Well, I preferred the days when radio stations were segregated. The reason is each genre was stronger because of it.

On R&B stations, you only heard funk and R&B with an occassional rap song being played. However, the only rap played on these stations, was the kind that fit in and flowed well with the funk on the stations. As rap grew and swayed further away from funk, it had it's own underground audience and eventually it's own seperate stations in some areas. It was no threat to killing off funk or R&B and both funk and rap/hip hop fans were happy in their own little separate worlds.

Actually, the problem started before hip hop merged with R&B. It started in the mid 1980s when R&B artists purposely tried to crossover to pop radio. It takes a lot of watering down to cross over to pop because pop listeners at the time didn't usually like something if they considered it "too black". Look at funk from 1985 to 1989 compared to 1980 to 1984.....the later years are much weaker. What's even worse is after artists like Shitney Houston came on the scene, they weren't happy with just crossing over to pop, they wanted to conquer the extremely dull world of Adult Contemporary also. R&B radio in the late 1980s was flooded with balladeers during this time. It felt like an era full of black Barry Mannilows.

All this crossing over let these record companies know that money could definately be made with black artists. When they learned that white kids liked hip hop, they immediately jumped on that genre, milked it for every dollar it was worth, and are still milking it today. Also, since the music was cheaper to make, they figured why not focus only on the R&B "singers" that have the hip hop sound. It's still singing but the music is cheaper to make. Once again, weakening the R&B/funk side.

The music world was definately better when each genre had their own separate worlds and people were free to roam from station to station if they wanted something different.