Idolator

After providing an all-too-brief burst of local Latin American color on the often leached-out American pop video/radio scene a few years back, a Reuters article finds that a miniscule dip (just 2.8%) in reggaeton sales in 2006 has radio programmers, producers, and label owners already wondering if the moment for selling the genre to those outside of the Latin music market has already passed:

"There's just enough quality music out there that justifies keeping the format," said Alfredo Alonso, senior VP of Hispanic radio for Clear Channel. Alonso was the first to give broad radio airplay on a massive scale to reggaeton when, in 2006, he flipped several Clear Channel stations to a "hurban" (Hispanic urban) format that heavily featured reggaeton. Today, all his hurban stations have slowly but surely evolved toward a more pop-based format, with reggaeton tracks playing, at best, once an hour.

"If there is a hot hit, we'll play it. But today, it's hard to find a hard hit that's new," he said.

From a purely radio perspective, Alonso said, reggaeton was also hurt by the youth of the movement.

"A lot of the advertisers are not interested" in a radio station where the largest portion of the audience are teens, Alonso said, echoing thoughts repeated throughout the year by multiple station owners and programmers. In addition, he said, part of the lure of reggaeton was that it was regarded as a format that could reach English-speaking Latinos.

"The reality was, that never materialized," Alonso said. "Seventy percent of our audience was primarily Spanish-speaking. That tells you (English-speaking) Americans aren't listening. Maybe a few are, but that's not enough to build a radio station."

The article makes brief mention of reggaeton merging with hip-hop beats or other international pop sounds, and I do wonder how much of Anglo/Afro-America's supposed rejection of reggaeton has less to do with language and comes more from a rejection of "Dem Bow," the dancehall-derived beat that is as immediately memorable as the "Be My Baby" intro or as maddeningly familiar as a McDonald's wrapper. As many writers have pointed out over the last few years—and as the casual listener can hear simply by tuning into an hour or so of reggaeton radio—the genre evolves in centimeters at best, with that unchanging, clonking beat being ambrosia to reggaeton lovers and poison to its haters. As the Reuters article points out, the more the genre moves away from "Dem Bow," the more "It's a mix that can no longer simply be called reggaeton." Perhaps that's true in the strictest sense, but dancehall, hip-hop, house, rock'n'roll and many other genres started out with rhythmic palettes as circumscribed as reggaeton's and still managed to evolve without ceasing to be called by their original names.

Reggaeton Still Evolving From Hot New Thing [Yahoo via Reuters]