The question of whether radio should appeal to teens is just quaint now. It’s been almost a lifetime since broadcasters actively wanted those listeners or asked them what they liked. We were happy if they showed up by osmosis, or if the music we were playing for their parents worked for them as well, as it did in 1998 or 2010. Now, radio and teens are out of each other’s consideration sets by seemingly mutual agreement.
If radio decided to give teens what they wanted, where would they start? With Tyler the Creator? With the female singer-songwriters your niece likes who might be variously found on TikTok or Triple-A radio? Classic Rock? Connie Francis? What younger listeners wanted used to be a question that most programmers could tally by 7:55 p.m., just in time for the Top 8 at 8. Now, it would be one more thing to guesstimate through the streaming numbers, which already confound us enough. (BTW, Pink Floyd is in the TikTok top 10 this week.)
The argument about whether Top 40 should acknowledge teens, much less cater to them, has been playing out throughout the generations. I’ve mentioned my Saturday-afternoon group that live-chats about American Top 40 reruns a few times lately; any countdown featuring Bobby Sherman, Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, or Shaun Cassidy will unleash both unapologetic nostalgia and comments along the lines of “this is the crap that made me switch to FM rock.”
The discussion that programmers had about Donny, David, and Shaun in the ’70s was one they’d been having since at least the Monkees, then the bubblegum-pop explosion of the late ’60s. They’d have it again about New Kids on the Block in the late ’80s, particularly when programmers blamed them for tanking the CHR format. When teen pop clearly helped improve CHR’s fortunes in the late ’90s, it only put those arguments on hold for a few years, until PDs had to decide how to acknowledge the Radio Disney acts.
Thinking about those phases of pop music sequentially makes it clear that what we’ve been talking about all along has really been about those acts that appealed to pre-teens and younger teens, a debate reopened recently in these pages by the success of Huntr/X’s “Golden” and the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack. We’ve already had consumer-press stories about the movie’s phenomenal success spreading to parents. Whether that will translate to “Golden” testing with adults won’t be knowable for a while, but does it matter?
The “Golden” discussion has started me thinking about some of the first records I liked again. I started listening right at the moment that garage rock turned into either bubblegum or harder psychedelia, and a lot of the songs that I liked were definitely little-kid-friendly. (A few months in, there was a remake of “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead.”) But there was also the decidedly adult “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” by Aretha Franklin.
When I was a little kid, I also liked “A Man Without Love” by Engelbert Humperdinck. For years, I attributed that to being so enamored of the hits in 1967-68 that I liked even the very adult songs by association. Then, a few years ago, Humperdinck underwent his own pre-Connie Francis resurgence on TikTok and that demographic cliché was shattered not only across ages, but generations.
The records that defined bubblegum were often subversive. I didn’t hear “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by the Ohio Express as a metaphor, or know what made our sitter so upset about it. “Little Willy” by the Sweet became an entirely different song once I knew more about British slang. (That writing team, Chinn & Chapman, have a lot of musical resonance in the turbo-pop late ’00s, by which time we had mostly moved on to single entendres.)
The records that the teen idols of the early ’70s made were often not so juvenile at all. “Julie, Do Ya Love Me” and Bobby Sherman’s other hits were really swingin’ Vegas MOR. Donny Osmond went for pre-Beatles remakes and left the more rockin’ stuff to his brothers. The Donny/David/Bobby songs were teen hits because of who was singing them, not necessarily because of what they were. (You might say the same about Benson Boone now.)
Like the cereals advertised to my generation in that era, the songs that were overtly kid-friendly were part of a balanced breakfast. They led me to the Aretha (and Engelbert) songs that weren’t specifically for me, and they began a lifetime of radio listening. Whatever angst programmers might have felt about Miley/Justin/Jonas (and, hey, some of radio felt that way about Taylor Swift, too), the Radio Disney acts can now be seen as the groundwork for the last great era of pop music and the last mother/daughter coalition.
I have held for a while that the mother/daughter coalition will be rebuilt by making moms happy first, in hopes they might lure their kids out from under the earbuds. Adults are the ones still trying to enjoy Top 40 radio, and while we give them “Toxic” and “Super Bass” for that reason, we know they are also here to try and stay current and have something to talk with their kids about. For some, “Golden” has definitely been that record.
To that end, I’d like to suggest that even if you still view “Golden” as mostly a kids’ record, the answer might be “so what if it is?” If a song is abrasive or actively driving away listeners, that’s one thing. If the answer is merely that some adults are indifferent to it, well, the ratings suggest that there are a lot of songs we’re playing that listeners of all ages are indifferent to as well. And, in the time of “Ordinary” and “Die With a Smile,” it’s not as if adults don’t already have something to latch on to. (Except, maybe, for those who are waiting for the era of “Party Rock Anthem” to return.)
I don’t know if Radio Disney created a new generation of radio listeners as it intended, or if it merely amplified the artists who were propelled mostly by the Disney Channel. It has certainly been the case that since the network’s demise things have not gotten any better for pop radio and music.
Now, the task of fostering younger listeners falls to us. Nielsen PPM ratings are 6+, and even the listening outside your station’s target swells usage in a way radio needs. Pre-teens are the new listeners who don’t know they’re not supposed to like radio yet. I can guess what your reaction would be if I told you to in any way play to them, but maybe we can agree not to dismiss them if they did want to listen with their parents.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com