Gen Xers are getting their very own taste of nostalgia-Sunnyvale's KCNL is calling it "Adult Alternative." Having lost its virginity to New Order, Violent Femmes or Nirvana anywhere from 10 to 20 years ago, the Alternative Nation is all grown up now, and fast becoming a prime target demographic. As the old saying goes, your favorite music will always be what you were listening to when you started getting laid-or really, really wished you were. The formula works because, when it comes to music, nostalgia rules. "Radio stations will always be going for that audience of an age range of 25-49," says former Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, "and they will play the music that the audience at any given time remembers from college and high school-you know, the prime music-loving years." Playing your classic rock hits from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s and beyond. Via time-tested methods of research and listener response, they whittle that music down to a few hundred sing-along songs, which in turn become a sort of canon of demographic-specific music, and it's all packaged just for you: Your oldies station. "oldies" for the '50s and "classic rock" for the '60s and '70s.
It happens every 20 years or so: radio program directors looking for ways to hit the lucrative 25- to 49-year-old demographic create a new term to describe the hits of yesteryear-e.g. Scott Weiland, on the other hand, is just going to have to deal with the fact that Stone Temple Pilots are already pretty much "classic" alternative rock. WHEN MOZART was cranking out the jams, it's safe to say that no one was calling his music "classical"-at least not without Wolfgang opening up a concerto of whoop-ass on them.
0 kommentar(er)
