Thebe Mabanga in your ear So Metrofm is reported to have 5,6-million listeners, making it the second-largest station in the country after Ukhozi fm (Radio Zulu), which has 6,7-million listeners. If you are a Metro listener, you are now probably drowning in a hype-induced frenzy. For that is all it is really. Here’s why. In Metro’s station manager, Romeo Khumalo, we have a suave, well-trained marketer who, to use an industry clich’, can sell ice to an Eskimo. Khumalo is the embodiment of the up-market image that Metro represents. The station’s glossy electronic media campaign has impeccable aesthetics, Loerie award-winning stuff. But if you peel off the gloss, you will see that what Metro is offering now is what it has offered virtually throughout its existence. A worrying aspect of Khumalo’s credo is a tendency to make statements that stand to be challenged. The first of these is that “… we give our audiences what they want”. This is flawed. Firstly because we are never told what the audiences actually want. More R&B and no acid jazz? More music and less talk? Well, from what they are given, it seems they want what they’ve always had: mainstream, predominantly American genres with a liberal dose of local music and a bit of talk. More importantly, giving audiences what they want is a weak tenet on which to rest an argument. For example, if you cast your mind back to 1995 when the Internet was amorphous and ethereal and cellphones were 10 times their current size, how many people would have said they wanted to use their huge gadgets to access the Web? Yet now that is possible. The truth is you do not give audiences what they want; you give them what you hope they will appreciate. Another favourite Khumalo statement is to “add value for our listeners”. Well, my view is entirely subjective, but I do not think this is the case. I would have liked to see Metro introduce their audiences, over the past three years, to crossover artists like Savage Garden and Shania Twain. If these are too white, then Lenny Kravitz is a good option. If they avoid him because he plays rock, then they shouldn’t be playing Macy Gray. Introducing such artists will help Metro cut back on the insipid, mundane and linear thematic R&B atists They missed the opportunity when they repositioned; the next one will come when their current boom goes bust. To be fair, Metro’s commercial success is impressive: R110-million in revenue, 1,2- million listeners for some weekend shows and so on. But the changes could have been driven by taking programming in a slightly different direction and yielded similar success. The latest example of how hype precedes substance is their decision to launch the Metro Fm Music Awards with MTN. Khumalo hopes this will help raise local content to 50% by year-end. I would have loved to see the quota raised and then the awards launched. The money spent on marketing would be better used to host live performances from popular venues, especially for their 700E000 jazz listeners. It would be great if the station could exploit brand strength and form partnerships with content providers to launch an online magazine. But the quality of their sports talk show suggests that a mag would be hype without content.