I never heard WOWO on AM because I'm in California, So KEX was booming at night
That's messed up what Inner City did baack then, But I know it was just business
Why did WOWO sell anyways backthen? I don't understand
It wasn't "messed up" at all. I would have done exactly what they did if I had owned WLIB.
Remember, this was the early 1990s. No streaming, no satellite radio, no HD radio. Each owner was still limited to one AM and one FM in a market and a limited number of stations nationally.
Every one of those stations was therefore pretty valuable, especially in a big market. If you were in NYC in 1993, you had about 50 choices of what to listen to live. Total. That was it. WLIB's programming back then was aimed at the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who came from the Caribbean, and if that was you - if you wanted to hear music and news from Jamaica or Trinidad or wherever - you couldn't just stream something. You had WLIB or a couple of competitors to choose from.
Having a daytime-only AM station in the biggest market in the country was therefore a huge disadvantage for Inner City compared to its competitors. 20 million potential listeners in the market and for half of drive time in winter, you're not on the air at all.
WOWO at this point was owned by Price Communications, a typical medium sized broadcaster of the era that owned a few scattered TV and radio stations. They put WOWO up for sale in hopes of tapping into an increase in station values now that the FCC was beginning to allow two AMs and two FMs per owner in a market. Lots of owners were doing the same thing at the time.
Price didn't really care who they sold WOWO to. They had made an investment buying WOWO from Group W and running it for a dozen years and now it was time to cash out of that investment.
Inner City could have just bought WOWO and turned it off entirely, and may even have planned to do just that, but an Indiana-based owner entered the picture. Federated Media owned WMEE and WQHK in Fort Wayne and was willing to buy WOWO even with a nighttime power downgrade.
So it really was a very clever deal in retrospect. Inner City spent relatively little by NYC market standards to turn its daytimer into a 24-hour signal at the last moment when that still mattered. I don't doubt they made significant extra revenue over the years from being able to sell ads early in the morning and later in the afternoon on WLIB, more than enough to pay off what they spent to do that upgrade.
WOWO's "downgrade" ended up not really mattering in the long run, because the AM signal over Fort Wayne was still good enough and then was eventually augmented by an FM signal - and in any event, WOWO (like every AM station in a market its size) stopped doing anything of specific local or regional interest after 6 PM within a few years anyway.
If anything, the kerfuffle helped WOWO for a while, since it put the station in Indiana ownership for the first time since the 1940s and generated a lot of headlines for a while.
WLIB was going to be a victim of changing times eventually, no matter what, but there was no way to know that yet in 1993-94, and going to full time operation bought Inner City some good years along the way.
There are a lot of deals from that era I wouldn't do if I could go back in time with complete hindsight. This one, I would have done even knowing everything we know now.
