Apology Not Accepted

Posted by staticblog

on December 5, 2007M at 3:51 pm

OneRepublic, plenty of apologies

It is not your imagination: you really are hearing “Apologize” by OneRepublic featuring Timbaland all the time. And you probably thought it was Maroon 5 the first 1,000 times it dribbled through the speakers.

According to a Dec. 1 story in the New York Times, the string-laden and lightly remixed ballad, which currently sits at No. 2 this week on the Billboard singles chart, just set a record for the number of times a song has been played on radio stations throughout the country in one week: 10,240 spins.

And one Philadelphia station jammed the thing into its listeners’ ears 123 times one week in November. For those keeping score at home, that is once every 90 minutes on average, or just enough to warrant a perusal of the Geneva Conventions.

“Apologize” is not a terrible song by any means, although it seems chiefly geared to people who cannot abide the full-tilt rocking assault of The Fray. But is it good enough to warrant such an enthusiastic pummeling from radio?

The short answer is no, but “Apologize” is getting the platinum treatment because it is a music marketer’s dream, a cross-format mélange of hip-hop beats and smooth love-man crooning from what is ostensibly a rock band, featuring grafted-on taps and beeps courtesy of Timbaland. It plays on every format except rock and country stations, and just wait — a lap steel and fiddle remix cannot be far behind.

But the Times article indicates that this is the way the world has been turning for awhile. “Apologize” broke the record that was just set by Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” in July, and eight out of the 10 most-played songs in history are from the past three years. Radio is now as repetitive as Timbaland’s beat box.

The strategy is not being driven by the collective public’s desire to hear OneRepublic as often as possible without breaking into mellow spasms. Radio is hoping that everyone who wants to hear the song at least once a day will get to hear it during their brief window of listening, and will thus be locked into the oncoming torrent of ads for new cars or new bars.

But this is not how many of us are consuming music these days. In the pre-digital era, teenagers and lonely adults sat for hours waiting to hear their favorite song on the radio. Now, especially in Philadelphia, the wait is sharply attenuated, but for 99 cents, that song can be downloaded in seconds and played 123 times a week — or more — on demand.

So who is being courted by radio stations that cannot “Apologize” enough? Is it people who do not have access to computers, or listeners who cannot figure out how to use iTunes? Extremely passive people?

None of those groups seem like demographics that are setting the market on fire.

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Music