Where did all the music go?

CEDAR GROVE, N.J. -- When 13-year-old Dana Marino flips on her boom box, she wants to hear her favorite songs. And she often does -- over and over and over again.

"FM stations overplay popular songs, to the point that no one likes them anymore," the eighth-grader complained after enduring a recent audio overdose of J.Lo and Ja Rule.

Ed Cronin, 42, rarely flips his radio on. He longs for the free-form format of his teen years, when you could hear anything from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, the Supremes to the Sex Pistols.

"You were exposed to all sorts of other stuff -- not only the hip and new, but older stuff," said the resident of West Roxbury, Mass. "You can't hear that now."

Finally, a place where no generation gap exists.

When it comes to commercial radio, it appears everybody has a gripe -- except the corporations atop the multibillion-dollar industry. Their stations, they say, are just following the advice of the Kinks' Ray Davies: Give the people what they want.

"We play what people want to hear," said John Hogan, president and chief operating officer of Clear Channel Radio and its 1,200 stations. "And if we play too little of what people want to hear, they're going to go somewhere else."

They already are -- although it's not necessarily to other radio stations.

Radio listeners are listening less. In 1993, they spent an average of 23 hours per week with the radio on; last year, it was down to 20 1/2 hours, according to Arbitron numbers.

Looking harder for hits

Those most likely to turn off the radio: teen-agers, long among the medium's mainstays. Among girls age 12-17, the radio is on just 16 hours a week. For boys, it's just 12 1/2 hours. That's bad news for the country's 11,047 commercial radio stations.

Why the turn-off?

Some, like musicians Prince and Little Steven Van Zandt, blame playlists so strict they make the old Top 40 format seem extravagant.

Others blame a 1996 law that opened the door for corporate ownership of hundreds of radio stations, replacing often-eccentric local owners with a legion of sound-alike voices and formats.

"FM is creatively tired," said Lee Abrams, a veteran radio consultant now employed by the satellite radio company XM. "The attitude is, 'We're making money. Why change it?'

"They make their money, they pay the bank, everybody is happy," Abrams continued. "And music is very low on the totem pole."

To listeners, music ranks higher -- and they're willing to look a little harder for it. Untold numbers download music off the Internet, and about 25 million people dial up Internet radio daily, a recent study found. XM predicts its satellite audience will quadruple to 350,000 by the end of the year.

Such abandonment once seemed impossible, when radio was king and its DJs ruled the musical landscape.

Golden era gone

When Richard Neer debuted on New York radio in 1971, the broadcast world was a different place. Right into the '80s, the airwaves -- from WNEW-FM in New York to KFOG-FM in San Francisco -- enjoyed a golden era.

"It was a time of artistic freedom. And we thought that would last forever," said Neer, a former 'NEW jock and author of the book "FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio."

Competition was cutthroat, with stations waging war for a single tenth of a point in the Arbitron ratings (and its corresponding bump in ad rates).

It was business, sure. But it was personal, too, and the DJs were the "personalities." Many were larger than life, nearly as large as their egos.

In the '60s, "Murray The K" Kaufman quit in the middle of his shift when handed a playlist. In the '70s, the legendary Frankie Crocker rode into Studio 54 atop a white stallion. In the '80s, WNEW's Scott Muni opened every show with a Beatles tune in memory of John Lennon.

By the '90s, the power had shifted. "Research started taking over," Abrams recalled. "People wouldn't go to the bathroom without going to a focus group."

The result, according to critics: appealing to the lowest common denominator with a slimmed down playlist, and ignoring the fringes.

"The philosophy was superserve your core audience, rather than hit a broad demographic," said Neer. "Anybody over (age) 50 was discounted, thrown aside."

Artists were marginalized along with audiences. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Stevie Wonder was suddenly MIA on the FM dial. AM radio had become the bastion of talk radio.

Phenomenons like the recent soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- No. 1 on the charts, 5 million copies sold, Grammy album of the year -- remained invisible to most programmers.

"There's nobody in the mainstream with the freedom to turn audiences on to great old or new stuff," said Springsteen's guitarist, Nils Lofgren, an old FM favorite. "It's about corporate money, not great music."

Those who condemn 21st century radio, including XM's Abrams, don't understand that times and technology have evolved.

Meanwhile, record companies and recording artists are supporting a proposed bill, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., that might restore the cap on station ownership.

Despite the complaints, independent studies have shown that deregulation has in- creased choices on the dial.