100.3 the Sound

[Crevecoeur123]

If CCM fares poorly in liberal markets, then it makes no business sense to establish a presence in the city of Angels.

Nevertheless, Educational Media Foundation's CEO Mike Novak wrote: “We are particularly excited to see what God has in store for the people of Los Angeles through our new station...."

At first glance, that statement sounds eerily creepy.
Taken one way, it may be a warning of sorts.
Taken another way, it may be just a celebration of establishing a new CCM station.

In any event, I suspect that statement is ambiguous in its intent but then again that might have been its whole intent.

Richard Wagoner pointed out, Univision's 107.5 must be shaking their heads as another K-LOVE enters its market.
Then again, it may not make much difference. It would be one thing if the formats were similar but in this case it's about as large a difference as there possibly can be.

What happens to 100.3 going forward in the new year is unknown.
Then again, only God knows.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

If CCM fares poorly in liberal markets, then it makes no business sense to establish a presence in the city of Angels.

False premise. Two reasons:

1) EMF operates non-commercially, so even if they only get a 1 or 2 share that's plenty to be profitable if their fund drives are well executed (and EMF is very good at this)

2) Christian Contemporary does fine in 'liberal' markets. See: Seattle, where KCMS does well, and K-Love does well enough. KCMS does better there with a bigger stick and longer heritage than K-Love. And in Portland, K-Love has a couple of rim-shots and Salem has the Fish. The Fish has OK ratings, K-Love is OK if you add them all together.

 

[TheBigA]

What happens to 100.3 going forward in the new year is unknown.
Then again, only God knows.

It really doesn't matter. EMF is the legal owner of the station, and they can program it however they see fit. If that means a satellite-delivered CCM format, then that's what it means. They aren't playing a popularity contest. They answer to a higher authority, as the old Hebrew National commercial once said. The bottom line is there won't be any buyer's remorse, and they won't be flipping back to classic rock.

 

[gr8oldies]

There are some pretty big mega-churches in those liberal markets, and most that attend are P1s for CCM.

 

[TheBigA]

There are some pretty big mega-churches in those liberal markets, and most that attend are P1s for CCM.

Plus as liberal as some may be in the city, there is also nearby Orange County.

 

[gr8oldies]

What if I told you that there are liberals who go to church?

 

[Radio Radio Listener]

What if I told you that there are liberals who go to church?

Yes, but Christian Contemporary is less often than not popular in more liberal cities. There are loyal listeners for CCM in liberal cities (Seattle, etc.) but none are exactly hotspots for the genre. I'm not saying liberals are anti-religious or anti-Christian, just that liberal cities aren't as interested in the genre as, say, cities in the Bible Belt.

 

[Crevecoeur123]

Radio Radio Listener makes a good point. Liberal cities more than likely aren't as interested in the genre as the the Bible Belt.
As a statistician, testing that would be an interesting research project.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Less popular, sure. There are some markets (Indianapolis, Atlanta) where CCM gets very good ratings.

But you can say the same for any format. News/Talk gets great ratings in Cincinnati but very bad ratings in New York. That doesn't mean WABC should give up and flip formats.

 

[TheBigA]

If we're going to accept this premise (which I don't), one might expect a station like KCRW to do much better in LA than it does. Or for that matter KPFK.

 

[davideduardo]

Richard Wagoner pointed out, Univision's 107.5 must be shaking their heads as another K-LOVE enters its market.

Hardly the situation.

 

[davideduardo]

If CCM fares poorly in liberal markets, then it makes no business sense to establish a presence in the city of Angels.

That's like saying that, since Los Angeles has less than 8% African Americans, it should not have any stations programmed to that community.

The answer is that an operator decides what the minimum listening level and reach a station should attain to be deemed "successful". LA has two specifically Black focused stations, and while they are not #1 in the ratings, they do well by serving a slice of the total market.

KFSH, The Fish, in Orange County, has a signal that does not even cover a quarter of the total LA market. Yet it reaches about 400,000 persons weekly. Extrapolated to the whole market, that would mean over a million and a half cume with a decent signal.

A 1.0 share in LA means somewhere around three-quarters of a million people are listening at some point each week. A 5.0 share in Montgomery, AL, in the heart of the Bible Belt, means that around fifty thousand people are listening. So, even at a fifth of the share level, the LA station reaches 15 times as many people. Of the two, the one more likely to be deemed a success, then, is the LA property.

And the limiting factor in many cases for EMF specifically is the the percentage of non-ethnic Caucasian persons in the market, as the appeal of their two formats is primarily in that group.

For an even more interesting case study involving EMF, we can look at its purchase of WCAD in Puerto Rico. There, they run the K-love format, the same as everywhere else. It's presented in English. The songs are in English. Probably 80% of the population of Puerto Rico (maybe more) can't follow the English lyrics of the Christian songs on K-love. So their potential market is limited to, perhaps, that slice of the remaining 20% of Island population that understands English well enough to listen and send money who also like Christian music rather than CHR or salsa or reggaetón and all the other formats on Puerto Rico's 120 radio stations. Obviously, EMF thought there was enough potential to warrant spending $3 million on the station they bought.

 

[davideduardo]

If we're going to accept this premise (which I don't), one might expect a station like KCRW to do much better in LA than it does. Or for that matter KPFK.

And ultra-liberal, progressive and ultra-high-power KPFK managed to cume just 104,000 people in a three month average in the July to September period. That is in a market of over ten million 12+ persons. CCM outlet "The Fish" with a signal that only covers a quarter of the market, cumed 400,000.

So much for assumptions based on political perspectives.

 

[gr8oldies]

We used to have this same conversation about talk radio. If you plunked Air America into Seattle, or Portland, or Los Angeles, based on voting records, it should be a smashing success. On the other hand, KFI (as it was programmed a few years ago) should be doing poorly in LA, based on how LA votes. Didn't quite seem to work that way.

It is true that "nones" are the fastest growing religious distinction, but that still leaves younger and middle-aged Christians and people receptive to the evangelical message (it was those white evangelicals who elected the current President and are his staunchest supporters, after all).

 

[Radio Radio Listener]

We used to have this same conversation about talk radio. If you plunked Air America into Seattle, or Portland, or Los Angeles, based on voting records, it should be a smashing success. On the other hand, KFI (as it was programmed a few years ago) should be doing poorly in LA, based on how LA votes. Didn't quite seem to work that way.

It is true that "nones" are the fastest growing religious distinction, but that still leaves younger and middle-aged Christians and people receptive to the evangelical message (it was those white evangelicals who elected the current President and are his staunchest supporters, after all).

You do have a point, although I would have to say that a liberal-leaning population is more receptive towards NPR, and they already (along with moderates and conservatives) can get sources / viewpoints from the internet. (Note that in LA, public radio listening is split between KPCC and KCRW.) Although, progressives (or even centrists) do not have their own Rush Limbaugh.

I also feel that radio listening might have a loyalty segment to it, to an extent. After all, ratings are factored by not just the number of listeners, but how long listeners tune in to that station. In the Washington DC area, where a very small percentage of the population voted for Donald Trump, conservative-leaning news/talk WMAL is a Top 5 station.

Speaking of KFI ratings, they are doing well, but they do not have Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, et al. But, KEIB has most of these national conservative personalities, but KEIB is doing worse in the ratings than class-A FM station KJLH and even classical (!) KUSC, let alone LA's public radio stations KPCC and KCRW.

 

[semoochie]

Less popular, sure. There are some markets (Indianapolis, Atlanta) where CCM gets very good ratings.

But you can say the same for any format. News/Talk gets great ratings in Cincinnati but very bad ratings in New York. That doesn't mean WABC should give up and flip formats.

Of course, they should! The only reason they haven't is because there are no viable, competitive formats left on AM.

False premise. Two reasons:

1) EMF operates non-commercially, so even if they only get a 1 or 2 share that's plenty to be profitable if their fund drives are well executed (and EMF is very good at this)

2) Christian Contemporary does fine in 'liberal' markets. See: Seattle, where KCMS does well, and K-Love does well enough. KCMS does better there with a bigger stick and longer heritage than K-Love. And in Portland, K-Love has a couple of rim-shots and Salem has the Fish. The Fish has OK ratings, K-Love is OK if you add them all together.

K-Love no longer has rimshots in Portland. We got a move-in a few years ago that gives them a full Class C1 signal from one of the main antenna farms. AirOne is still a rimshot though.

 

[TheBigA]

What's interesting to me after listening to radio for more than 60 years is the rise of the number of Christian radio stations in bigger CA radio markets.

As far as I can remember, I'm pretty sure that there were not a whole lot of them during the 60's and 70's in southern California.

That's a great observation, and worth talking about. In my view, part of what brought it about began in the 60s when you started to see folk music being used during church services. So the concept of church changed. The next step may have been the pioneering work of Amy Grant, who was both popular and Christian. Then in the 90s, an entire new genre started to emerge, called Contemporary Christian Music, where musicians used rock and pop instrumentation with inspirational lyrics. These days, there's a fine line between the sound of music you hear on pop stations and CCM stations. That's made the music far more popular. Some of these musicians are able to attract huge audiences for their shows, and they still sell a lot of records. It wouldn't surprise me, given the artistic community in LA and surrounding areas, that there will be a large number of people interested in this kind of music.

 

[AM FM listener]

2) Christian Contemporary does fine in 'liberal' markets. See: Seattle, where KCMS does well, and K-Love does well enough. KCMS does better there with a bigger stick and longer heritage than K-Love. And in Portland, K-Love has a couple of rim-shots and Salem has the Fish. The Fish has OK ratings, K-Love is OK if you add them all together.

In order for a CC format to succeed in a market, I think "WASP-iness" matters more than political leaning. Proportionally, Seattle has fewer Hispanics, Blacks, Eastern Europeans, Persians, Middle Easterners, Jewish, etc. than LA. That leaves a lot of White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants to program to.

 

[davideduardo]

Crevecoeur123 said

What's interesting to me after listening to radio for more than 60 years is the rise of the number of Christian radio stations in bigger CA radio markets.

As far as I can remember, I'm pretty sure that there were not a whole lot of them during the 60's and 70's in southern California.

In the 60's, FM was an insignificant factor in radio listening. So any AM that had even medicare coverage had something it could do.

KEZY was a big ratings-getter in Orange County, as was KWIZ at the time. KGIL had a nice San Fernando Valley audience and lots of local clients to call on. KWOW in Pomona had a niche, sitting between LA and the IE when LA ended at Covina and Fonatana was a bunch of fields and orchards.

The 70's was the transition. Most AMs could still do well, even the suburban ones. But the weaker players went into Spanish programming and the era of time brokered shows came to ones like KTYM. Market revenue was not increasing in proportion to the increase in programming choices that the FM band added to the mix, so most heritage stations suffered audience loss and revenue was fragmented.

So the 70's set the stage for a number of stations to drop out of the transactional business competition while at the same time, the local retail scene began to contract in the 80's. A group of broadcasters found that religion, a mainstay of more Bible Belt areas, could make money in CA and Los Angeles.

As Spanish language programming died on AM in the 90's, even more facilities became available for alternatives, including religion, from Fresno to Indio and from San Diego up to Santa Rosa. The "last resort" programming became very profitable for some, but it's not been a favorite of the high profile group owners, who don't even seem interested in mainstream CC or Gospel formats for the most part.

 

[LKellerIII]

We used to have this same conversation about talk radio. If you plunked Air America into Seattle, or Portland, or Los Angeles, based on voting records, it should be a smashing success. On the other hand, KFI (as it was programmed a few years ago) should be doing poorly in LA, based on how LA votes. Didn't quite seem to work that way.

I like to remember that the ultra-right Michael ("The Savage Weiner") Savage rose to prominence in the local San Francisco market, where he lives - arguably the most liberal metro area in the USA, and he rose quickly, and with not much objection from anybody. And at first, he was on KGO, which did not program to the right wing in those days. In general, the conservative "Hot Talk" station Savage was flipped to - KSFO (KGO's sister station), also did well for about a decade. So I guess that means that even if only 25% of Bay Area citizens are conservative, you can build a successful station. And you can assume that some non-'wingers are listening, too. I used to listen to Rush in the 80s, even though I disagree with pretty much everything he says. I found him entertaining...until I didn't, anymore.

BTW - I'm one white person who has listened to many "African-American" programmed stations over the years, from KGFJ when I was a kid - to KDIA in Oakland when I was a young adult - to KBLX some of the time, to this day. So it's clearly not just the Black population that listens.