Music Radio's Self Flagellation

Courtney Yasmineh is amazing.  She's a great story.  Having grown up in a family which fell apart, she set off at a young age to northern Minnesota.  She learned life through struggle and Bob Dylan, eventually carving out the beginnings of her musical career.  She then tried suburban life in the Twin Cities, settling down to raise kids, but eventually found her way back to music.  That was over ten years ago, and she's not slowed down.  She's released numerous albums and I HIGHLY recommend her albums 'Wake Me Up When It's Over...' and 'Red Letter Day.'  Her latest single, Tangled Web, recently charted at #2 in The Netherlands, and has been in the top 3 there for the last seven weeks.

You probably weren't aware a Twin Cities musician was charting with a hit song in Europe.  That's because she's being ignored by Twin Cities music radio.  She's been handed a modern day music industry scarlet letter.  She's (unfairly) been deemed to be too old to have a hit single in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

For the record, music radio is a hollow shell of what it used to be.  I fell in love with radio in the 1980's, the time when radio wasn't nearly as fractured as it is today.  The fault lines were starting to show, but a lot of the newer music genres (alternative, rap, hip hop, and the numerous variations of R&B, metal, rock and country) were still folded into existing music formats: Top 40 (CHR), Album Rock (AOR), Country, Adult Contemporary (AC), R&B/Soul and maybe, if you were lucky, and Americana or an Adult Album Alternative (AAA).

In the 80's, regardless of format, local pride governed the playlist.  If a local artist was making it, every station tried to play their song.  Take Prince for example.  Everyone (outside of Country) played Prince, and still does!  Back then, if the music was good the priority was civic pride and community promotion, as opposed to a modern Music Director's/Program Director's strict rules of adhesion.  If Prince was a new artist today, he'd be relegated to two, maybe three stations in the market, and that's it!  Radio stations used to look for a reason to play the local artist.  Today, they're looking for any reason to not play them.

Most of the first 15 years of my radio career was spent on music formats.  WGEZ was oldies, KDAO was AC, KKBJ was Top 40, as was Hot 105 KCCQ, before it flipped to Alternative in my final year.  On KCCQ's sister station, 1430, KASI, I got my first taste of hosting a talk show, the long forgotten 'Matt and More after 4' show.

It was in Ames, Iowa, on Hot 105, where I started noticing music formats changing for the worse.  With the rise of mega corporate radio groups, national/regional Music Directors and Program Directors started seizing control of local playlists.  When I started there in 1997, our number one song for the week was played around 70-75 times, for the entire week. This would mean the song (probably from The Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls or Britany Spears) was played once every 2 to 2 1/2 hours.  I remember how insane is sounded to hear of the first station (I think it was in Phoenix) going 100 plays a week for their top song, making the #1 song of the week play once every 100 minutes.  Now, it's not unusual to have Top 40 's number one song played 110-120 times a week.  There are a few radio stations in the country who play only the top 10-15 songs over and over again.  That's it!

With this consolidation, new artists, especially artists who were local or were from small record labels, were forced off the air.  The national music 'experts,' desperately wanting to anoint themselves the 'kingmakers of music,' demanded strict obedience from the local PD's.  And it wasn't just Top 40 stations.  ALL music formats consolidated their playlists to a tight knit grouping which followed strict guidelines.  At one point, I was working overnights at the 80's station in Minneapolis and it blew my mind they only were playing 80 songs.  For God's sake!  If you just took the top 100 hits for each year from 1980 to 1989, you'd have 1000 GUARANTEED top ten songs to use as your base playlist.  It's not a surprise 80's music format has struggled mightily.

Music radio has changed a little bit in the last ten years, mainly for the positive.  In the Twin Cities, The Current has opened up a wide variety of music, and their streaming only channels are superb.  There also seems to have been a 'come to Jesus moment' in music radio, where they realized the stiffness of their playlists was pushing listeners away, but the playlists are still claustrophobic compared to 20 years ago, and there are other issues which need to be addressed.

This gets me back to Courtney.  Courtney is not some Pinterest mom who has bought her way onto a local stage to play two nights of cover songs, just so she can check off a box on her bucket list.  She heard the calling of her music, and embraced it.  Courtney had to make a lot of tough decisions about her life, but she made them for herself.  She went on tour, playing dirty bars and half empty coffee houses.  She immersed herself into writing her music, with her vision clearly represented in the songs.  She was done being a spectator, jumping eagerly onto the playing field to get sweaty, dirty and hurt, with sporadic moments of pure joy.  It shows.  Her music is exceptional.

A local musician who's got a great song, and who's already charting in Europe?  You'd think it'd be a no brainer to giver her a few local spins.  When talking to a popular local radio station in the Twin Cities, not necessarily about Tangled Web, but more talking about her music in general, Courtney was told "our station is never going to play the music of a woman over 50.  They just won't."

What Bullsh#t!

What radio station announces their next song "next up Cake By the Ocean from 22 year old led DNCE!"?  Age is only an issue for the uptight, stick up their caboose Music Director and/or Program Director who's trying pathetically to look nuanced, the grown adult trying to feebly and pitifully look cool to a 15 year old.  Instead of using their musical expertise to help mold a good playlist of songs they think represents the market (like The Current does), they're hiding behind a gaggle of teens, hoping if they do what the mean girls want, they'll let them hang out with them.  This is a gutless coward who not only doesn't know a good song when it comes across their desk, they epitomize the cookie cutter, generic, lifeless industry which is music radio; a pathetic product which still (unfortunately) dominates our local airwaves.

You can't fix stupidity, you can only work around the problem.  Courtney refuses to say which radio station said this, but if I had three guesses, I'd probably only need two.  Here's the link to her song on BandCamp, the single Tangled Web:  https://courtneyyasmineh.bandcamp.com  Listen to the song, buy it(!!!), and then call every station in town and tell them to play the new hot song from the "too good to pass on," "up and coming Twin Cities artist," Courtney Yasmineh.

By the way, Courtney Yasmineh is also a heck of a writer, with her first book, 'A Girl Called Sidney,' available now.  No one needs to validate Courtney, but local Twin Cities radio stations shouldn't be going out of their way to ignore her.  She deservers to be heard, as does any artist with a good song, regardless of their age.