Cummings tried for a year to get the management of sister station, New York’s Hot 97, to follow suit. Hot’s program director Joel Salkowitz hired Funkmaster Flex to do a weekend show, but the station’s general manager, Judy Ellis, resisted. “We will never be able to sell hip-hop,” she told him. “It’s not going to happen.”
Ellis had good reason to think that Salkowitz and Cummings were nuts. Despite much evidence to the contrary, advertisers still viewed rap and hip-hop as having a primarily Black audience. And in the racist pseudo-science of American demography, Black audiences were viewed as having less worth than white audiences. As a result, Black radio stations earned something like 60 cents for every dollar that pop stations made. As KMEL had done in San Francisco, Power 106 had trained its sales staff to fight against those perceptions, and was beginning to win.
Ellis fired Salkowitz, and when the next programmer, Steve Smith, eventually came to the same conclusions as Cummings, Ellis dropped her resistance.
Smith took Power 106’s slogan, “Where Hip-Hop Lives,” more seriously than anyone expected. He put Funkmaster Flex on Hot 97 every day. He hired Dr. Dre & Ed Lover for his morning show. He sought the cultural counsel of respected MCs, and hired the founding fathers of hip-hop to do radio shows. Flavor Flav even did traffic reports. Community affairs shows guided listeners through riots and racial outrage.
Both Power 106 and Hot 97 quickly became the number one stations in L.A. and New York.
Just as WBLS had left the door open for 98.7 Kiss FM by neglecting the audience for rap, Kiss had then left that same door open for Hot 97. For hip-hop supporters like Bill Stephney, Black stations had only themselves to blame.
“They turned their back on the most significant development in Black music that had ever came out of New York,” he said.
As pop stations across the country began to adopt the Emmis formula, Black radio stations became followers in a game they very well could have led.
The Rebirth Of Kiss
In 1994, Emmis Communications bought 98.7 Kiss FM. With Hot 97 winning the youth audience, it allowed Kiss to jettison any pretense of competing for new ears with new music, and focus completely on adults and by programming old school R&B. Emmis hired celebrity talent from soul and funk’s glory days — Isaac Hayes, Ashford & Simpson, Roberta Flack — and created an expensive rebranding campaign.
“I still remember showing the Barry White commercial,” Cummings recalled. “He’s in this penthouse. He looks in the camera and says, as only he can, ‘98.7 Kiss FM… Ohhhhh baby.’ I got a standing ovation.”
The campaign triumphed for a time. 98.7 Kiss FM shot to #1, beating Hot 97 for the first time in years. WBLS trailed, a distant third.
The rivalry between WBLS and 98.7 Kiss FM heated up again. WBLS rehired Frankie Crocker for a spell, then fired him again. This time, WBLS’s on-air promo assault against Kiss took on explicit racial tones, labeling Kiss “the plantation station”: the white-owned station usurping the territory of the legacy Black-owned outlet.
Even the folks at WBLS knew it was bull. Crocker distanced himself from the plantation promos. WBLS morning man Ken Webb told the New York Times that the campaign was “childish.”
The Decline of Kiss
Emmis’s incarnation of 98.7 Kiss FM didn’t remain at number one. By 2001, its retro format had slumped badly in the ratings. That’s when Rick Cummings got a call from the station’s virtual father, Barry Mayo.
“Mr. Mayo,” Cummings answered. “To what do we deserve the honor of this call?”
“Rick,” Mayo replied. “Can I ask you a question? How did you fuck up my radio station?”
Cummings laughed. “Well,” he said. “We did.”
“In 26 years of my career,” Mayo continued. “I’ve never, ever made a phone call like this and asked this question: Can I help?”
In the years after he left 98.7 Kiss FM, Barry Mayo had sold his company and became a millionaire. Semi-retired, he went back to college, took photography courses and consulted radio stations in his spare time. But Mayo’s phone call with Cummings led, eventually, to Mayo’s re-entry into the radio business, as general manager of Emmis’s New York “cluster” of stations.
But Mayo found that the business he entered in the 1980s was not the same.
“It started with the signing of Telecommunications Act of 1996,” Mayo says. “The value of licenses started to escalate in anticipation of the industry being deregulated. And what you say a fundamental shift of the radio industry going from a predominantly broadcaster driven business to an investor driven business.” It made the running of radio stations subject to the weather patterns of the stock market, rather than the needs of individual stations and their audiences.
After Mayo’s departure from Emmis in 2006 to take the presidency of Radio One — a chain of Black-owned and -operated radio stations (that, by the way, owns NewsOne.com) — another huge change happened that would effect traditionally Black radio outlets in particular: The arrival of the Portable People Meter as a way to measure radio audiences. The digital device that listened and identified whenever a radio station was playing within human earshot replaced the manual “diaries” that, for decades, were the only way to determine how and when audiences listened.
The diaries relied on people’s memory and their perceptions, invariably influenced by their passions. And passionate audiences — Black listeners in particular — tended to overstate the amount of time they listened to their favorite stations.
Cummings elaborated: “They might think, ‘Oh, I love Steve Harvey! I never miss him. I listen from the time I get on the bus and get to midtown, so I listen for 90 minutes five times a week.’ And they would write that down.
“What they failed to note was that ‘On Tuesday I didn’t listen cause I was on the [subway], and on Thursday I didn’t listen at all.’ That’s what happens when you’ve got very loyal people. I don’t think they were [at another station]. They were just nowhere.”
The advent of the Portable People Meter in 2007 and the Great Recession in 2008 packed a one-two punch to Black radio.
“We knew that you were only going to have [room for] one urban station in New York,” said Emmis founder and chief executive, Jeff Smulyan.
The only question was: Which one would it be?