In an earnings call with investors last month, Radio One executives bragged about Boom 92’s early ratings and said that music formats in Houston and elsewhere would help the company turn around its $1.5 million loss from news stations.Ĭlassic hip-hop is one of radio’s first format rushes in years, but executives and analysts are divided on whether it has staying power. In Houston, the company laid off 47 employees in October, when KROI ended its news format. Now the reigning hip-hop king is a multiracial guy from Toronto who did not struggle.”įor Radio One, another benefit is that classic hip-hop stations are often cheaper to run than the ones they replace. “But hip-hop back then was about telling a story about your struggle and your family’s struggle. I think Drake is great,” said Doc Wynter, the senior vice president for urban programming at iHeartMedia. Some also say the older hits recall an era when rap played a stronger role in defining black culture. Stevens and other programmers say the format has a wide crossover appeal. The new stations target an age group of 35- to 49-year-olds, who grew up with rap but may be out of touch with the genre’s latest developments. Sirius XM also has a classic hip-hop station, Backspin.īut programmers say that the time is right for the format. At that time the station had an audience of about 500,000 people a week but now regularly reaches over one million, according to Nielsen. KDAY-FM (93.5) in Los Angeles, for example, has had a similar format since 2009.
Stations have tried to feature hip-hop oldies before. Ross, who compares the format’s explosion to the arrival of classic rock radio in the 1980s. “Everybody is looking at their market and wondering whether there’s an opportunity, and also wondering, ‘If I don’t do this, who else will?’ ” said Mr. But the new format’s most popular rappers are Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., who are still revered as lyrical virtuosos nearly two decades after their deaths. Boom 92, for example, started out with a song by the Geto Boys, a Houston gangsta rap group, and in Atlanta, the Radio One station Boom 102.9 opened with Ludacris, who grew up in the city. So far the classic (or “throwback”) hip-hop radio format is taking shape around a core of hits from the period spanning the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, with N.W.A, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Ms. Hip-hop emerged in New York in the 1970s and had its first hit with the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” released in 1979. The Cox Media Group chain also has four throughout Florida.
Louis and WSOL-FM (101.5) in Jacksonville, Fla. IHeartMedia, the giant broadcaster formerly known as Clear Channel, already has two such stations, KMJM-FM (100.3) in St. At least nine variants have arrived in recent weeks, stirring excitement among listeners and yielding one of radio’s most enduring signs of success: a format turf war. Other broadcasters quickly followed suit. Within a month, the ratings for Boom 92 (KROI-FM, 92.1) more than tripled, and Radio One - a national chain of 54 stations that cater largely to black audiences - added the format in Philadelphia, Dallas and Atlanta. “You still love this music, but it wasn’t being exposed on a regular basis at any radio station,” Mr. “Listeners who grew up on this music, in the late ’80s and into the ’90s, are now 40 years old,” said Jay Stevens, a programming executive at Radio One, the company that started the trend in October when it introduced Boom 92 in Houston, replacing a poorly performing news station. Those rap stars, along with the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott, Salt-N-Pepa and De La Soul, are some of the standbys of radio’s hottest new format, classic hip-hop, which in just two months has spread around the country as broadcasters capitalize on the nostalgia of the hip-hop generation. Oldies radio used to mean Johnny Mathis and the Four Seasons.
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