To be sure, money talks but, to the best of my knowledge, the Majestic’s problems did not include a lack of patrons. And as far as radio stations go, hip-hop listeners are not exclusively black. Perhaps you don’t know that white kids love the music too. In fact, I believe they are the biggest consumers of hip hop CDs.

I don’t listen to much hip hop but I’d prefer that the public airwaves be diverse and cater to as much of the public as possible. However, you are free to be as selfish as you care to be.

The reality here, folks, is that ratings determine the per-minute price of advertising, and ratings are a figure based on listener demographics. Even a large listener-audience can be meaningless if it’s not a demographic group with money – specifically what’s known as “disposable revenue” -to spend.

The easy-listening, country (and I don’t mean Shania Twain), album-formatted, jazz, and other specific music listeners have gone through this same thing in markets across the nation.

Does the black community have money to spare? No slur or badmouth intended here; I don’t live in Wisconsin and have no local knowledge. I do know that the white suburban middle-class wannabe 16-to-25 crowd has money, but are they hip-hop and/or rap fans? Again, I don’t know.

As the expression goes, “money goes where money is.” And in my eyes, losing a rap or hip-hop station is more of a gain than a loss. No racism there, I just don’t like it.

Part of me feels like, if the phrase “colored people” was good enough for W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, it’s certainly good enough for me. But point taken.

Speaking of Douglass, if you go to the Art Institute, see if the daguerreotype of him is still on display. There’s a link to it at FS.

As for the rest of your comment, I agree with el guante as well and made a post at FS yesterday relating to it.

Now as far as your hair goes, you’ll just have to go to a different salon. See this:

http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/business/index.php?ntid=116187

I think el guante has it right about the culmulative effects of many unrelated issues. I won’t pretend to understand how commercial radio works, but it’s not difficult for me to imagine that a business or company might think that fans of hip hop don’t “need” their stuff, which could be really good marketing, ignorance, or flat out racism.

Remind me to tell you the story of when I went to buy shampoo and the lady at the salon thought I just *had* to be looking for a pick (because that was the only “black” thing in the place).

Malicious intent does not always preclude an act of racism.

The D.

As for the Janeville market being excluded–i was basically paraphrasing my most recent post (in which i kinda included the caveat “yeah, what’s done is done” in re: to continued numbers parsing)

Nielsen supposedly lumps Rock County into the Madison market for their various ratings.

I mentioned this not to dwell on the ratings, but because it seems like the fact that the station’s actually in Janesville has been downplayed/overlooked, beyond the issue of reception quality.

i.e. there’s a listener base there. How have they reacted? I’m completely sidestepping race–but I never even thought to check media outlets based closer to Janesville when I was looking for information, other perspectives, etc. [i'm not counting technorati]