Music styles in rural USA

June 7, 2006 12:25 PM

How come all rural radio stations in the U.S. seem to be universally country or rap/hip-hop? Is there a reason that alternative, techno, jazz, new wave, and disco flourishes in the city and fizzles in the country? Is there really something about rural areas that fosters a narrow, homogenous interest in music, or is it a self-perpetuating cycle between listeners and marketing demographics? Or are folks in the country much more diverse than we're led to believe?
posted by chef_boyardee to media & arts (21 comments total)

Two words: Clear Channel
posted by randomstriker at 12:27 PM on June 7, 2006

Well I think a big issue is that there are just not that many stations. If you've only got 3 stations, obviously you're going to go with what's most popular.

In a big city with many more stations you'll have much more of an opportunity to find niche listeners, and you'll have large enough of an audience that servicing that niche will be profitable.
posted by Paris Hilton at 12:30 PM on June 7, 2006

Would you not say your lifestyle generally includes both music and residence as part of its defintion?
posted by vanoakenfold at 12:37 PM on June 7, 2006

My experience with radio stations hasn't been the same as yours.

I've heard plenty of rural Christian and rock stations, and I don't think I've ever heard a rural rap station (R&B, sure. Top 40, absolutely. Easy listening, talk, all kinds of stuff. Gospel, even. But I've only heard rap stations in cities.)

Granted, this is all anecdotal, but I can't help but wonder if your impressions might be inaccurate.
posted by box at 12:45 PM on June 7, 2006

People interested in music outside the scope of Clear Channel aka Soylent Green aka NAMBLA, be they in the country or city, will generally be savvy enough to ditch their FM radio in favor of internet radio. Both conventional radio stations and internet-only streams like somafm are accessible by anyone with a decent internet connection, and can even be listened over a stereo with something like the uber-cool squeezebox.

I live in Minneapolis so I don't have this issue as badly (89.3 The Current is a fantastic station), but you better believe that if I lived rurally I wouldn't be turning on FM too often.

I imagine there are a lot of people in the country doing just that. There is probably an even larger number that don't explore music options because they don't know they exist.
posted by mcstayinskool at 12:45 PM on June 7, 2006

Having briefly worked at an AM radio station in a town of about 6,000, I will say that they're diverse within a narrow spectrum, if that makes sense. For instance, my station was known as a country station, but I played and got requests for everything from Elvis and Al Green to the Allman Bros. and Lynyrd Skynyrd to George Jones and Johnny Cash. So all these got mixed in with the "new country" sound that predominated our playlist in the early 90's. A wide range, but all this still fits into the "rural" aesthetic.

If I called one of the country stations here in this decently sized town, and asked for any of these, I'd be laughed back to a dial tone.

Now, my experience was pre-Clear Channel, pre-deregulation, so YMMV. But this radio station is still independent, and still plays a wide mix of music. (Shout out to my boys at WMSR, yo!)
posted by 1f2frfbf at 12:50 PM on June 7, 2006

Is there really something about rural areas that fosters a narrow, homogenous interest in music

I think the narrow, homogenous stereotype can be leveled at nearly every aspect of life in small towns. It's why people leave these towns for the "big city." ;-)

Seriously, it's about demographics. There's a barrier-to-entry cost to deliver radio content, and that has to be matched by an audience of sufficient size that can be marketed to. Small radio stations simply cannot afford to provide jazz programming to the 10 people in SmallTown USA that like jazz because the size of the audience can't ever justify starting the station in the first place. So the stations serve up only the most popular fare. Go back 20 years, and every station in TinyTown USA was playing Warrant, Poison and Motley Crue.

In the "big city," while that audience of 10 jazz lovers is still smaller than the hip-hop fans, it's now an audience of 100,000 jazz lovers. Now it's a critical mass that can justify the initial and ongoing expenses of "niche" programming.
posted by frogan at 12:53 PM on June 7, 2006

perhaps also it is that urban life is very much about wider varieties of experience and entertainment, faster trend cycles, more dense exposure to marketing influences, and higher general cultural/material disposability...
posted by troybob at 12:58 PM on June 7, 2006

I live in the country. Our radio is a bit eclectic but we have a few college and public stations in the area which play all sorts of things. Most of the major stations are, as you said, country or hip-hop or ClearChannel which I find generally amounts to classic-hits-whatever. We listen to satellite or internet radio. I'd always assumed it was numbers, as frogan says. maybe in the Burlington area where you'd reach 100,000 people, you could have some sort of indie rock channel, but where we are there would be like six people listening it it and the same size antenna would only reach maybe 15-20,000 people max.
posted by jessamyn at 1:01 PM on June 7, 2006

My experience has been just the opposite. I grew up in the suburbs in Michigan (everything is separated by something rural around my house), and we had more diversity there than we do where I currently live (Philadelphia). There were 1 or 2 country stations, a couple top 40 stations, an alternative station, a couple of classic rock stations, and your other various assorted public radio/religious/jazz stations. In Philly, there's a rock station, public radio, top 40-ish (skewed toward hip-hop), an oldies station, a couple of religious stations, and about a thousand hip-hop and r&b stations. It drives me nuts because they never play the good hip-hop either.
posted by monochromaticgirl at 1:16 PM on June 7, 2006

A lot of this has to do with commercial vs. non-commercial radio. It's commerical radio that delivers the blandification, whether in a city or in the country -- one of the reasons it's more difficult to sustain a non-commercial station in a rural area is on account of the exponentially-greater coverage area to reach an audience.

For a MN example, KAXE is rural but I daresay they play as wide a range of materials as KFAI does in the Twin Cities (both are largely volunteer operations). KFAI first started up (and broadcast for years) with only a 10-watt transmitter.
posted by omnidrew at 1:18 PM on June 7, 2006

Like box, I would find a rural rap station very unusual. The choices I'd give for rural radio would be Country (meaning modern country, ie country rock); Christian; and Classic Rock (ie 70s oldies with the pop and anything black bleached out).
posted by Rash at 1:20 PM on June 7, 2006

You left out the third type- Christian.

In fact, I would peg those top three as Christian, Country and Talk Radio. Whenever we get away from an urban area while driving, dial-flipping invariably returns one of those.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 1:28 PM on June 7, 2006

We do have rap out here; lots of it. It's not exactly the boonies, but is likely coming from some of the large towns dotting the region. All of the kids seem to listen to it, regardless of ethnicity. Forgot Christian and classic rock; we do have a lot of that too.
posted by chef_boyardee at 1:29 PM on June 7, 2006

The California country (i.e., Central Valley), is mostly dominated by Spanish language music in the ranchera and tejano styles. Quite homogenous and conservative.

I think the bias is that cities attract people with more diverse interests, not that living in the country homogenizes a person.

Cities also have many more people per square mile, so the 50,000 watt antenna erected in Manhattan reaches many millions of people, compared to the antenna 50 miles north of Bakersfield that reaches a few thousands. However, each antenna costs the same to operate.
posted by ikkyu2 at 1:29 PM on June 7, 2006

I think that rural America has a much higher percentage of lower-income Americans than urban and suburban areas, and that lower-income Americans find rap and country music more relatable and reflective of their world-view than guitar-driven emo rock made by trust-fund kids in Brooklyn. Rap music and country music are often about struggling to make do, working hard for very little, and going to extreme lengths to overcome long odds and succeed in a world that's out to get you at every turn -- a situation that many people out in WalMartland understand all too well.
posted by junkbox at 1:52 PM on June 7, 2006

Country (meaning modern country, ie country rock)... Classic Rock... and talk shows

Oddly enough, or not, that's exactly what you'll hear if you happen to bump into one of the frequencies of the US army radio around their bases abroad. It's a very funny experience especially if you're driving by and don't know that there's a US base in the vicinity.
posted by funambulist at 2:24 PM on June 7, 2006

Too bad you're not in Alberta. CKUA has a rather eclectic format (rock, blues, jazz, country, folk, trad... sometimes in the same hour) and covers most of the south and central parts of the province via a mixture of FM and AM transmitters. It was originally set up by the provincial education ministry (for school broadcasts) but has been a non-governmental nonprofit for the last decade or so.

Or are folks in the country much more diverse than we're led to believe?

It's like restaurants with specialized cuisine - it takes a certain critical mass of patrons (those 'niche' diners/listeners referred to by Paris Hilton above) to support the varieties that are out of the mainstream.
posted by hangashore at 3:37 PM on June 7, 2006

Small radio stations simply cannot afford to provide jazz programming to the 10 people in SmallTown USA that like jazz because the size of the audience can't ever justify starting the station in the first place.

Hey, don't forget KJAZZ: "Our broadcast range is only 23 feet... which makes us the most powerful jazz station in the entire US of A!"
posted by languagehat at 3:59 PM on June 7, 2006

Don't forget the difference between there being radio stations in the country, radio transmitters in the country, and radio waves in the country: top-40 stations will tend to have very powerful transmitters and locate them out between cities so they can cover multiple cities with one transmitter, and those powerful transmitters also mean you'll be able to pick up those (urban-directed) stations far outside the urban areas they target.

This website features lists of urban areas' broadcast tower locations -- it'll give you an idea of what sort of huge urban-radio transmitters are sitting out between cities.
posted by mendel at 5:12 PM on June 7, 2006

Well, if you're just looking to blame the "mainstream," even college radio these days seems way more homogeneous than it did fifteen years ago. Playing infinite loops of The Postal Service and Iron & Wine and !!! instead of George Jones and Kenny Chesney and Rascal Flatts makes for just as narrow-minded and absolute listening through another person's lens... it just seems more authentic because it's being spun by indie-elitist undergrads. There's something just as poisonously self-conscious about it, as far as I'm concerned, if not more so.

Arguably, no matter what part of the country you're in, there are only a handful of stations left that aren't married to their core playlists for huge periods of XMTR time, whether they be Clear Channel or collegiate.
posted by mykescipark at 7:27 PM on June 7, 2006