Actually there are two stations, WSB-AM and then the FM side-kick which may have more of the audience...
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WSB vs WABC
- Thread starter Radig
- Start date
Nielsen lists the FM separately. WSB (AM) has a simulcast partner on FM, but the ratings are "single line reporting" which means that the simulcast AM and FM are listed under one station... in this case the heritage AM call letters. As mentioned, WSB (AM) is one of the highest billing radio stations in America, not just the highest biller in Atlanta.
IICC Sunday nights WSB runs Kim Komando with I doubt anybody can accuse her right wing.
WSB has some brokered programing on the weekends. My best guess it is expensive so if someone wanted to play music they will need a good sponsor or have deep personal pockets. Occasionally they split the AM off for a couple of hours for special news stuff. You might be able to get some time on the AM without the FM for a discounted price. I don't know the Neilson rules on this but I am sure a 3 or 4 hours Saturday night might be doable. I believe WBBM splits for the Bears.
I am pretty sure if music is played on WSB: "the check has cleared the bank"
WSB has some brokered programing on the weekends. My best guess it is expensive so if someone wanted to play music they will need a good sponsor or have deep personal pockets. Occasionally they split the AM off for a couple of hours for special news stuff. You might be able to get some time on the AM without the FM for a discounted price. I don't know the Neilson rules on this but I am sure a 3 or 4 hours Saturday night might be doable. I believe WBBM splits for the Bears.
I am pretty sure if music is played on WSB: "the check has cleared the bank"
The available audience dictates what programming can work. The only people who listen to AM radio any more are old, mostly white, conservative men. Right-wing talk and religion are the formats for them.
For sake of argument, if all the talk radio was magically and suddenly stopped - would AM radio then have no listeners?
Sports talk and play-by-play would still attract listeners and advertisers providing those stations don't have an FM simulcast (either through management not wanting to blow up a successful music FM or not having an FM outlet at all to move to). Otherwise -- and I sense you are trying to get someone here to admit music programming on AM is still viable -- sorry, you're broadcasting to 70-to-grave with oldies and classic country on AM and to practically nobody with anything resembling a contemporary music format.
To be honest, music programming on AM ceased to be viable when FM became standard equipment and the majority of listeners could receive it. That was around 1982. That's when most of the major AM stations gave up on music. None of them wanted to. They were still fully staffed with legendary talent. But the writing was on the wall and the audience was abandoning AM for FM. By the end of the 80s, two of the heritage radio owners, NBC and GE, sold their radio divisions.
Yes, I remember. WABC was one of those stations. Six years later, WNBC (AM) signed off for good.
There was a good article about the demise of AM car radio audio fidelity in Radio World Magazine recently. In an attempt to fight all of the interference in the AM band, receiver selectivity has been significantly improved. The downside is that the receiver narrower passband restricts the audio response that people expect for music.
No, not really. I'm trying to understand why Right Wing programming is so prevalent (and apparently viable) on the AM band, particularly here in the Atlanta area. WSB with their clear channel frequency dominates the band, yet management decided that they also needed an FM frequency to simulcast their broadcast. Was this simulcast move made due to a reduction of the number of listeners to the AM station?
I was one of the listeners who preferred the FM band, for music, because it was stereo and a perceived higher quality.
Had the FCC standardized on AM Stereo and allowed the transmitted audio bandwidth to be 15 kHz, then perhaps the situation might have been a little different.
They couldn't allow AM bandwidth to be 15Khz. And frequency response isn't AM's biggest problem. It's noise.
Even 10khz is too much for most receivers today. Here's an article from 17 years ago about AM bandwidth:
Every possible idea you can come up with was discussed 40 years ago. Nobody in radio is happy about this situation.
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Early 80s you could still have the "I only have AM in the work car" audience but other than that......
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Hence my observation that "WSB needs little programming advice just now."
Not sure how that became unclear.
And it goes back, historically, even further: in 1977 the national average tilted for the first time towards over half of all listening being to FM stations. Even before that, around 1975, the music listening majority had moved to FM.
Of course, the market-by-market numbers were variable. Some markets... those with better AM signals like NYC and Chicago... took longer while others were "first in line" on the transition to FM. A good example of an early transition market was Miami, where there was a perfect combination of FMs with rock, beautiful music, Top 40, oldies and other options as early as the '72-'73 period.
What your point is has become woefully unclear. How is it that the #1 biller in the market needs any advice at all?
If anything, many other talk stations around the US should be emulating to the extent that they can the success of WSB.
The one step they had to make was to simulcast on AM. The almost "worst in the nation" ground conductivity around Atlanta makes a 1 kw station in Omaha cover more than 50 kw in Atlanta. Add in the increasing man-made noise level due to consumer electronics, dimmers and all the rest and AM is dreadfully affected by reduced effective coverage.
And, of course, WSB has the kind of heritage that is bankable: a strong name with positive images and current programming that is acceptable to a big slice of the market's population.
Nothing is viable on AM in Atlanta these days. There is only one decent signal 24/7 (750), and essentially no one is listening to it.
When WSB decided to drop 750 from the station branding, the PD told the Journal-Constitution that over 90% of listening was to 95.5.
I liken the AM band these days to a declining shopping mall. As there are fewer stations on AM with mass-appeal programming, there's less reason to ever browse the band.
In the latest ratings, only 3.1 shares belonged to an AM facility, and all but a couple of them are attached to FM translators which probably gain the bulk of the listening.
The reason for the sharp 10 kHz roll-off was not noise... it was heterodyning with adjacent channel stations 10 kHz up or down the dial. And that was due to adding way too many AM stations to the band. So, limiting audio to a sharp 10 kHz bandwidth kept heterodyne interference to a minimum simply by making the heterodyne inaudible.
An d, as you said, receivers limited AM bandwidth because, otherwise, they got complaints. This was particularly important with car radios, where dealers got "my radio makes whistling noises..." from new car buyers if the radio was too broadband.
Yes I know. Those were meant as two separate things. Limited bandwidth isn't as big a problem as noise.
I answered this before, but it can't be emphasized enough how badly man-made noise has impacted the usable coverage range of AM stations. Light dimmers, fluorescent lights, wall warts, computers and anything with a microchip, and all kinds of other electronic and electrical devices have reduced the coverage of AM stations due to increasing man-made noise on the AM band.
WSB on AM now has plenty of areas in the Atlanta Nielsen radio market area where the noise is too high for comfortable listening.
Add in the fact that younger listeners just don't have a habit of going to AM because "it sounds bad".
FM stereo came too late to be useful. It was supposed to start around 1979, but one of the proposed system developers held it up for nearly 5 more years... and by that time FM had about 70% of all music listening nationally.
Further, in markets like Atlanta and Houston where there were only one or two "good" AM signals, by the late 70's there were a dozen or more FMs that covered the whole market well, making listeners give up on AM over signal issues, quite independent of audio quality concerns.
Back then, the FCC "Proof of Performance" for AMs which had to be done every year measured frequency response of stations systems well above 10 kHz. But, later, the FCC had to limit audio bandwidth to 10 kHz due to heterodyning between all the stations they had allowed to be licensed.
The biggest factor against AM's survival is signal, with very few truly good AM signals in the major markets. In fact, in the 100 largest radio markets, there are less than 180 AMs that cover at least 80% of the market day and night. But there are five or six times that number of FMs that fully cover their markets.
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