By 1989, the rising popularity of hip-hop and hard rock, favored by young listeners but disparaged by the adults that sponsors craved, further pressured the original hits format, prompting Radio & Records to ask, was CHR “Losing Its Niche?” A station like Z100, which claimed that the 75 percent of its listeners over the age of eighteen accounted for 90 percent of ad revenue, faced questions of whether to play all hits or just a slanted fraction. Race factored heavily into the answer programmers came up with, as the new category of “rhythmic CHR”—aimed at both black and, increasingly, Latino
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