The Long Kiss Goodbye: Fear of a Black Planet Killed a Black Radio Station

Three decades have passed. And last week, both of these iconic radio stations found themselves on the brink of extinction.

WBLS’s parent company, the Black-owned Inner City Broadcasting, was being forced into bankruptcy by its investors. Kiss’s owner, Emmis Communications, had been selling off assets to stay solvent. Emmis’ finance chief, Patrick Walsh, saw the revenue of both of these stations plummet from $60 million a few years ago to $30 million.

Emmis’ president of radio, Rick Cummings, took a sober look at the situation.

“You had two stations that had once been dominant in the market battling each other down at 10th and 11th place,” Cummings said. “Neither of us were winning.”

To survive, one of them had to go.  To many folks’ surprise, it was Kiss that went away.

“I really thought we would be the buyer for the longest time,” said Jeff Smulyan, founder and chief executive of Emmis.

On one level, the collapse of those two globally influential brands into one is a sign that radio’s power and value has been eclipsed, especially by new forms of media, downloadable and streaming music in particular. The troubles of radio were also compounded by deregulation — which made radio stations act according to the needs of the stock market rather than their audiences. And the woes of Black radio were redoubled by a new, digital audience measurement system, changing demographics, and the perennial racism of advertisers who — even in the 21st century — discount the buying power of the Black consumer. And the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 just made everything worse.

But there’s more to it than that.

The fact is that the demise of 98.7 Kiss FM did not have to happen at all. Both Kiss and the station that swallowed it, WBLS, were sabotaged from within. Their swift rise and slow decline is the 30-year story of one of the greatest cultural and management failings of our time: How stations that purported to serve broad audiences with the power of Black culture ended up forgetting those audiences and ignoring that culture.

The squeezing of these once widely listened-to stations into a narrow lane called “Urban adult contemporary” has as much to do with the myopia of its programmers and sales force — perhaps a comfort with the world they know rather than fight it out in a world they don’t — as it does with economy, technology and demographics.

The history shows that both stations, year after year, made decisions that killed their stations’ future by fighting a cultural war against Black youth and by refusing to understand the broad appeal of the music they did program.

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