Post by David Crider, State University of New York at Oswego

As someone who has previously written for Antenna about country music radio’s gender problem, I have been following the “#SaladGate” situation pretty closely. For those who are not familiar, longtime radio consultant Keith Hill was recently explaining his winning strategies in Country Aircheck Weekly. Hill stated that one way to improve ratings is to decrease the number of females on the playlist to around 15-percent. He concluded, “They’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.” Well-known female country artists Miranda Lambert and Martina McBride took umbrage to Hill’s comments, and their fan bases followed suit, attacking Hill via e-mail and social media.

Hill has been on the defensive ever since, falling back on his 40 years of experience with music programming and consulting. He addressed many of his detractors directly via Twitter, and then appeared on the Radio Stuff Podcast to explain his strategy and his side of the situation. At one point in the interview, Hill noted that he had created a Twitter account during a convention panel six years ago, then never used it again until recently when the angry #SaladGate tweets started coming in. He added that the country radio audience is 55 to 65 percent female, and until now they were happy with what they heard. It was only when they were exposed to the internal data that they started to think the format was biased.

It seems to me that this is a classic case of disruption brought about by digital and social media and greater media literacy. Radio is a very insular media culture, driven by the same research metrics that have been used for decades. The Keith Hills of the world fall back on what has always worked because they see no reason to change. Fear drives their programming decisions; if they try something new or different, they could lose listeners. Until recently, they were immune from direct criticism because they worked behind the scenes and had much more anonymity than on-air personalities, who serve as the public voices of the industry. The rise of Twitter and Facebook has brought listeners to the gates of this insular radio industry, allowing them to shout, “Listen to us!” When listeners don’t like something, they can let radio management know, immediately and directly. Naturally, this development will knock a practitioner of ingrained methods off his/her axis.

Another potential disruption is the shift in how we receive our music. The advent of streaming has already broken down barriers of genre for many listeners; they now base their playlists not on whether it is Country or Rock, but instead by context or mood. Rock journalist Alan Cross points out that for Alternative Rock listeners, the gender of the singer does not matter like it did 15-20 years ago. The day may be coming soon when Keith Hill can no longer fall back on saying, “Women like male artists” simply because they had in the past, especially in a format where the majority of the audience is female.

The push toward greater media literacy has been underway for several years, and social media allows inside information to be spread much more quickly. More people are questioning the framing of media content and the media ecosystem in which it is created; in so doing, they discover patterns of bias. In short, as more people find out how the sausage (or in this case, salad) is made, it is likely that more people will find fault with the practices of Hill and others who shape the content. As the pushback grows, the radio industry will be forced to make changes because the fear of keeping things as-is will outweigh the fear of change.

The down side of this disruption is it also begets the “Twitter mob.” Hill received messages using every nasty name in the book, as well as a handful of death threats. He became the latest “target of the week” for those who enjoy tearing someone down. These people may be very passionate about their social beliefs, but they can also forget that everything they say via social media affects how people see them. In this case, as someone in a management culture that struggles to understand social media, Hill’s treatment on Twitter prompted him to call the site “a cesspool that overflows.” In a separate interview, Hill also stated that when he gets one of these angry tweets, “I know it doesn’t represent the mass Country audience.” The problem here is that when it’s Miranda Lambert or Martina McBride’s fans sending those tweets, it may not represent the audience as a whole, but it does represent some of the most passionate listeners. When it comes to social media, you ignore these motivated listeners at your own peril. However, when too many of them cross lines of decorum, they become easier to dismiss.

During his Radio Stuff Podcast interview, Hill acknowledged that there is a degree of sexism within radio and country music, but not by design: “Its outcome is sexist, but that’s because it’s simply responding to the market.” For those of us who study radio from a social-science viewpoint and wish to teach the next generation how to succeed in this or any other entertainment medium, it poses an interesting conundrum: How do we reconcile the imperative to “give the people what they want” with the fact that from a sociological standpoint, we disapprove of what they want? Continuing to improve media literacy certainly helps, as we teach our students to pay closer attention to the ever-changing needs of the current audience, instead of falling back on decades of outdated trends.

Mickey Guyton (Image: KMLE/CBS Local)

I recently read a piece on All Access (a radio/music industry website) by R.J. Curtis, trumpeting 2015 as a possible “Year of the Woman” for country music and country music radio. As various country music programmers trumpeted the up-and-coming female country acts poised to break through this year, many of them scratched their heads as to why they have to try so hard to push female artists to the forefront. It’s a question I found myself asking when I was in their shoes in a similarly male-dominated music radio format.

The year was 2003, and I was the Program Director/Music Director at Revolution 103.7, an Alternative station in Chambersburg, PA. “Why Can’t I,” the lead single from Liz Phair’s self-titled album was going for adds, and remembering the important place Phair’s work held in 1990s indie rock, I added the song without hesitation. I immediately got pushback from my general manager and others whose opinion I trusted. Granted, many music critics decried Phair’s move toward “pop-rock” status, but it shouldn’t have mattered. Ask anyone who owns a copy of Exile in Guyville if Liz Phair could ever be considered a “Pop” artist. Still, it was a time when I was expected to play Godsmack or Slipknot instead. Concerned about losing the coveted Male 18-34 listeners to the newer, testosterone-heavy Active Rock format, we Alternative programmers were supposed to mimic them as much as possible.

In the R.J. Curtis piece, Lisa McKay, a Country program director in Raleigh, states that their sister Pop station has a rule about playing no more than three females in a row, while she works to force three females into an hour. My first reaction to this statement is that it shouldn’t need to be forced. Country is a radio format that appeals equally to males and females, and the sales data backs this up. Yet in research that I presented at last April’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference, Country playlists skewed 83% male, and it is apparently getting worse. Curtis pointed out that just two of the 30 most played songs at the Country format right now are sung by women. Two. Thus making the current national Country playlist a staggering 93% male. These are numbers I would normally expect in the alpha-male-driven Rock formats, but in a climate where “bro-country” is considered the prevailing trend today, perhaps we should not be surprised.

My second reaction to McKay’s lament was, “Why do we even need a rule about how many consecutive female artists is too many?” Curtis compared the Top 30 Country songs to the Top 30 at Pop radio and found that nine of the top Pop songs were sung by women. Better than Country to be sure, but still producing a national current playlist that is over two-thirds male, and in a format whose target audience is women. Would women really change the station if they heard too many female voices in a row?

In this same article, Los Angeles Country program director Tonya Campos stated that people want success for female artists, “but only for the really good ones,” adding that she cannot add female singers just for the sake of having more female singers. Quality should of course be the rule, but there is also the possibility that a stigma exists about the quality of female country singers. During my dissertation research, I sat in with a Country DJ who took a call from a female listener, complaining that Taylor Swift cannot sing. After politely handling the call, he turned to me and said, “And yet, we never get a call saying Toby Keith or George Strait can’t sing… We only pick on our female artists.” Stories like this probably make Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie nod knowingly at the way radio and the music industry justifies the marginalization of women.

Author Eric Weisbard recently wrote a piece for NPR, collaborating with such music journalism titans as Maura Johnston and Jason King to note how the splintering of music radio formats has caused each to begin dictating the terms by which a song could be classified as Alternative, Country, and so on. So it is that we have come to a point where the two major rock awards at this year’s Grammys were won by artists who many immediately claimed were “not rock.” Beck’s Morning Phase won Rock Album of the Year – a win that was apparently just as controversial as his upset win for overall Album of the Year – and Paramore’s “Ain’t it Fun” won Rock Song of the Year. The band Trapt, a hard rock group best known for the raging 2003 hit “Headstrong,” immediately claimed that these two selections were part of a larger establishment conspiracy to prevent “anything too threatening or in your face” from dominating the rock scene.

Hayley Williams (Image: Neil Roberson)

This complaint could not be farther from the truth when it comes to radio airplay. Although Trapt has not had a hit in years, the “aggro” brand of rock has become so dominant on Rock radio for so long that Grantland music critic Steven Hyden recently described the state of mainstream rock as “ossified.” In other words, an entire generation has been raised on male singers pairing aggression with perceived alienation, entrenching the angry white male aesthetic into a dominant position from which it cannot be pushed aside by newer trends. Formerly an Alternative mainstay, Beck’s lighter fare was immediately ticketed for Adult Album Alternative, and Paramore – fronted by one of the heretofore few acceptable female rock singers, Hayley Williams – was sent directly to Pop radio despite far more critical praise than Liz Phair received a decade ago.

At least Country is trying to stop the same thing from happening with the “bro-country” movement. At times like this, I am reminded of Honna Veerkamp’s terrific piece, “Why Radio Needs Feminism.” Perhaps at least one male-dominated radio format will see the light this year and recognize that women listen too.