Formatting Race on Commercial Radio Stations

Scanning the radio dial in the United States, you’ll hear a lot of music: the supple sounds of a pop crooner singing a ballad, the midtempo dembow riddim backing a reggaetón track, the wails of a virtuosic guitar solo, and so on. For the past century, commercial radio stations have offered listeners across the country a chance to tune into a unique blend of songs to soundtrack their dance parties, drives, and workdays. But these stations do more than just play music. In this chapter, I analyze the commercial radio industry’s programming alongside its business model, arguing that this industry has shaped understandings of racial identity in the United States. Commercial radio stations operate by selling specific audiences’ attention to companies that play advertisements on their stations; music, in this business model, is what one radio programmer described as an “evocative and economical” tool that helps these stations create sellable audience segments out of the diverse American public. Relying on an understanding of musical taste that links musical consumption with sociocultural differentiation, radio programmers use musical taste as a proxy for demographic difference, systematizing what otherwise might be an indirect relationship between musical sound and people. Far from simply soundtracking listeners’ daily lives, the commercial radio industry participates in the construction of racial identity in the United States; it produces (and reproduces) correspondences between music and racially defined audiences.