i am pretty sure even i said that because even i.. with no connection to the market.. kmows that lol
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1260 Going Country Gold
- Thread starter Joey1986
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i am pretty sure even i said that because even i.. with no connection to the market.. kmows that lol
My 17-month old granddaughter is coming to visit from Georgia this afternoon. I'm sure if I asked her, SHE'd say:
"On 1260 AM in Los Angeles in 2024?"
I’m not sure who has the higher ratings among the board posters in California, KMZT Beverly Hills or KNEW Oakland!
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Y’all laugh but classic country will actually get an audience. It may not be a sellable audience. But, it’ll certainly do better than bleeping classical music. Again, the largest country music festival, in the world, is in Southern California each year. Does anyone have numbers for how well classical music festivals do?
The only kind that matters in commercial radio.
Second largest. CMA Fest in Nashville attracts about 110,000 more people than Stagecoach:
Also, Stagecoach is in Indio, 125 miles from Los Angeles.
And if Stagecoach’s size were relevant to L.A. radio ratings, it would suggest that KKGO, with a full-market FM signal, should do better, don’t you think?
I mean, classical by its nature does not focus on crowd size, but…
It depends. Cumulus and iHeart are each doing classic country in Dallas, Austin, and several other cities and getting very good demos. People in their 40s grew up in the 80s & 90s. Classic Hits gets sellable audience by playing music from that era. If 1260 does the same, you might be surprised.
The mistake some AM classic country stations make is they play 60s/70s, and that era attracts retired people. I'm sure Kenny Jay has advised Saul about that.
as someone who hosted a classic country overnight show for 6 years on 4-5 dozen stations and did afternoons on a top rated small market country station, i can personally attest to and have evidence to suggest a few things.
In the last 5-10 years when country has become incredibly pop oriented, people are clamoring for "Real country" both to coin a term from ABC/Jones/WW1 satellite format and what people are calling it.
They're tired of the same top 40 hot country songs played ad naseum. They want real country music.
And I'll tell you, tempo/mood/flow is a big thing... would i play a 70s tune on an 80s 90s early 2000s classic country station? Maybe if it wasnt old and twangy sounding.
You dont wanna be playing a good selection of 80s 90s up beat tunes then ruin the radio cranked in the truck, singing along taping your feet cleaning the house and jamming out while vaccuming.. with some old tired tune.
When I was in NW PA, we were a 60-70/40-30 mix of new versus old... now theyre primarily classic couintry.........and when id get requests from people 50-60.. some even 70 miles away, id ask why they listen to us and they said that whole "tired of the same top 40 stuff" almost every time and they were listening over the air.
people who grew up listening to 80s/90s country and REMEMBER it are going to be older than me, mostly and im 40.
When i started in radio 20 years ago, i started getting jobs at small town country stations (williston, nd, Ridgway PA) and didnt wanna be marked as a country jock my entire career, cuse once you start doing a certain format, at least 20 years ago.. its hard to do something else. I'd NEVER even listened to country music for an hour in my life before I started in radio.. and as it turns out, its been the segment of this industry that turned out to be my most successful, where i gained the most knowledge and suchforth.
In the last 5-10 years when country has become incredibly pop oriented, people are clamoring for "Real country" both to coin a term from ABC/Jones/WW1 satellite format and what people are calling it.
They're tired of the same top 40 hot country songs played ad naseum. They want real country music.
And I'll tell you, tempo/mood/flow is a big thing... would i play a 70s tune on an 80s 90s early 2000s classic country station? Maybe if it wasnt old and twangy sounding.
You dont wanna be playing a good selection of 80s 90s up beat tunes then ruin the radio cranked in the truck, singing along taping your feet cleaning the house and jamming out while vaccuming.. with some old tired tune.
When I was in NW PA, we were a 60-70/40-30 mix of new versus old... now theyre primarily classic couintry.........and when id get requests from people 50-60.. some even 70 miles away, id ask why they listen to us and they said that whole "tired of the same top 40 stuff" almost every time and they were listening over the air.
people who grew up listening to 80s/90s country and REMEMBER it are going to be older than me, mostly and im 40.
When i started in radio 20 years ago, i started getting jobs at small town country stations (williston, nd, Ridgway PA) and didnt wanna be marked as a country jock my entire career, cuse once you start doing a certain format, at least 20 years ago.. its hard to do something else. I'd NEVER even listened to country music for an hour in my life before I started in radio.. and as it turns out, its been the segment of this industry that turned out to be my most successful, where i gained the most knowledge and suchforth.
Let's double back to Stagecoach, which had 89,003 attendees this year.
IF you---and you can't----but IF you could get every one of those people to listen to 1260, that'd be a cume of 89,003.
That's fewer people than make up the weekly cume for Christian KKLA (90,200) and Cal State Northridge's KCSN (95,300). Those stations have a 6+ share of 0.2 and 0.3, respectively.
KKGO, with a city-grade FM signal, is 22nd with a 1.9.
Stagecoach draws attendees not just from L.A. but from San Diego, where KSON's been a big deal for decades, from the Inland Empire, where KFRG has had similar long-term success, from Imperial County, the Mojave Desert and Eastern Sierra communities and more than a few folks from Arizona, Nevada and other states.
You cannot measure the potential success of a country station in L.A. using that as a metric.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
This reminds me of arguments we had here, years ago, as to why Entravision should have kept the Indie format on 103.1 based on the attendance of fans at various concerts by artists that they played on KDLD/KDLE. For some reason people equate event numbers with potential listenership, when in fact reversing the situation shows that it is only a small percentage of any station's audience that can be persuaded to attend a live performance.
Never mind getting enough people from a concert to listen enough to get a 0.2 or 0.3; by the time you factor in the low probabilty of attendance at all by any of the listeners, you're lucky to show up in the monthly numbers at all.
It didn't work for Indie. It won't work for KKGO (FM or AM). Trying to tie listening to concertgoing is a fool's errand.
I was under the impression that "classic country," as a genre and radio format alike, was widely agreed to be anything prior to Garth Brooks that's also amplified in whole or in part (meaning excluding 100% acoustic recordings from the middle-early 20th century a la Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys).
Has the meaning of the term changed?
Edit: around the time of his popularization, many considered Brooks to be a line of demarcation between "real" and "modern" country. There are still threads about this everywhere, if anyone is curious why I used his name above as some sort of classifier.
Has the meaning of the term changed?
Edit: around the time of his popularization, many considered Brooks to be a line of demarcation between "real" and "modern" country. There are still threads about this everywhere, if anyone is curious why I used his name above as some sort of classifier.
The times I have gone, I hear from folks at the food stands, seated near us and conclude just by looking at license plates. There are people from Australia, and loads from Washington, Idaho, Texas, Colorado and the like. Because it is a three-day event, people use it as a real "vacation" and they come in campers, RV's and bring tents.
It's not really an LA event "out in the country". It is a regional if not national event that's a destination that lasts for all three days with noon to 1 AM music on three stages and with all kinds of country-appropriate food, such as some great barbecue and Southwestern "Mexican" offerings.
It seems to me that the mood of the music changed after the 90's, not in the Garth Brooks / Randy Travis / Brooks & Dunn / Tim McGraw era.
As a wise man once said: "When did Mötley Crüe become classic rock?"
It depends. For people in their 40s, their view of classic is stuff they remember from growing up. So if you're programming to people in their 40s, then Garth Brooks is their version of Johnny Cash. But if we were programming to you, then we might play Johnny.
The current country format is almost entirely Y2K. They might play 90s on Sunday morning. Or they might throw in a Strait or Garth cut every now & then. So anything before 2000 could be classic if you compare it to what's on most country stations now.
As I always say, people in radio aren't musicologists. If they were, then sure, Bob Wills is classic country. But if you're trying to attract an audience that you can sell to advertisers, classic country can be whatever the audience calls classic.
You're exactly right. But that was 35 years ago. Garth turned 60 years old this year. He's a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He's revered for all he did to bring young people to country. Now those young people are in their 40s, and want to hear Garth on the radio. People today listen to those Garth hits from 35 years ago, and they're amazed at how country they sound, with fiddle & steel just like Bob Wills. Except without the horns.
Huh? Youre missing the fact that at the time Indie went off the air, there were and still are two other stations in the market with the exact same format. Indie would still be alive today if the fcc leaves Clear Channel alone. There aren’t other country stations in L.A.
What stations were identical?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Your memory is faulty. KROQ and Alt are nowhere near "the exact same format". They weren't then, and they aren't now. What defined Indie and set it apart was the wide variety of specialty programs which broadened the concept.
And Clear Channel had little to do with Indie's demise, other than having to divest the station to Entravision in 2000 when it was still a AAA station branded as "World Class Rock" in order to comply with FCC ownership caps. (I believe the FCC was correct in "counting" LMAs in calculating the caps, and CC was certainly not the only ownership group that was affected.)
Indie was a format created by Entravision as a replacement for the "KDL" Dance format, which itself replaced the Spanish-language CHR "Super Estrella" which ran on 103.1 before they bought the 107.1 stations and moved the format there. Clear Channel had been out of the picture for more than three years when Indie debuted.
I see. I was thinking there must have been a succession of terms for each era in country music, just as there is for popular music. For instance, to many people, "smokin' oldies" is the specific term for pre-Beatles oldies ('50s - '64), while everything from the Beatles until the dawn of classic rock is just plain "oldies." Classic rock, of course, was itself only applied to '70s rock, not '70s pop. And '50s/'60s rock was just "rockin' oldies," or "oldies rock," or originally, "rock and roll." And "classic hits," of course, somehow became the term for '80s and '90s oldies, that generation, like past ones, not wanting their oldies confused thematically with their parents'.
That was why I asked about "classic country." If there's no long list of variant subterms for the different eras of country music, then "classic country" essentially becomes a meaningless term, meaning a completely different subgenre/era of country music to each listener or collector.
When Arrow 93 became JackFM!
There may be. But once again, radio programmers aren't musicologists. We're talking about a radio format.
Exactly. There are a whole bunch of people who hate the fact that what's being played on the radio now is called "country." It's a never ending debate. Nobody cares. In today's world, everybody's an expert, and we can call music whatever we want. There is no music police that will arrest us for calling Garth Brooks "classic" or Post Malone "country." It's all meaningless. People like what they like.
I've never heard the term "smokin' oldies" except as, maybe, a liner on a 50's and 60's based station decades ago. It's not an industry term I recognize. I looked for it in a search of Billboard from the 60's to the end of the 90's and did not find anything indicating it was a recognized term in the industry of radio or that of music.
Classic rock is the "graduating class" of AOR in the last several decades. It may have included even some "flower power" late 60's, 70's, 80's and, more recently, 90's.
Again you have come up with several terms I have never heard given to a style, era or kind of music format. "Rockin' oldies" sounds like a Saturday night specialty show with Buddy Holly and Little Richard songs. I have never heard "oldies rock" used at all.
And "rock and roll" or "rock 'n roll" or "rock 'n' roll" is what was sort of the generic term for the music Top 40 stations played for the decade between Rock Around the Clock and "I Want To Hold Your Hand".
"Classic Hits" is the term "oldies" stations changed to for sales purposes when "oldies" became identified among agency buyers as meaning a format that appealed to mostly over-55 listeners. So stations playing 60's and 70's phased out the 60's, and then, over a number of years and at different rates depending on the market, began thinning the herd of early 70's. Now, we have "Classic Hits" meaning later 70's, a lot of 80's and a thin smattering of 90's in most cases.
As time goes on, stations in the Classic Hits format will want to slowly remove the 70's stuff and add more 90's as their target is primarily 35-54 and so each year, the add the "new" 35's and drop those who are now 55. It's totally dynamic, and based on a stable target age which is a moving target musically.
In the case of radio, "classic country" is a positioning statement or term. No matter what the age range of the songs they do play, they call it "classic". There is no "format police".
If we look at "classic hits" vs. "oldies" we see that many true classic hits stations still continued for a decade or more to call themselves "oldies" because the term was positive to listeners. There is no format police to make stations use or not use names.
And when "Jack" impacted American radio, Nielsen was petitioned to add a format name, "Adult Hits" to cover the wide range of decades and music types that a Jack or imitation Jack might play.When Arrow 93 became JackFM!
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