Two
hard rock bands, one young and one old, walk into a bar. The bartender
asks to see the older band’s ID. “Welcome,” she says. “I loved your
music when I was a college student in the 90s.” The younger band hands
the bartender its ID. “Sorry,” she says, fiddling with the knob on her
FM radio, “you’re far too young to be in here. Go get a few radio hits
and come back in a decade or two.”
 |
| Ghost BC, a.k.a. Ghost, one of the few metal bands with songs popular at both Pandora and hard rock stations. |
Such
is the dilemma for young hard rock and metal bands. Radio has all but
turned its back on the hard rock and metal stars of tomorrow. It’s a
shame. Radio has remained the most common source of music discovery,
according to numerous surveys over the years. The old-fashioned format
is tied with friends/family at 68 percent, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital.
Where do fans of metal and hard rock go for new music? Not commercial
radio. Metal, and its umbrella genre, hard rock, has become a format for
the middle-aged listener. People wanting to find new, hard music will
find what they’re looking for at Pandora.
But
hard rock and metal do well at Pandora, a democratic platform that
rewards songs for their listeners’ positive reactions, not the decisions
of radio program directors. Metal,
a sub-genre of the more popular rock category, is tied for 13th in
monthly time spent listening and currently gets over 6 million unique
listeners per month. Rock,
which includes hard rock and other types of rock music, has the most
monthly listening hours on Pandora, ranks 2nd in monthly time spent
listening and gets 50 million unique listeners each month.
The
numbers show the severity of hard rock radio’s problem. According to
Nielsen BDS data, only 10.5 percent of hard/active rock stations’
playlists are current tracks while 82.9 percent are legacy/golden tracks
and 6.6 percent are recurrents (“active rock” stations have an emphasis
on hard rock, “recurrents” are former current songs that still get
spins). For comparison, current songs are 85 percent of music played at
both pop and rhythmic (a catchall spanning upbeat rhythmic pop, hip hop
and upbeat R&B) and 68 percent at country.
