Was the KFRC Game Zone successful?
Did it air on a network of stations?
Did it air on a network of stations?
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Game Zone
- Thread starter Donny-KUDU
- Start date
Not at all. It lasted six months and was a disaster. In fact, it was rushed off the air on November 8, 1985, with a big-money ($61,000) prize still unawarded. That broadcast was moved to December 21 to bury it in half an hour of Saturday night.
KFRC had dropped to 8th place with a 3.1 when the decision was made to try the Game Zone (a block of games from 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.) weekdays.
It began on the first day of the Spring, 1985 ratings period and the station collapsed to a 1.9 and tied for 19th place.
Trouble was, in those (pre-internet) days, in a market measured quarterly, you'd only see the numbers a month before the next book began.
So KFRC held on---and the Summer, 1985 book showed it with a 1.5 and tied for 23rd with a classical station.
They decided not to risk the fall book, and dumped it a week and a half in advance of the rating period beginning.
The ratings improved...but only slightly---a 1.7 and 21st place.
The audience never came back. KFRC had one more 1.7 book, then a 1.6 in spring of '86. That was when plans began to change to the Magic 61 standards format.
No. It was the idea of KFRC's consultant, Walter Sabo (who today is a talk show host known as Walter Sterling), and if KFRC had been successful, I imagine he would have tried to syndicate it.
But---Sterling also was the consultant behind the Magic 61 standards format, and I've always suspected that his goal was to put KFRC into a position where they'd try that.
And, hey, Magic 61 worked. Great numbers for ten years. The trouble was that the audience aged out of what was the original salable demo (50+) at the same time agencies were discovering that demo really didn't work well for them.
For those of us outside of SF, what was the “Game Zone”?
Read all about it:
(page 2)
Street Novelist
Banned
That shows how desperate things were on AM 40 years ago.Man, what a terrible idea. I can't believe someone actually approved it.
I don't think AM was in THAT much decline 40 years ago. I believe you're exagerating the situation.
I literally quoted the ratings and linked to a two-page article about why KFRC made the decision and you think I'm exaggerating.
Let's dust off my "AM Mall" analogy:
And that's in a market where AM supposedly had an advantage.
Let's check AM in the Top 15 markets in the Spring 1985 book. How many AMs were still in the top 10?
01. New York: WOR (4th place), WINS (6th place), WCBS (8th place)
02. Los Angeles: KABC (2nd place), KMPC (7th place), KNX (9th place) KFWB (9th place-tie)
03. Chicago: WGN (first place), WBBM (5th place), WJJD (8th place)
04. San Francisco: KGO (first place), KCBS (2nd place), KNBR (6th place), KABL (9th place), KNEW (10th place)
05. Philadelphia: KYW (4th place), WPEN (8th place), WCAU (9th place)
06. Detroit: WJR (first place), WWJ (4th place), CKLW (5th place),
07. Boston: WBZ (2nd place), WHDH (3rd place), WRKO (5th place), WEEI (8th place)
08. Houston: KTRH (9th place)
09. Washington: WMAL (4th place), WTOP (9th place)
10. Dallas: WBAP (2nd place), KRLD (4th place)
11. Miami: WQBA (4th place), WINZ (8th place), WIOD (10th place)
12. Nassau-Suffolk: WNBC (4th place), WOR (5th place)
13. Pittsburgh: KDKA (first place), WJAS (8th place), WTAE (10th place)
14. St. Louis: KMOX (first place), WRTH (9th place), WUSA (10th place)
15. Atlanta: WSB (7th place)
So:
- ONE market with five AMs in the top ten (San Francisco)
- TWO markets with four AMs in the top ten (Los Angeles, Boston)
- SEVEN markets with three AMs in the top ten (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami, Pittsburgh and St. Louis)
- THREE markets with two AMs in the top ten (Washington, Dallas, Nassau-Suffolk)
- TWO markets with only ONE AM in the top ten (Houston and Atlanta)
So, yeah...AM was in that much decline 40 years ago.
Yep. And options were limited. A market could only support so much News/Talk. Sports hadn't really emerged as its own format yet. So in markets where the News/Talk space already had established winners, other stations had to look at music formats that might work on AM.
Standards did, getting great shares. But by 1992-93, most stations found that their original 50+ listeners from the mid-80s were 60+ and the ad agencies didn't want them. They were even cooling on 50+ by that point.
Black music formats succeeded in some cities---until someone put the format on FM. Same with Country.
As someone in broadcasting since 1971 (I retired last year), who mainly programmed Adult Contemporary AM stations, I can tell you the writing was on the wall as early as 1978, and things were getting pretty bleak by '82-'83.
AM was in decline 50 years ago.
It has been posted in the past by David Eduardo that 1975 was when the majority of music listening went to FM, and 1977 when a majority of all listening went to FM.
Yes, but...important context: It was that early only because of the mid-late 70s boom in Beautiful Music shares. In some markets, two and even three Beautifuls would be in the Top 10 at once.
A lot of the boom in Beautiful Music was from former MOR listeners who didn't like the transition to Adult Contemporary. So once-huge chunks of audience for (we're talking about San Francisco here) KSFO were moving to stations like KFOG.
Album Rock stations lagged Beautiful, but only by a little...'78-'80 was the watershed moment for those stations becoming massive players with top-five rankings and in some markets, more than one big enough to be in the Top 10.
The bulk of Top 40 format listening didn't really shift to FM until '80-'82 (depending on the market), with AC roughly in the same timeframe.
Before someone says---"but you said...": There were trends that were clear as far back as the late 60s that suggested FM would achieve dominance.
And even as AM radio shares continued at strong levels, you could see the penetration of FM receivers in cars, home systems and portables, improvements in tuning (vertical polarization on the transmission side, phased lock loop quartz tuning on the receiving side) and know that people (competitors and listeners) would make use of them.
Since the thread began with KFRC, let's go back to KFRC. It had its peak book---8.4---in the Spring 1978 Arbitron. Two years later (Spring 1980), it was down to a 4.4. An almost 50% loss of share, scattered amongst climbing competitors, none of which were actually Top 40 stations, but who played music the audience liked.
KYUU and KIOI were Adult Contemporary, but not soft. KSOL was what was then called Urban, and KFRC had historically played a lot of R&B. KSFX did well with Disco and was still coming off that peak by morphing into an R&B-heavy pop station. And some of KFRC's 1978 audience grew out of Top 40 and were listening to AOR on KMEL and KOME.
And all of those stations---were FM.
In Spring '80, KFRC with 4th with a 4.0, behind only KGO, KCBS and KFOG. The lazy take would be that KFRC "beat" KYUU, KIOI, KSOL, KSFX, KMEL and KOME...but the real message (and anyone in broadcasting at the time understood it) was that those stations took damn near half of KFRC's share in two years.
Last edited:
I remember THE GAME ZONE on KFRC. It was bad.
Like has been said the writing was on the wall for SF area AM RnR stations at the time . . . KFRC was trying things, that just did not work.
But when they did RnR in the 60's / 70's THEY SOUNDED GREAT!!! REALLY GREAT!!! Technically & Personality wise.
Like has been said the writing was on the wall for SF area AM RnR stations at the time . . . KFRC was trying things, that just did not work.
But when they did RnR in the 60's / 70's THEY SOUNDED GREAT!!! REALLY GREAT!!! Technically & Personality wise.
Michael, during this 10 year stint, I understand KSFO tried playing standards for a year or so? Were they not successfull ?
There were two attempts. One was a disaster, one worked, but only temporarily.
Al Newman was KSFO's Program Director from 1959 to 1974. Don Sherwood, the station's bad boy morning man, would quit every few years and then work out a deal to come back.
In May of 1974, Sherwood had been gone for five years. For whatever reason, he told KSFO he'd come back and do mornings only if he could be PD, and they said yes, firing Al Newman.
Sherwood then fired Dick McGarvin and Jim Lange and retreated from KSFO's adventurous MOR format that allowed the personalities significant latitude in picking their own music. Here's a 1971 aircheck of Terry McGovern in afternoons playing, among other artists, Taj Mahal:
Though nobody was programming standards as a format yet, that's what Sherwood did...essentially went back to what they were playing before 1965.
It was a disaster. KSFO, which generally was first, second or third in the ratings, fell to 5th place (behind KGO, KCBS, KFRC and KABL-AM) in the October/November 1974 ratings.
In February of 1975, Sherwood got bored/disgusted/drunk/all three and quit, leaving KSFO, never to return.
Golden West brought Vic Ives down from KVI in Seattle and he essentially tried to put KSFO back together again, but from that point on, KSFO's only really strong ratings books were Spring and Summer, when the Giants were playing, and after the Giants moved to KNBR for the 1979 season, KSFO slumped into a year-round 10th place (give or take) with (again, give or take) a 3.0 share.
In 1980, KSFO hired Allan Hotlen away from KNBR, where he'd been for five years (he was at WIP in Philadelphia before that). This was a period when Golden West was experimenting with talk in some dayparts (KMPC wound up going all talk), but Hotlen held it to 9-noon, and in early 1981, convinced Golden West to let him take KSFO to what Hotlen described as "standards by major adult artists". He explains it in this interview in R&R:
And, for the most part, it worked...KSFO was back in 4th place with a 5.0 share in the spring '81 book, and there was a good solid year before the numbers got soft and they were back to 3 shares.
I can't find specifics on what happened after that (R&R didn't care enough to report it), but by fall of '82, they were a straightforward AC again, and had cratered to a 2.2.
The numbers got a bit better in '83, with a really good summer book (4th place with a 4.2---largely attributed to a good season for the Oakland A's with Billy Martin as manager), but by that time, Golden West had sold the station to King Broadcasting, which took over in December.
It was a low-rated AC from there (and when I say low-rated, I mean 1.8-2.0 for three of the four 1985 books and a 1.7 twice in 1986) until the KSFO/KYA-FM oldies format.
Michael, thanks for the information, and more importantly, the great story telling.
The Game Zone was on KKSN in Portland, beginning in 1987, continued on KKSN-FM the following February and then dropped from the FM. It appeared to be locally produced and live. I heard a girl I used to date call in. The host seemed to be the same one on KFRC but don't quote me. I probably knew at one time. That was two years later so there must be more examples.
I'm gonna guess that it was this. Mark Richards was the evening jock at KFI in Los Angeles, which did a block of games from 6-9 p.m. beginning in August of 1985.
Apparently Mark had done similar things as early as 1982 at KOGO in San Diego, then at KGIL in San Fernando before going to KFI.
By April of 1986, it was over at KFI, but Mark was syndicating. It was not related to Walt Sabo's "Game Zone" at KFRC (in fact, in this Radio & Records article, Mark says he tried to make some suggestions to KFRC and was blown off).
The KFRC hosts were Dave Sholin, Chuck Browning and Jim Bridges. None of them worked in Portland, so it was likely a similar voice.
I can't find any mention of KKSN doing a game block, so I can't tell who it might have been. I found this interview/profile of Mark Richards, which mentions that he moved to Las Vegas in 1990 and did the game show thing on KENO-AM, but I can't find anything that suggests he was in Portland in between KFI and that.
Mark Richards: Game Show Host and Aficionado - Listen Now!
This week, Ira spoke with Mark Richards, who hosted “Starcade,” cable television’s first original game show.
iraseverythingbagel.com
There really weren't. The only examples I can find in a pretty exhaustive search of the trades are Mark Richards at KOGO/KGIL and KFI and the KFRC Game Zone.
Given what happened to the two major stations to try it (KFRC with a 1.5 and in 23rd place in the summer book, KFI with a 1.6 and in 22nd place in the fall book), I'm betting there were few takers.
"Big" Tom Parker, perhaps? I know he moved up to Portland from San Francisco somewhere in that time frame, and was on KFRC and at least one of our FM's while he worked in this market.
Nope. Tom went back to Portland in '86 after 10 years in SF, but didn't get to KKSN until the mid-90s.
- Status