Nancy Goes To Coachella

They released the 2019 Coachella lineup this week, and the reactions were... interesting. My Facebook news feed was full of indignant comments from folks who lamented the pop acts that have largely replaced the more alternative and eclectic artists of past festivals ("That's it, I'm out"). Meanwhile, on Twitter, pop fans were ecstatic, from Ariana Grande's legion of listeners to K-Pop kids posting a continuous stream of "OMG BLACKPINK!!!!!!!!!" (Also, lots of "Idris Elba!" Yes, he's DJing on the two Saturdays. You know you'd want to check that out.)

The reactions illustrated once again how we all become our parents. It's 2019, and the music that the target audience for Coachella likes has changed. Rock fans have experienced this before, with the Boomer Classic Rock contingent in "those kids today don't know REAL good music" mode for years. Now, it's Generation X's turn to watch a new generation find its own culture. The cycle continues.

What's happening is that a cultural institution is changing to reach a changing target audience. If they don't try to do that, their audience would keep aging, and, likely, shrink. It's yet another example of the principle of Adapt or Die. You evolve to give the audience what it wants.

Like "Nancy." You know "Nancy," right? The newspaper comic strip? (You remember newspaper comic strips, right? You remember newspapers?) It's hard to imagine anything less 21st-century than Nancy, and by 2018, it was strictly for a very, very old audience, the kind of people who read comic strips in actual newspapers. But the audience for comic strips is online now, and those readers weren't responding to a strip that wasn't for them. So the syndicate hired a young, pseudonymous webcomic artist/writer who both appreciated the character's history (yes, there is history; there's even been a scholarly book deconstructing a single Nancy strip, and there are some people obsessed with "the three rocks," which I'd explain to you but life's too short as it is) and recognized that some changes needed to be made.

The result was a Nancy who's a) true to the original version but b) always looking at her smartphone, taking a robotics class, and generally behaving like a kid her age would in 2019. Meta jokes abound, including one now-iconic strip teasing the critics with Nancy riding a hoverboard, surrounded by cellphones, saying "Sluggo is lit," which became a widespread meme. The Internet got flooded with articles about the changes, about the reactions, about a comic strip that hadn't merited news coverage in maybe forever that was now being talked about by people too young to have ever even picked up a print newspaper. While older readers reacted with revulsion, many more people who would never think of reading "Nancy" are, yes, reading "Nancy." Again, adaptation made an old cultural brand suitable for the next generations.

You know where I'm going, right? Talk radio -- radio in general, really -- has been taking a different approach. Rather than changing to address new generations, radio has been clinging to the audience it has. I've seen radio folks calling for campaigns to get advertising agencies to spend more money on the 55+ audience rather than try to remain relevant for younger generations, and I get it: It's what we have, it's hard to get people being raised with Spotify and Apple Music and Pandora to listen to broadcast radio, it's what we know and what we do. Long-term thinking is risky and difficult. But so is getting ad agencies and clients to change their buying habits, forged over the last 50 years or so. You're trying to get people who have spent the last half-century telling you that it's more expensive and less fruitful to target older consumers whose brand preferences and buying habits are deep-rooted and marketing-resistant to suddenly reverse course. That won't be easy, either.

For the industry's sake, I hope that the effort to grab a larger piece of the ad revenue pie for older demographics is successful. Lord knows that talk radio needs a wider range of clients and less direct-response ads for gold and snake oil. But it shouldn't be considered such an impossibility for broadcast radio to come up with content that draws loyal and enthusiastic listeners under the age of 40, either. It can be done.

The first step is to stop worrying that your P1s will revolt. The second step is for programmers and managers to understand that it's not enough to just hire young hosts who say the same things and sound the same way as the older hosts; it's not about the age of the talent, it's about being relevant to a different generation's interests, culture, and tastes. It's about adapting and not merely trying to hold onto what you have as the audience dies out. It will take management and programmers who are looking beyond the present quarter. You don't have to eliminate the same-old, but someone HAS to try something new. If Nancy can do it, so can you.

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One small, teeny-tiny housekeeping note: Next week, I'll be in Las Vegas covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which I do every year and which means that Talk Topics might be updated more irregularly than usual. It depends on how busy things get. (It's CES. Busy is what CES does.) CES is a great generator of talk about the future of technology and the media, and that's almost certainly what we'll talk about in this column next week. Expect a lot of 5G and "smart city" talk. And even if you think tech news isn't radio news, what happens at CES definitely impacts your future, so let's reconvene next Friday and I'll tell you what I see.

Perry Michael Simon
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