Not really. Mega has a lot more traditional Dominican music.
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Format Changes 2024
- Thread starter MVB13
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Sports betting stations don't have to beat the bushes looking for advertisers. Advertisers come to them in the form of programming paid for by sports betting operations, which don't care how many total people are listening, but how many of them are looking to bet on sports or for advice on sports betting. Sports betting -- or any bought-and-paid-for talk/advice programming -- is much better for the bottom line than all-news. Country, alternative or any music on Ancient Modulation stopped being a good idea in the 1980s.
OK, so here's a question for no one in particular:
Let's ignore legality for a moment...
If a drug dealer (heroin, fentanyl, etc.), or an association of drug dealers, approached WCBS and offered to buy out their 6 AM-Midnight inventory, provide their own programming, eliminate most overhead costs while guaranteeing a steady revenue stream, if they did that, would you be as gung-ho as some of you seem to be for the sports betting? Should Audacy accept that offer?
Doesn't have to be WCBS. Could be WFAN-AM. Or WINS-AM, now that the newswatch never stops on FM.
Does there come a point in your analysis when ethics, morality, societal good (or damage) trumps revenue and profit?
Let's ignore legality for a moment...
If a drug dealer (heroin, fentanyl, etc.), or an association of drug dealers, approached WCBS and offered to buy out their 6 AM-Midnight inventory, provide their own programming, eliminate most overhead costs while guaranteeing a steady revenue stream, if they did that, would you be as gung-ho as some of you seem to be for the sports betting? Should Audacy accept that offer?
Doesn't have to be WCBS. Could be WFAN-AM. Or WINS-AM, now that the newswatch never stops on FM.
Does there come a point in your analysis when ethics, morality, societal good (or damage) trumps revenue and profit?
But you can't ignore legality. Sports betting is legal in all three states that make up the NYC metro. Heroin and Fentanyl are not. Check your morality at the door. If it's legal, you're free to profit off it.
So if I remember correctly, you're a journalist, a (former?) newspaperman. And you're saying, "Check your morality at the door?" I find that an, uh, interesting argument for you in particular to make.
Anyone else? This is actually a very substantive question. (Way more so than whether "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree" is worthy of being #1 after 65 years.) It's basically, where do *you* draw the line?
Not sure about making more money, but I'm pretty sure they're losing less money.
Do you understand there's a big difference between TALKING about odds and bets, and actually gambling? That's where you start.
The fact is that every person I know in every line of work has an office pool that picks winners for every week of the NFL season. Explain the moral issue you have with that.
you're counting WXNY as urban?
I was a copy editor for three Connecticut papers after three years as a one-man sports department for a tiny paper down South. At none of my papers did I go around removing or editing ads or questioning their content. Not my job. Sports betting was legalized in Connecticut just a couple of months before I left the state, and I was already retired then. But all the Connecticut papers I worked for ran ads for Connecticut Off-Track Betting and, before they closed, the state's greyhound tracks and jai-alai frontons. Liquor stores advertised, too. Again, not my job to raise moral issues, although I would call any spelling errors I spotted when proofreading a finished page to someone's attention. And as far as stories about those offenses against morality go, I just made sure they were grammatical, spelled correctly, didn't contain falsehoods or exaggerations, and got headlines that would attract readers to the stories. My responsibilities as a copy editor were to the publisher and the reader equally. I would be serving neither by inserting moralistic elements into a story about someone who won Megabucks or the local OTB's plans for a big Kentucky Derby party for its patrons, just as I'd have been overstepping my boundaries as a sportswriter by inserting material about the dangers of football into a story about the big Homecoming game at the local high school.
"Check your morality at the door" might have been too strong. Maybe I should have said "Take your morality and make a letter to the editor out of it."
Oh, one more thing about advertising and news. The publisher and editor of that small Southern paper were convinced that chiropractic was quackery. No advertising was accepted from any chiropractor, and unless the chiropractor happened to be murdered, his practice got no news coverage. That was their right, and it was not my place to object.
And about gambling: I'd wager (lol) that more money has been lost and lives damaged by playing the sanitized casino game called the stock market than by sports betting.
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There's also a big difference between talking about heroin and fentanyl and selling it to children in the schoolyard. Would *you* like to be the executive explaining to the parents of a kid who's OD'ed why your station has programming that glorifies a dangerous pastime?
People die from gambling problems. People destroy their families, their marriages, their kids' futures. Problem gamblers commit suicide. (I doubt all that many people commit suicide from losing the office pool, but problem gamblers tend to have bookies who are a little more, uhh, forceful that the guy running the football or March Madness pool.) You want to be the GM at KGO when the inevitable happens? Maybe the market manager? Perhaps next to Mary Berner in a courtroom?
That's "the moral issue" I have.
Yes. What else would it be?
From what I've seen, WXNY plays more tropical music than WSKQ, in mornings and afternoon drive.
There are tons of gambling helpline numbers for different states that are tagged on the end of the sportsbooks ads. Not everyone who listens to a station that runs sports gambling shows or sportsbook ads is going to start gambling and wind up penniless. I don’t like listening to sports gambling either, so I don’t listen to stations that run it.
Why do you keep bringing up drugs as some sort of equivalence here? They are not equivalent. I can understand if you want to compare to legal marijuana, but that's not the issue here.
I heard this same argument when states discussed having lotteries to fund education. That a lottery is a slow walk to gambling, death, and destruction. Yet most states have enacted lotteries. The same argument was made 100 years ago to justify prohibition. We know how that went. People have to take responsibility for themselves. We can't prevent a discussion about which team has a better chance of winning because one person may gamble to excess. This is a free country for now.
Wouldn't a Latin Urban station be more like La 94 or Mix 107 in Puerto Rico? I sometimes hear Salsa on both WXNY and WSKQ. I thought Latin Urban was more like Reggaeton and Trap music, not Salsa or Merengue.
I've never seen a Spanish language station referred to as straight up urban. When speaking about urban radio one is usually referencing stations playing primarily English language rhythmic music and mostly African American.
You are debating industry terms in two different languages, and not the “feel” and appeal of the music. Reggaetón and hip hop appeal to the same groups but in different ethnic, cultural and racial communities.
An Urban station may play mostly hip hop plus some R&B songs, just as a reggaeton based stations may add some salsa, merengue or even vallenato.
Agreed but that doesn't dismiss that fact that calling WXNY urban as if it were WWPR isn't the norm. I think it's pretty clear that when speaking about urban radio we're referring to r&b/hip hop. Perhaps we should call WXNY hurban. With your logic we could also then call WKTU urban with it's cross over rhythmic appeal
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I saw the term "Hurban" as far back as 20 years ago, when KLOL "Mega 101" Houston, TX debuted. It has since gone to a Latin pop-oriented format. WQBS-FM "Mix 107" from Puerto Rico was called a pioneer of the Hurban format when it debuted in the late 90's as WVOZ-FM "Mix 107.7". Today, I see other names for the format such as "Latin Urban" "Latin Rhythm" and "Urbano".
The real difference is in language.
I put on an all rock format in Buenos Aires. It was totally and absolutely rock. It was also all in Spanish, and every artist had to be Argentine, too. But it was still just as rock as any rock station in the USA or Australia or France or England. ddd
WKTU is certainly mostly ethnic, mainly Hispanics and African Americans. Of course, there are those who feel "Urban" is stereotypical... but then calling another format "country" would commit the same sin.
Again, the main purpose of identifying a station by a somewhat standardized format name is to give advertisers some idea of what kind of station they are considering a buy on. Lots of agency business is national and regional and generally the time buyer is not directly familiar with the station, those names of formats are very useful and important to ad buyers.
Keep in mind that a buyer for a national account might be buying 4 to 6 deep in the top 100 markets... maybe 500 stations in total. They will see the call letters and format class in Nielsen data, and that is all they usually need to know.
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