Or how Triple M rocked it’s way back from the wilderness with Real Music

Part three of Peter Saxon’s chat with Triple M’s Mike Fitzpatrick.

It is arguably the most enduring of all the styles of popular music. Founded in the 1950’s as Rock and Roll, like Country and Western, the “and Roll” part has long been discarded so that the term Rock could embrace a much broader church of variants as well as some deviants.

With its many guises, Rock as a genre, is hard to define. Yet almost everyone can identify it when they hear it. You won’t find the word “pompatous” in the Oxford dictionary but when the Steve Miller Band introduced the lyric, “I speak of the pompatous of love” in their 1993 hit The Joker, they trusted Rock fans to get the meaning without needing to trace its etymology.

But radio programmers, being the breed that they are, can’t help but try to define the indefinable anyway. ‘Let’s deconstruct this puppy and see what makes it tick.’

In this third part of our discussion with Triple M’s Group Content Director, Mike Fitzpatrick, he explains why Rock means Real Music to Triple M and its listeners.

As much as anything it was Triple M’s departure from its rock roots that brought about its decline in 2008. In our previous slice of conversation with Fitzy he recalled, “We adjusted the music to try and chase an audience that we thought would be attracted to Pete and Myf and basically stepped away for our core audience.

“All the people who had signed up for what Triple M stands for, Rock Music, we stepped away from. So when you’re playing Gabriella Cilmi and Katie Perry and the Rogue Traders next to Cold Chisel and Def Leppard… I don’t know who wants to hear that. We thought we could keep a certain amount of our core listeners and attract new ones. And that was probably the end,” says Fitzy.

Then, as much as anything, it was Triple M’s return to its rock foundations that brought it back to life.

“I don’t think it’s rocket surgery when it comes to music,” says Fitzy, “Rock Radio is challenged by design because there hasn’t been rock music in cycle for years… I mean, when was the last time that there were 10 rock songs in the Top 40 at any one time? It would have been about 2001, maybe. And they were divisive and polarising. They were either loud Linkin Park or Chop Suey by System of a Down or Puddle of Mudd – full on new metal sounds. There hasn’t been a lot of big, broad accessible rock songs in the past 14 years in the charts.”

radioinfo: So Rock is harder to program than, say, CHR?

Fitzy: Top 40 radio is not simple. It’s a craft, an art and a science but you work from the chart. It gives you a work pad in that, ‘here are the 40 most popular songs in the country, lets work with that to start off with.’ Whereas with rock radio, unless you are a daggy old ‘Dad Rock’ station playing Bon Jovi, The Sunny Boys, Supertramp etc – songs that charted in their day – you don’t have a work sheet, you can’t say, ‘okay that’s popular right now, let’s play that,’ because those rock songs are niche by design and as media fragments and people stream more and more songs, the rock stations around the world are becoming even more niche – metal stations, hard rock stations, alternative stations, indie stations, soft rock, classic rock and modern rock stations.

radioinfo: To name a few…

Fitzy: I’m sure there are more that exist – acid rock, adult rock stations, album rock stations. But you don’t have a cheat sheet to tell you what’s popular. So, you either choose songs that the majority of audience don’t know in the hope that your core will love them while you become more and more unfamiliar to any ‘floating’ or ‘disloyal’ cume. Or you broaden your definition of what Rock Music is – which is what we did.

radioinfo: And you do that, how?

Fitzy: We said, ‘okay, we know you love rock music’ and we took the listeners on a journey with us and said to them, If you love this band, then you’re probably going to like this band because they were influenced by them.’

Muse is a great example of that. We could not get Muse to research on Triple M five years ago. Muse is one of the biggest rock bands in the world. But if you like Queen, you’re probably going to like Muse. If you liked INXS, you might like Kings of Leon.

We took the listeners on that journey and redefined what Rock Music is by calling it Real Music. Our listeners always told us that when we asked them, ‘How would you describe a rock song?’ And they’d say, ‘It’s just real music. Real musicians playing real instruments. Not a kid sitting at home making it with a computer.’

Of course, everyone uses a computer now to record with Pro Tools, it’s not the primary instrument… not like Flume where the kid goes out on stage and opens his Mac to perform to 10,000 people. I don’t diss that music because I enjoy all forms of it, but our listeners who love Rock music and know that Triple M stands for Rock don’t want to hear that.

But we can say, Bastille play their own instruments and are essentially a rock act… or they’re a pop/rock act. Mumford and Sons are a pop/rock act as are Monsters and Men and Imagine Dragons. We try to find that pop/rock crossover. But even those acts are getting harder to find and you’re really stretching the friendship with pop/rock acts because they tend not to chart. That’s also why we focus a lot on 9o’s and classics.

But if you want to be relevant, because men who love music still want to feel relevant, and still want to be discovering new music, they just don’t want to be too challenged by it. It’s easy to say, ‘Hey, these guys are influenced by these guys and they play their own instruments… they’re credible. They can cut it live, so you probably should have a listen to their songs.

Read Part One and Part Two

 Peter Saxon