Weeks after music’s Blackout Tuesday, which sparked a plethora of heated industry-wide conversations about systemic racism, companies and executives still debate the use of the word “urban” in job titles, award categories, and more. facets of the music business. While not all organizations agree on what to do with the word, the radio community appears to be largely eliminating it.
A representative for iHeartMedia, the largest radio conglomerate in the US, which operates 855 stations, says the company is in the process of removing “urban” from job titles, adding that “it has already moved away from He “a” more descriptive and specific names like hip-hop and R&B “to break with the past. iHeart will also not use more “urban” when referring to the format or in internal communication. The term is “definitely outdated,” says the representative.
In addition, multiple executives from major record labels and other industry sources familiar with the matter have Rolling Stone that iHeart-owned data analytics company Mediabase, which powers the industry charts on radio airplay, plans to remove “urban” from the chart names. Mediabase currently publishes two charts reflecting the most played tunes on US urban stations and on Urban Adult Contemporary (AC) stations; These sources will change their name to Hip-hop / R & B and R&B, respectively, the sources say. Mediabase did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Republic Records announced last month that it would remove the word from departments and job titles, calling it a reference to “the outdated structures of the past,” and the Grammy Awards have renamed their category from “Urban Contemporary” to “Progressive R&B.”
But other organizations and individual black executives hold firm. Shawn Gee, manager of The Roots, for example, told the New York Times that he believes that the conversation about the word is a distraction and that “the problem lies in the infrastructure, in the system, not in the word”. And iHeart executive vice president of programming, Thea Mitchem, told Rolling Stone last month: “If you delete the word, does that stop the marginalization of black executives or exacerbate the situation?”
It’s also worth wondering how effective removing the word “urban” from awards, official formats, and job titles can be if other companies in the industry still operate on it. Interscope Records has just announced its new senior vice president of urban radio promotions, for example, and several other major labels also retain a strong department explicitly under the umbrella of “urban radio promotion.”
The word first became popular in the radio community in the 1970s, thanks in large part to Frankie Crocker, a famous DJ and one of the pioneers of black radio in New York. “Many advertising agencies still seem to know very little about the buying habits of today’s black consumer,” explained Boston program director Sunny Joe White in 1982. “So stations are called urban to make themselves more attractive to those agencies. .. Such stereotypical forces of thought even black stations to minimize their blackness to compete for advertising dollars. “
