these years still seems like the easiest way for your average eighth-grader to hear a new song or band.
Years before the phrase "peer-to-peer" had anything to do with laptops and hard drives, it was the main way friends told one another about fantastic new songs they'd heard on the radio. Everybody listened to the same pop station (in my case, Z93 from Winston-Salem, N.C.), so we all knew the same songs.
I imagine it's still the same today. Kids don't want to feel left out of the loop, so most listen to the same songs on the same stations. In Roanoke, that probably means most are listening to K92. Many are listening to WJJS, too, which barely trails the onetime pop-radio juggernaut.
K92's ratings are a ghost of what they were during the station's 1980s heyday, when it won every ratings period for 12 consecutive years.
These days, it fluctuates between third and fifth place, pulling a share of 6 percent to 8 percent of the audience (compared with the upper teens two decades ago), usually trailing Q99 and Star Country.
But I'd wager that K92 still ranks as the favorite station of most of the teens and tweens in the Roanoke-Lynchburg market.
Where you gonna hear your next Flo Rida or Usher hit? Not on WROV.
From there, kids can own the music any number of ways -- they can download it, rip it from a friend's collection or -- if they're into old-school media -- buy a CD or even a record.
Of course, people don't seem to be buying music like they used to. Even with online sales increasing by one-third each year, the spike can't keep up with the downfall of CDs. According to SoundScan, overall album sales are down 11 percent through the first half of 2008 (CDs alone are down 16.3 percent, not as steep a drop as recent years).
Still, even with all this digital whizbangery at our fingertips, sometimes the old ways are easiest and best.
When it comes to hearing new music -- that is, pop music aimed squarely at the kiddies -- a century-old technology still delivers the goods.
