All of that sounds great in theory. It reads like a David Field memo.
WBEN simulcast = Fail.
Alternative Buffalo = Fail. Rinse & Repeat.
Check back when Audacy flips it again to the "Next Great Idea"...
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May Ratings
- Thread starter SirRoxalot
- Start date
WBEN simulcast = Fail.
Alternative Buffalo = Fail. Rinse & Repeat.
Check back when Audacy flips it again to the "Next Great Idea"...
No, it sounds like the opinion of the owner of a local ad agency who understands pricing, geographic distributions of listeners and the market in general.
In the many decades of newspaper dominance, both the big central city daily papers and the suburban zoned weeklies thrived. Each was priced appropriately and both worked for advertisers.
Same applies here.
The newspaper analogy must be unintentional Gallows Humour. Yeah, it worked great long ago.
Audacy already has a viable Country format in Rochester. They aren't going to cut rates their to race to the bottom. The 107.7 signal covers much of the same geography. The Wolf isn't going to find any significant revenue out in the sticks...
You've already been told by someone who knows, and someone you claim to respect, that they HAVE found revenue there.
Yet you prefer to hold to your unsubstantiated opinion.
The concept works now, too. The main one is that some accounts can't or won't buy the higher rate stations and find that a lower rate station in areas they serve to be highly advantageous.
Where I first worked in radio, we shared the floor with a suburban newspaper. They did very well int he shadow of three metro area papers by serving smaller accounts and ones that did not cover the whole city.
If you look at the usable signal of 107.7, it has a definable suburban and rural exclusive area.
The alt cult is hard to preach to.
Try again. The Alternative format sucked. All I'm hearing is how successful this Country format is. That's a crock. When they end up dumping the format, you'll still try to say how great it was...
You should get your hearing checked.
WTSS should ditch it's Hot AC format and just become an AC station to avoid overlap with WKSE. Similar to WBEB and WTDY and philly
You seem to be inventing a problem where one does not exist.
WBEE covers Rochester very well, but not so much south of the Thruway. There really isn't much overlap in the small market area previously discussed. WYRK hammers Buffalo, but not so much in the hills southeast of Buffalo. Both stations get top dollar for spots - a price that's out of reach for businesses that don't have customers in either city. They do want to attract local customers in the area underserved by both the Buffalo and Rochester markets that WLKK covers well. WLKK doesn't need to get top dollar to make money. They can sell spots at rates that are affordable for smaller advertisers and still make money without cannibalizing the primary stations. It's actually a symbiotic relationship with WBEE with little cost to Audacy. If it happens to siphon a little audience off WYRK, so much the better.
In 10-15 years when towers and transmitters don't matter anymore the situation may be different. For right now, it works better than trying to develop an audience as a rimshot station with a weak signal in the bigger markets.
I’d be curious to see if WLKK would perform better ratings-wise if they did classic country/played more gold, seeing how well WBEE and WYRK perform in their respective markets I could see an audience for it in WNY, but SirRoxalot makes good points.
It's certainly working for KPLX in Dallas, which centers on '90s and '00s country with some '80s and '10s as well.
Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. I hear from a lot of listeners in that area how they’d love a station that plays 90s country. I know one station owner in WNY who would go for it, too.
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The Wolf has a 90s country show Sunday mornings, so they have that audience to study and see if it's worth expanding.
Right now they're regularly playing about 25-30 90s songs from Garth, Strait, McGraw, Chicks, Shania, Martina, and David Lee Murphy. They're playing them mainly in morning drive and PM drive.
The problem is that Audacy doesn't have the infrastructure to do an entire 90s country format, where Cumulus does. So they'd have to find a way to staff it. Right now, their afternoon show comes from Chicago, and the evening show comes from Detroit.
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The staffing issue could be solved by VTing or hiring local. I don’t think they need to have a lot of infrastructure to run the format well as long as they have someone who can program it effectively.
They're already VTing from other cities, as I said in my post. I believe it's already being programmed from another city. The problem is that none of those stations do classic country. And there aren't any Audacy country stations that do the classic country format. At the same time, they're trying to promote a national platform of current country stations, with a national weekly Top 20 countdown and a mid-day superstar interview show. They want those shows cleared in Buffalo. And they're not going to hire any more local talent.
In the meantime, as I said, they are already playing a lot of 90s country in their standard music mix. So I think that's about as much as you're going to see on this subject.
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