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At 19 he cofounded Burkhart/Abrams, a now-famous consulting group that pioneered the AOR format, in particular the now-infamous “Superstars” subformat. Basically, he took the adventurous musical tastes of underground radio and applied the business principles of the moribund top-40 format (same link as above):
“We were stuck with these underground deejays who thought they knew more than the listeners,” he says. “They were elitists. They wouldn’t play Led Zeppelin because they had already ‘sold out.’ We wanted deejays who were in Top 40 and had that discipline. But these were people who would go home and listen to Pink Floyd and Genesis. They would bring the discipline and the idea of being part of a plan, but they brought more passion than the underground deejays because they were playing Top 40 now, and this was the first time they could play all this cool music and get paid for it. No more Donny Osmond and Bobby Sherman. They were going to get to play Frank Zappa.”
Plus, at XM he seems to have learned the importance of good technology and the benefits of an audience with deeper, more specific tastes–a sort of mainstreamed long tail. TribCo has a ton of resources that they’ve never been able to integrate very well, and some of the same principles might give them more value from their existing resources.
