Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Sound unlike everything on the radio
Unlike the radio
The old way of thinking was to make records that sound like everything already on the radio. That gets you more of the same. When the president of Def Jam heard 99 Problems, he predicted it would never be a single and would make a great album track, because it didn't sound like anything on the radio. When it eventually reached the radio, it had a big impact.
Sugar at KROQ
System of a Down shows the same thing. The California band was starting to get popular in the clubs, where a crowd of maybe 200 people would sell out a room. Rick Rubin brought their song Sugar to Kevin Weatherly at KROQ, the alternative rock station whose plays set the pattern for other stations across the country. Weatherly refused to play the song and refused to ever play the band, because it sounded insane and unlike anything else on the station.
One year later it was the number one song on the station and the most requested. More recently, the band sold out an 80,000-seat stadium in Paris two nights in a row. They made what they loved and never asked where it fit in the market.
Why do radio stations favor familiar sounds?
Stations rely on audience research such as call-out testing, where listeners hear short clips of songs and rate them. Songs that resemble what people already like tend to score well, and the psychologist Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that repeated exposure alone makes people like something more. That pushes programmers toward the safe choice. A new sound can lose in testing even if listeners embrace it after hearing it several times.
What made System of a Down sound so strange?
The band formed in Glendale, California, in 1994 among Armenian-American friends. Their songs mix heavy guitar with Armenian and Middle Eastern melodic scales, sudden tempo shifts, and vocals that move between singing and shouting. The song Sugar came from their 1998 self-titled debut album. Their 2001 album Toxicity reached number one on the US Billboard 200.
More from The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
