Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Red Hot Garth Brooks Chili Peppers?
Sunday, January 28, 2007

A decade ago, while living in Nashville, I wrote a big piece in the NYT about why blacks don't listen to country music. Looks like I need to update that piece: Why Hispanics don't listen to country music! A fascinating piece looks at how Music Row in Nashville is scrambling to appeal to Hispanics as their percentage of the population in country's traditional base across the South, Southwest, and West explodes. A key reason has been the loss of a country station in L.A.:

The nation's No. 2 market joined New York, which has lacked a country station since 2002, and San Francisco, which bowed out of the country game in early 2005, as the third among the top five markets with no FM country outlet. (Two Los Angeles-area AM stations recently switched to country.)
Among the reasons for the KZLA switch: It's increasingly difficult to succeed with country radio in a market where Caucasians carry less and less sway. A 2006 Arbitron report estimated that only 5.4% of country radio's nationwide audience is Hispanic and 2.3% is black, while 92.3% of country listeners fall into Arbitron's "other" category (which includes Caucasians and
Pacific Islanders).
But in recent years, U.S. Census figures show, the Hispanic portion of Los Angeles County's population (which grew to 44.6% in 2000 from 37.8% in 1990) has passed up the county's non-Hispanic white population (which slipped to 31.1% of the total in 2000 from 40.8% in 1990).

A station in Miami has become a pioneer in this effort, but the core white audience of country has been pushing back: "There appears to be a very vocal bias (and/or) prejudice that exists in South Florida among whites who feel that the Hispanics have 'pushed' their culture and language on everyone else," explains [the station manager]. That bias makes it difficult to reach Hispanics using the WKIS airwaves, he says. "For example, we can't even do bilingual IDs without significant listener backlash."

Labels: Pop Culture

Posted by B Feiler at 7:56 AM
Permalink Digg this Post Email this Post

0 Comments: