NEW YORK, NY.- Sidney Miller II, who in 1976 founded the influential trade magazine Black Radio Exclusive after concluding that Black voices were not being sufficiently represented and respected in the music business, died on Jan. 20 in Arlington, Virginia. He was 89.
His family said in a statement that the cause was complications of COVID-19.
Miller began promoting music acts while he was a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, and he had worked in several capacities at Capitol Records when he decided to start the magazine. Although Black artists were having success on the mainstream pop charts at the time, music that appealed mostly to Black listeners and the radio stations that played it were not getting much attention.
Miller’s magazine — often known simply as BRE — took a close look at the world of Black music, spotlighting artists, executives and radio stations. It also published its own singles charts and detailed lists of whose records were trending in which markets. At annual conferences that BRE sponsored, leaders in the Black music and radio worlds talked shop and awards were handed out to stations, disc jockeys and others.
The conferences quickly grew into glittery affairs where record labels would bring up-and-coming acts and established stars to perform. Miller’s definition of Black music was, as he once put it, “music created, written and performed by Black folks,” and the magazine and conferences encompassed R&B, jazz, rap and other genres.
Sometimes that meant crossover stars whom white listeners embraced — Sade, the Pointer Sisters, Michael Jackson and other big names graced the magazine’s cover, and Aretha Franklin, Prince and many other hitmakers performed at the conferences along with lesser-known acts. But Miller was passionate in his belief that crossover stars should not draw all the attention.
“Show me a Black station that’s lost touch with what’s out there in the streets,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1987, “and I’ll show you a station that’s losing.”
He argued that the trends and genres nurtured on Black stations percolated upward into the mainstream, and he urged Black stations, which often struggled for ratings in markets with dominant pop stations, to continue to play music that was of interest primarily to Black audiences.
“Black radio is becoming colorless,” he warned in a 1988 interview with The Los Angeles Daily News. “They are trying to reverse the crossover trend, and that’s just not smart. It won’t stop until we say, ‘Wait a minute; we’re the trendsetters’ and stop being led by the tail and be the leaders we are.”
“We’re encouraging the mainstay of Black artists to stop cutting soft, watered-down Black records,” he added.
That article called Miller “Moses to a nation of radio programmers and executives.”
Sidney August Anthony Miller II was born on Dec. 13, 1932, in Pensacola, Florida, to Sidney and Evelyn (Maddox) Miller. After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, he enrolled at Florida A&M as a premed student. But he was also a musician, playing trumpet in the university band, and he worked up a side business booking music acts, including the jazz musicians Cannonball and Nat Adderley, his fellow students.
After college, where he had been in ROTC, he joined the Army, serving in Texas and continuing to book acts on the side. In the 1960s he joined Capitol Records — first in Atlanta, where he headed its Fame subsidiary, and then in Los Angeles. One day in 1970 while walking from the Capitol Records tower toward Hollywood Boulevard, he was intrigued by the Florida license plate on a parked car. Inside were two young women, Susan Marie Enzor and her sister, Dottie, who were on a cross-country adventure.
Soon he and Susan were married, and she became his business partner when he founded Black Radio Exclusive in 1976. The magazine continued publishing for some 40 years.
During that time its conventions were both a showcase for new talent and a forum for serious discussion. The 1988 conference, for instance, featured a panel on whether rap music was reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. Ice-T was one of those who spoke to the issue.
“I got banned in Detroit,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying. “They said my music is favored by drug dealers and gang members. But they get a gang problem there and who do they fly in to talk to the kids? Ice-T — because I’m the one the kids are listening to. If I’m listened to by these kids, then maybe I’m the best chance you’ve got to get through to them.”
In addition to his wife, Miller, who lived in Oakton, Virginia, is survived by three children, Paxton, Sidney III and Evelyn Miller; six grandchildren; and a brother, Wilmer.
Miller generally wrote a publisher’s note in each issue of the magazine, using it sometimes for mild observations and at other times for strong ones. In December 1990, he expressed concern that Japanese companies were buying American entertainment conglomerates. He cited a series of comments by Japanese officials that denigrated Black people, and Japanese marketing that relied on stereotypical portrayals of Black Americans.
“Let us be wary of those who consider us intellectually inferior, portray us in unflattering ways or think we ruin neighborhoods,” he wrote. “Let us make sure we control our music.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
