Latin radio format trendsetter, Nestor Rocha talks exclusively with Billboard Magazine
Posted by: CorrienteLatina Posted: 10-12-2011
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When you looked at the 18:34 numbers, Super Estrella was sometimes the overall No. 1 in the format. It was youthful, sold well. It was always a small signal, and that was always part of our problem. But the brand is so powerful. There is a niche for that formula in Los Angeles. Between 2001 and 2003 we expanded (to other cities) because we felt there was a big passion for the music. We had the Juaneses and Shakiras of the world, and we wanted to be first in the market. It worked fairly well, but I just think that the one thing we suffer from is lack of music. You look at the big artists that sell records, they are artists who broke in Los Angeles, 15 years ago.
We started switching from the whole Latin pop to urban, and urban became pop because of the lack of pop artists. And now you see more stations playing pop music because it has more mass appeal, but with urban music as part of the mix. The urban sound is now very pop, very danceable. And there are a lot of stations, from Univision, for example, that adapted that format. With regional Mexican music, you can have five or even more stations playing the format and you're still OK. But with (top 40) there isn't room for many stations in a single market. If you look at all the stations that exist in the county, 80% are regional Mexican. It's just huge. It's the pop sound for the market. By population there's more people listening to regional Mexican than anything else. There are markets that will have 13 regional Mexican stations and one pop station.
At this moment the Latin sound is still very big, and even you're doing pop, young music, it needs to have some kind of Latin sound to it. The best example is Aventura. They're young, they're hip, they speak English perfectly. And they didn't come out in Spanish with a mainstream sound; they came out with a bachata sound. Another perfect example is Pitbull. Everything Pitbull does has a Latin sound in it. And a lot of other groups come out but they don't have the Latin sound, and it just doesn't connect as well. You hear them say, "Why do I need to put in a Latin sound? I can do this as well as an American band." But if it doesn't have a Latin flavor I'll say, "I can listen to the same thing in English. Give me something else. Give me the flavor."
It has become the urban sound for the youth. The corrido movement is a street movement with a lot of underground clubs and you see a lot of youth (ages) 12-19 that are into it. And the funny thing is, it's very traditional. It's not like they went and made some great production. The lyrics changed. Now they're not driving the pickup but the Mercedes. But the sound of the music is very traditional.
PPM has made you be more competitive, just becasue it's lisetening to the station at the moment. It tends to hurt the record insudtry because we have to play "this" as opposed to making "that" a hit. That's why you see the decline of the record labels. They now need to have proven hits becasue of PPM. When PPM came into our formats I went jockless, and we did very well. If you're going to have personalities, they have to be very compelling and they have to have a mission. Overall Ive reduced the number of new tracks we play and the talk.
They really like anything that's danceable. That's why Pitbull's sound is huge. The whole Don Omar movement is huge. And I've also seen it happen on the Anglo side. Now they appeal to Latinos more than ever because the urban side is more danceable.
If it appeals to our market, why not? It's what our audience is listening to. Obviously, we're not going to be an English station. But the majority of songs that are crossing over into our charts are bilingual. They compete because they appeal to the Latin community. It happens more on the pop stations.
We're always going to be what the market wants. The challenge really is for the people that are producing this music. They're the ones that need to have their ears to what the market wants. And that's something we at radio do well. We're always doing research. We're always looking for the next trend.
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