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Will we be seeing any foreign language radio stations popping up in Seattle?

F

fordranger797

I would say yes. With the growing market for Asian radio programming in the Seattle area, I highly expect to see this market being satisfied in the future. While there are already numerous community stations which cater to the Asian market, I believe it is only a matter of time before a larger station tries to target the entire market. I predict more Spanish radio station in the future as well. It would be interesting if some of the Spanish stations on the AM dial flipped to talk in the Spanish language, leaving FM signals to carry music.

As speaker of the french language, I would love to see some french radio available on the terrestrial dial. However, that is unfortunately unlikely.
 
Nobody had hard data in the late '80s predicting the rise of the Spanish or the Korean stations on the edges of Seattle. But they happened. It depends where the market value of stations goes. If it goes down, expect to see more foreign language stations. In the coming few years, it's a safe bet more AM stations will flip to some ethnic format. Whether they're Asian or not is a toss up, but I wouldn't rule it out entirely.
 
fordranger797 said:
http://www.seattleglobalist.com/2013/03/05/international-students-from-asia-at-uw/10885
Click to expand...

"The total number of international students has grown by more than 50% just in the last two years, to almost six thousand this year.

Over 80 percent of these new students are coming from Asia, with China, Korea and Taiwan sending the biggest numbers"

A temporary increase of 4800 Asian students does not mean there's a "growing market for Asian radio programming in the Seattle area".

The point is this: As Bong noted there's already a number of foreign language stations in the market so the chances of stations "popping up" are about as likely as hitting 80 degrees here on Christmas Day.
 
Mike, I found your last post there more amusing than any Cocamo reference anywhere on this board! 80 degrees here on Christmas day? That would be something! Anyway back to the topic of the thread, I could see a few AM stations picking up foreign language programming, but I don't see much coming to fm lately, unless by some maybe not so strange event that KISW or KZOK gain a full market competitor, then I could maybe see CC using KKBW to target the Asian community, but given that I don't know any Asian targeted stations CC owns, and with the seemingly endless cost cutting moves down there, that situation is probably not likely either.
 
Another metric that is being missed is how we don't know how many foreign-language people who would listen to a radio or a radio station of their native tongue.
 
I'm all for foreign language expansion if it gets rid of the constipation that is AM raydio. At least the locally owned stations are being creative and the corpo owned ones cant save their sorry asses by regurgitating the same thing a station down the road does. How is that innovation?
 
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