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KFXM is off the air

3

30james

Banned
Yep I went to their webpage and nothing but dead air no streaming nothing. I understand as a nonprofit they only can do so much as they have limited funds to fix things. Hopefully they can be on the air soon.
 
I'll shoot Chris Compton an e-mail and see if I can find out what's going on.
 
I didn't know about this LPFM until coming across this thread...A music library of over 36,000 titles from the 50's thru 70''s, sounds like the ultimate oldies station for those who like a deep, wide, big playlist.

The website says they are planning to have some of the old jocks from the past do shows.

Keeping my fingers crossed that they come back online. Maybe someone in the Lancaster area can confirm the status of the OTA signal.
 
KilowattKat said:
I didn't know about this LPFM until coming across this thread...A music library of over 36,000 titles from the 50's thru 70''s, sounds like the ultimate oldies station for those who like a deep, wide, big playlist.
Click to expand...
I only listened to the station once or twice years ago. While it was professionally done, I found that about 75% of the songs were either totally unfamiliar or had no emotional tie with me. I was a huge Top 40 fan from the mid-50's onward, and actually built, programmed and owned a station with that format starting in the mid-60's... so I know the music and, of course, have favorites like we all do.

But the idea of playing the songs that never got above #75 on Billboard meant they had lots of tunes that did not engage me.
 
DavidEduardo said:
I only listened to the station once or twice years ago. While it was professionally done, I found that about 75% of the songs were either totally unfamiliar or had no emotional tie with me. I was a huge Top 40 fan from the mid-50's onward, and actually built, programmed and owned a station with that format starting in the mid-60's... so I know the music and, of course, have favorites like we all do.

But the idea of playing the songs that never got above #75 on Billboard meant they had lots of tunes that did not engage me.
Click to expand...
David... You make this point repeatedly regarding commercial radio viability needing to adhere to the biggest and most recognizable hits. While it may be the formula for OTA stations that rely on short 15 minutes TSLs, it leads to boring radio for P1s. Yet here you make the same argument for an LPFM (KFXM), and you have recently made it as well for SXM's decades channels.
This 'hits only' programming philosophy, which is so prevalent in infecting broadcast stations. is leading to the loss of the medium's influence among the 12-49 demo. In counter to your post, I hope it remains relegated just to commercial OTA stations, and not be imported to LPFM, Satellite radio, and streaming - unless they too want to see the creativity sucked out of their product, and hence the loss of what makes them compelling.
 
david said:
This 'hits only' programming philosophy, which is so prevalent in infecting broadcast stations. is leading to the loss of the medium's influence among the 12-49 demo.
Click to expand...

No its not. When i get requests from thje majority of listeners wether its here at KSKO, when i was full time art KLMI.. it was songs that wqere quite popular and recognizeable.

Listeners, except for music geeks.. dont want stiffs. They say they want a bigger playlist, but then they hear stufvf they dont know.
 
david said:
David... You make this point repeatedly regarding commercial radio viability needing to adhere to the biggest and most recognizable hits. While it may be the formula for OTA stations that rely on short 15 minutes TSLs, it leads to boring radio for P1s.
Click to expand...
Radio always had very short TSL. It's just that in the diary system people did not put down the on and off times, but, instead, put down the overall periods of listening. So they would put " 6 AM to 8AM when, in fact, those two hours were really a bunch of short intervals adding up to maybe 40 minutes.

It took real time PPM monitoring to realize how fragmented listening really is.
david said:
Yet here you make the same argument for an LPFM (KFXM), and you have recently made it as well for SXM's decades channels.
This 'hits only' programming philosophy, which is so prevalent in infecting broadcast stations. is leading to the loss of the medium's influence among the 12-49 demo.
Click to expand...
Radio has not cared about 12-17 for many decades... back when pimple creams still advertised on the radio. And when you talk to most adults, particularly those over 21, you find that when they listen to broadcast radio... or stream it... they do so for familiarity. Music discovery is a different mood and mindset, and other sources are used for that... ones where a song can be cut off after just a few seconds if we don't like it; you can't do that with radio as you get the whole song or nothing.
david said:
In counter to your post, I hope it remains relegated just to commercial OTA stations, and not be imported to LPFM, Satellite radio, and streaming - unless they too want to see the creativity sucked out of their product, and hence the loss of what makes them compelling.
Click to expand...
LPFMs are so often creations in the image of their owner. This is similar to pirate stations that think commercial radio does not play "the good songs" without realizing that most people don't share that taste and preference.

This gets back to the "if a tree falls in the forest..." Broad spectrum music programming is generally so very... so terribly... niche that it should really find a broader home via streaming. In Los Angeles, the Pacifica station has a huge signal with a very broad spectrum of talk and music shows... and barely has a couple of hundred average listeners in a market of ten million... too much variety.

And, again, the idea that "variety" in music means "more songs" is a misconception that one easily finds when talking to listeners one-on-one; "variety" really means "my favorite songs and none of the ones I don't like".
 
LPFM's are different from commercial radio. They have to be non-profit, limited to one station ownership, and a much smaller focused listening area. This makes it ideal to bring music, and programming that would never be heard on commercial radio.

This expands what's available on the radio dial, making radio, creative, interesting, and bringing to listeners who like to hear things such as a 36,000 song playlist. They are not programming to masses, doing music research to find only those magic 300 songs.

LPFM's are providing radio options that are outside of the control of commercial radio. Something that is really needed, especially considering the current state of the industry.
 
DavidEduardo said:
And, again, the idea that "variety" in music means "more songs" is a misconception that one easily finds when talking to listeners one-on-one; "variety" really means "my favorite songs and none of the ones I don't like".
Click to expand...
This is perhaps, the most widely misunderstood term by those who use the "more variety" argument against today's Classic Hits stations.

It has been proven over and over (and over) that when a successful CH station is challenged by an upstart with a "wide variety" that listeners go back to the original station after the novelty wears off of hearing "a bunch of songs I don't care about" (their words, not mine).
 
30james said:
It might be the stream is down. But the station itself might be down as well
Click to expand...
I'm still waiting to hear from the illustrious Mr. Compton (who I worked with for several months in the mid-1980s). I may just give him a call instead.
 
KilowattKat said:
I didn't know about this LPFM until coming across this thread...A music library of over 36,000 titles from the 50's thru 70''s, sounds like the ultimate oldies station for those who like a deep, wide, big playlist.
Click to expand...
They don't rotate 36,000 songs, that would take many months. They may schedule a fraction of that, maybe 1200-1800 and keep the rest on standby and play some of them as requests or other specials. Playing unknown low charters and album fillers consistently would drive away listeners.
 
K.M. Richards said:
I'm still waiting to hear from the illustrious Mr. Compton (who I worked with for several months in the mid-1980s). I may just give him a call instead.
Click to expand...
Well, so much for that idea. The number I had for him at home is disconnected now (I last called him sometime in 2019, so who knows what's happened since then).
 
oldies76 said:
They don't rotate 36,000 songs, that would take many months. They may schedule a fraction of that, maybe 1200-1800 and keep the rest on standby and play some of them as requests or other specials. Playing unknown low charters and album fillers consistently would drive away listeners.
Click to expand...
1800 songs is about 1200 too many in a gold based format.

Example: I was doing a classic rock station in a market a bit bigger than New York City and we were getting around a 22 share. Another station came on with a playlist about three times larger than ours, and promoted "variety" and "less repetition". During the year that they lasted, the highest they got was a 1.8 and we never lost anything. They ended up changing format, but not until they had amply stated that the survey was rigged and people could not possibly like the same songs over and over.
 
DavidEduardo said:
1800 songs is about 1200 too many in a gold based format.
Click to expand...
Case in point ... in the Eighties Channel library for any given week there are:
  • Approximately 125 "powers"
  • Approximately 185 "secondaries"
  • 100-110 "fill" titles (dropped if not needed)
  • 50 New Wave songs, played once an hour as an accent
  • 36 "Forgotten 45s" - hourly feature, one-third of the active songs swapped out every week, from a total library of about 500 that rest a minimum of four months before being scheduled after their last three-week run
  • 50 more New Wave songs that play weekly on a Saturday night special program
  • 24 "deeper" New Wave songs that are part of the Saturday night show, different titles every week from a total available of about 350 and which cannot repeat any sooner than six weeks from the last airing
So that's roughly 500 songs in the regular library at any given time (and the only lesser titles are in an hourly feature where they will play only about a dozen times, bouncing around all different hours every time, before being swapped out).

And, much to the dismay of "deeper library" fanatics, when scheduled properly that works just fine for attracting and keeping listeners.
 
Well, this doesn't look good.

Someone posted on Facebook back in November saying Chris wasn't doing his Saturday morning show anymore, and subsequent replies (one from around the beginning of April) indicate that the station phone number was disconnected and even the businesses that paid for underwriting announcements don't know what happened, but apparently the stream was still up a week ago without any Compton shows.

Facebook

www.facebook.com www.facebook.com

Chris is about ten years older than me, which would put him in his mid-70s. I hope there aren't health issues that have affected the station's operation.

I also note that there is no silent STA filed with the FCC.

(And no, I have no idea why the Facebook link is displaying in an Asian language.)
 
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