Radio Playlists Not Dancing to Prodigy’s Beat

Can’t escape Prodigy?

MTV has the English electronic group’s “Breathe” video in heavy rotation. Keith Flint’s visage glares at you this month from the covers of both Rolling Stone and Spin. And the group’s “The Fat of the Land” album, which debuted last month at No. 1, has remained in the Top 10 since, selling an impressive total of 716,000 copies in six weeks.

If all that is too much for you, simply turn on the radio. Despite the sales, video and media saturation, alternative-rock radio programmers have been slow to move on it. “Breathe” is only No. 23 on Billboard magazine’s modern rock chart and even L.A.’s KROQ-FM (106.7) rarely plays the song during the day.

“It’s pretty strange, isn’t it?” says Lewis Largent, vice president of programming at MTV and a former KROQ programmer. “Most radio stations look to call-out research [surveys of listeners rating snippets of songs] that favors songs that are more traditionally radio-friendly--have immediate hooks.”

Prodigy, which generally eschews conventional hooks and song structures in favor of a less familiar, beat-heavy mix with rave, punk and hip-hop elements, is at a disadvantage. Instead, such current favorites as the novelty-tinged ska of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish or the pop-flavored rock of Third Eye Blind or Matchbox 20 are favored.

“No one can deny the sales, no one can deny the awareness,” says Tom Calderon, rock radio consultant for the national Jacobs Media firm. “The issue is, does it fit in current alternative radio formats? They’re not ignoring it, they just don’t get as much reaction to it as they do for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which seems to be more mass appeal.”

The trick, says Oedipus, program director and vice president of Boston’s influential WBCN-FM, is to build the audience’s familiarity with this new sound.

“The first question of call-out research is, ‘Do you know this song?’ ” he says. “We took a chance on it and our audience is responding. Now the call-out for it is extremely good. But you have to give it a real shot.”

Calderon points to two precedents.

“When AOR [album-oriented rock] stations first got Metallica records in the ‘80s they were told to play it at night and see what happens,” he says. “They responded that it could never work, but eventually it did. However, as was the case with industrial, someone has to write a song like ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails with the kind of pop values that can break it open.”

He says the lack of radio exposure could be a benefit for Prodigy in the long run.

“Everyone wants to feel they’ve discovered the next big thing and the fact that it hasn’t gotten a lot of mass-appeal airplay gives it a mystique,” he says. “Despite MTV and all the press it’s gotten, people still feel like they’ve found this.”