KLOS, Cable TV, and Perenially-Mutating Genre Definitions

I don't choose to listen to KLOS at work. It's just always on. It's also one of the better options out of the music stations that come in on our crappy radio. Star and KROQ? Sorry, but there are only so many times you can hear Kings of Leon in a day before your brain starts oozing out of your ears. Jack FM? A limited playlist of overplayed past and present top 40 hits, all played by a randomized playlist with no heart or soul. Blah. KCRW is wonderful, but they don't play music in the afternoon. I like The Sound too, but they tend to be a bit too mellow a lot of the time.

So that just leaves KLOS. The station's core has always been classic rock. Back in the day, they'd throw in modern rock/adult contemporary stuff like the Red Hot Chili Peppers too. But once Arrow FM changed to Jack FM, it left L.A. without a full-fledged classic rock station. So KLOS got rid of the new stuff and dedicated themselves entirely to classic rock. In listening to KLOS on a fairly regular basis for the past year or two, my problem with them is their horrible lack of variety. Adhering to a classic rock format gives them a good three decades worth of great music at their disposal. Yet they play pretty much the exact same stuff every single day - all the hit singles that everyone's already familiar with, deeper album tracks nearly nonexistant. Luckily, a good amount of the songs they play are actually good. And unlike most stations, they generally only play each song once a day, unlike the countless stations that pick a handful songs and play them every two hours every day for several months. So ultimately, KLOS is the lesser of many evils.

Lately though, KLOS has abandoned their loyal adherence to the classic rock format. Formerly self-promoted as "Southern California's Classic Rock Station", the station now refers to itself as "Southern California's Best Rock Station". The music change isn't too dramatic. 95% of the time, they still stick to the small classic rock playlist that they've always limited themselves to. But every now and then, they throw in some more contemporary rock, kinda like how they used to do. Some of the selections are decent, stuff that doesn't feel too horribly out of place on a classic rock station, songs that could feasibly be considered "new classics." But a lot of it is the same crap that the other rock stations have been playing to death for the past decade, (i.e. Kid Rock, Puddle of Mudd, and Nickelback). This infusion of crap rock reeks of desperation, a sad ploy to bring in younger listeners and more advertising dollars by watering themselves down.

It's a practice that's all too common in the media these days. If something isn't attracting enough viewers or listeners, then it won't bring in as many advertisers and the station will be less willing to fund it. So you dumb it down. You broaden its appeal so that it reaches out to a wider audience. Your product is just a watered-down, homogenized shell of its former self. You've forgotten your original mission statement and cashed in your integrity for a few extra ratings points. This isn't automatically a bad thing. Media, like politics, is all about compromise. You make a few concessions, and in return, you get to keep doing what matters. Ideally, you could throw a little extra crap into your programming and still be able to maintain the station's integrity and focus. But let's be honest - that's not what happens. In fact, KLOS is probably one of the least objectionable examples of a station selling out and altering its format.

Here's what normally happens in these situations: the station's getting low ratings, they change their approach and alter their programming (either slightly or drastically) in the interest of drawing in a more profitable target demographic (adults in the 18-49 range), and the station gradually becomes a bastardized version of its original self. If the changes don't bring in better ratings and more ad revenue, then the station either continues fighting to broaden its appeal or it ceases to exist it current form. L.A. rock station Indie 103.1 would be an example of the latter. Originally, it was launched as a genuine alternative to the bland commercial radio style of KROQ. They had better music, more variety, and daily free-form programs hosted by celebrities and musicians playing all sorts of stuff that you'd never hear on any other radio station in a million years. But the ratings weren't there. So the owners got rid of all the specialty shows, threw in more Kings of Leon. But the ratings didn't increase, so the owners shut down the station and put a Mexican polka station in its place. But here's the silver lining: since being taken off terrestrial radio, Indie has become an online-only station and its music selection has gotten significantly better. Now, they get to play whatever crazy stuff they want to, and they barely have to run any commercials.

The more common alternative to being shut down is to change focus and broaden your appeal. It's the mindset that has taken over the entire system of cable television for the past decade. Look at how cable TV was originally set up: you have a channel for music videos and concerts called Music Televsion, a channel for educational shows called The Learning Channel, and then channels like USA with a wide variety of programming. The variety channels like USA and FX seem to have fared the best in recent years. They've been able to maintain their basic structure and do fairly well. But most of the niche channels have been morphed and tweaked to the point that they barely resemble the original channels. MTV no longer plays music. The Learning Channel (now just TLC) is full of reality shows about unfit mothers. The History Channel is full of reality shows about lumberjacks and fishermen. Cartoon Network now has plenty of live-action programming, like people playing basketball on trampolines. TV Land, once a channel dedicated to just showing episodes of classic TV shows, has now found airtime for dating reality shows.

Speaking of TV Land, I was browsing their schedule the other day. And like most classic rock stations, they have decades of quality content at their disposal but still only present an extremely limited showcase. Yeah, they've got All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and MASH, but what about I Love Lucy or The Munsters or any of the other old Nick and Nite staples? And Nick at Nite, formerly an outlet for classic shows, now consists of George Lopez, The Nanny, and Malcolm in the Middle. New classics, indeed. If you have 24 hours of airtime to fill everyday, you might as well put as many shows as you can out there. We need more variety. Case in point: the Nickelodeon Games and Sports channel (which doesn't exist anymore). The entire 24/7 lineup consisted of five or six old Nickelodeon game shows played over and over. That was the entire channel. The nostalgia was fun, but it wore off pretty quickly. If you're a station with a concept, then you have to live up to it - with quality programming and variety.

Plenty of other channels find adequate ways to fill their airtime, but have watered themselves down from their original form, resulting in a half-assed, less enjoyable product. Look at AMC. The entire channel used to be old, classic movies. No commercials, no censorship, just good movies. Then they started showing newer movies, which they had to censor in order to air on basic cable. Then they added commercial breaks to the movies. Now, American Movie Classics just chopped up, commercial-filled versions of crap like Catwoman and Two Weeks Notice. But hey, I bet they're more profitable that way.

The divisions between the genre-specific channels are mostly blurred now. And I'm not saying this to try to make a conservative or segregationist argument, since I strongly believe the progression and innovation are the cornerstones of our society. My point is that the companies that run them are thinking primarily in terms of saving money on production costs and making money with ad revenue. And the result is that instead of airing content serves a purpose and addresses an audience normally overlooked by most of the other media outlets, we instead end up with hundreds of channels filled with a bunch of crappy reality shows. That's what you wind up with when a few big media conglomerates continue their quest for that lowest common denominator: cameras following horrible people around and passing their arguments off as entertainment. The whole reality TV thing was supposed to be a passing fad, but it's been going on for over a decade now and fills an overwhelming percentage of TV programming as a whole.

Maybe the Indie 103.1 example is a proper showcase of the growing shifts in American media consumption. Instead of building your personal schedule around what's on TV, you can pick and choose what shows to watch and catch them anytime on Hulu or your Tivo. And instead of being stuck with whatever your local terrestrial radio stations choose to play, you can opt for satellite radio, internet stations, and customizable services like Pandora. These new methods are still a relative drop in the bucket compared to the power of the established media structures of media. But as TV and radio stations continue to sacrifice quality for cost effectiveness, more people will get turned off and seek out a safe haven, free of reality shows and an overabundance of product placement. Sometimes, things have to get worse before they get better. We had to suffer through 8 years of Bush before people gained enough sense to elect Obama. Similarly, the quality of standard TV and radio options will decline and the effectiveness of new media will increase. Ineffectiveness and dissatisfaction begets change. We've already seen it in the fact that networks are putting their TV shows online for free instead of still making you pay $2 to download an episode. So let the peons trudge through that hell of reality shows and Linkin Park songs. Those out there who actually care will still have a way of bypassing the garbage to find content that's actually worthwhile. Of course, as with most things that are both free and worthwhile, it's only a matter of time before they try to make more money off of it and find a way to ruin it forever. So enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.