Teens fleeing adult radio by William Burrill

P.U.! No, that's not the only university your slacker teen has a hope in hell of getting accepted at.

That's "P.U." as in something detected by the teenage nose - and it don't smell like Teen Spirit.

It smells like a festering fossil called teen radio. Check it out: a zit-zapped zombie that gave up the ghost years ago and is now one reeking rotter crawling to cram your head with Celine Dion and Michael Bolton and Retro Rock guaranteed to be soft and runny.

C'mon teens. You've seen enough splatter flicks to know the drill: When menaced by a marrow-sucking melon-mangling monstrosity you gotta flee. Never mind that the shredder from your worst urban-legend nightmare is hiding in the backseat with a broken radio antenna dripping blood. Get in that car and flee.

It's what teens do best. And that's exactly what is happening, according to a recent study making the rounds of radio news sites on the Net under the headline "TEENS FLEE RADIO."

The report contains information from a new survey from The Bridge Ratings Research Company that indicates teens are rapidly leaving traditional radio for new media sources. In the first quarter of this year, 12-to-24-year-olds spent 68 quarter-hours listening to traditional radio and 50 quarter-hours using new media such as MP3 players, Internet radio and the like.

By the second quarter, that ratio was 66-51, and the third quarter 62 quarter-hours traditional radio and 55 new media. The tipping point seems to be September: 56 quarter-hours listening to traditional radio, and 63 quarter-hours using new media. And if that's not enough, the same survey indicates that the 25-to-59 and 35-to-64 age brackets are heading in the same direction.

With the CRTC having limited the number of Top 40 radio stations, today's teens have long turned to Much Music and MTV and word of mouth for a lot of their pop.

Now technology is filling the void: Some believe the teen drain is largely due to the large number of channels available through satellite radio. They believe youth are throwing their loyalty and their listening time behind the programming on fixed services such as DMX or Galaxie.

Many others, this columnist included, believe there are a number of factors that have turned radio into a teen no-man's land. You can start with the iPod and the much less hyped Sony Mps music piracy systems, which can hold up to 10,000 songs.

When MP3 services, such as Napster, first came out, the storage was so limited, some with room for as few as a dozen tunes, that any self-respecting radio pirate was kept ridiculously busy unloading yesterday's files to make room for today's pop or hip-hop to keep up the pose.

The Napster couldn't be caught napping.

"I am not surprised that tons of kids are leaving radio for more control. They don't want to hear the same pop pap poop all day, not to mention bazillions of ads," says Jamyz Bee of JAZZFM91. "We're getting more and more youngins at JAZZFM91, because we don't play the same four songs all day with 14 minutes of commercials an hour."

Bee says young listeners check out his channel for the old jazz, "but also to find out new stuff, and maybe even learn a thing or two."

JAZZFM91 is hoping for a younger image by this week, having hired Ralph Benmergui as the station's new morning show host. Benmergui kicks off his 6 a.m.-10 a.m. morning show this morning.

But who can blame the kids for bailing on radio, says Marc Weisblott, editor of betterlivingcentre.ca who, as always, has a mouthful ready on the topic of radio, which he loves and hates to see go downhill.

"There are just too many opportunities to express oneself and find cultural identifiers online - music downloads, instant messaging, blogs and journals," Weisblott says, "but, contrary to the original theory, Internet radio is not much of a teen thing ... those kids never had the chance to connect with radio in the first place so why would they seek out a better version of it?

"The real opportunity is reaching out to those disaffected grown-ups who haven't found a surrogate for the kind of radio that abandoned them ... that's what satellite radio in the States is trying to be all about and if anyone here knows what they're doing (which they don't), they'd be investing in the bandwidth to create programming and content that connected with the people who once listened to stations like CHUM-FM, CFNY and Q107 to interface with new music and culture."

Of course, most program directors and radio jocks see this teen flight as just so much bafflegab. "Another anti-radio research study likely commissioned by the print media," says David Farough, program director for Classic Rock Radio Q-107 FM.

"Let's not forget, 10 years ago there were not as many media choices as there are today, so naturally radio tuning was higher then," Farough points out. "It's human nature: when you give people choices, they tend to take them ... at least for a while. Believe me, the kids I talk to on a regular basis (high schools, broadcast schools, etc.) assure me that radio is alive and well.

"As proof that a major corporation feels the same way," Farough announces the production of "A new product targeted directly at the youth market - an FM radio jacket called a Hoodio."

I can see it all now, a convenience store owner who's just been knocked over telling the cops he was robbed by, "a whole gang of guys wearing hoods. I couldn't see their faces but their heads were all playing 'Stairway To Heaven.'"

Bail on that scene or you'll wind up on at the bottom of the harbour with cement boots on, spending your last breath hearing "Hoodio And The Blowfish."

Nuh-uh, kids. I say flee. And, if I dress like Tinkerbell, will you take me with you?

© Toronto Star