WAMZ would be doing great if Coyote was still pd. He could always win in bad times because he left the station alone. All heritage has been removed and they will now never get those huge numbers again. The state of country music has been rough before and wamz was always one of the handful of country stations that could endure, even thrive through tough times in the format. WAMZ has been "tinkered" with way too much.
My hat is off to Coyote, and I'm sure he's your friend. But you're dreaming of the good old days when AMZ had no competition. It's not that way anymore.
In 2004, country had a 17 share in Louisville, and WAMZ had it all. That came about, in part, because for years there were only 4 high power FMs in Louisville. And each one got their niche format:
95.7 QMF- got rock. (Ripped it out of the hands of lower power WLRS in 1981 in the span of only 1 book, because they could.)
97.5 AMZ got country.
99.7 DJX got top 40
106.9 WVEZ got AC (WRKA dropped AC in favor of oldies in 1988 because VEZ would have done the same thing to RKA that QMF did to LRS)
Each of those 4 big stations made craploads of money as the top stations in their format. They could do what they wanted, and none of them was going to change formats to challenge one of the others. Every other FM in Louisville was 3000 watts and they all fit in where they could around those 4 and ate of what was left of the pie after the big 4 had their fill.
In the early to mid 90s, FCC Docket 80-90 allowed the creation of several new stations in Louisville, including 100.5 and 107.7. Clear Channel got control of 100.5, but 107.7 went to Jacor, which went country and became the first serious competition WAMZ ever had.
The 107.7 ratings cut into them deeply, and CC paid an obscene sum (IMO) to purchase the intellectual rights to the Hawk format that was running on 107.7. And they found a way to control the move in of another big signal, 98.9. They put the Hawk format on 98.9 and made sure it never seriously challenged WAMZ in the ratings.
When Clear Channel merged with Jacor, they had to spin off the Jacor stations. So Clear Channel made sure that no one company ended up with all the big stations from the Jacor cluster. Blue Chip got WDJX, and Cox got WVEZ and WSFR.
There was no frickin way that Blue Chip was flipping their one big stick, WDJX, to country. And Cox wasn't flipping either VEZ or SFR. There was simply no way to make the financials work out on that. And every other big signal in Louisville was controlled by Clear Channel. So AMZ was still safe. They had no competition, because no significant competition was possible.
So if the country share was 17, as it was in 2004, AMZ had a 17. And if the country share was 10, AMZ, as you said, "could win in bad times". Because a 10 is still winning. But those days ended when Cox started getting a piece of the pie, first in late 2004 with the launch of New Country on 103.9, and then when the unthinkable happened- 103.1 got a power increase from a 6KW class A to a big stick class C2. The following week, New Country moved to 103.1, and an older demographic country was launched on 103.9.
At that point, WAMZ would have been insane to "let the station alone." They have done what they could to stop the bleeding, and in fact, they've done pretty well with it. But they don't get all the shares any more, and they never will again. So when the country market share drops to 10.7, like it did in the last trend, AMZ gets less than half. That's not because Coyote is gone and people are meddling with perfection. It's because they are responding to a changing market situation. And they're not the only game in town any more.
