It may have been higher in the past, then---that's a 2024 CDC number.
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560
- Thread starter K108 Sacramento
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I think this is what your envisioning. This is a part 15 on 1610 AM. I believe it's run by one of the users of this board.
Antioch OTR
radio.macinmind.com
Nights overall don't get many listeners regardless of the station. That's a unique station in Dubuque, it's full service/Standards and the only station I know of that has a cooking segment:There must still be an audience for the old time radio shows. KDTH airs 6 hours of it on Sundays.
Big Broadcast
Listen Now Sunday, June 7 6p-12a (Shows chosen by; Beanie Baumhover) Lone RangerDuffy’s TavernDragnetGunsmokeThe SaintFibber McGee and Molly Have Gun Will TravelYou Bet Your LifeMel BlancCisco Kid Sunday, June 14 6p-12a (Shows chosen by; Chuck Spielman )www.radiodubuque.com
Cookin’ with Kaye
4/12-BBQ Beef Sandwiches BBQ Beef Sandwiches (makes 12 sandwiches) Roast Rub: 3-4 lb. Chuck Roast 1 tbsp. brown sugar ¾ tsp. freshly ground black pepper BBQ Sauce: 1 cup ketchup 1 cup chopped onion 2 cloves
www.radiodubuque.com
Yes, but---and this is true of every type of music and entertainment---there are outliers.
Network radio shows missed me entirely. I was six years old when the last one aired. I ignored the CBS Mystery Theater in the 70s, 80s and 90s because I really didn't care that they'd dusted off old radio shows and were playing them.
But 20-ish years ago, when satellite radio launched, there was an Old Time Radio channel. On a long drive one night, I punched in, and discovered that there were some really good shows, that radio actually did some of them better than TV because of the whole "theater of the mind" thing.
Here's the thing, though---now I know they can be entertaining. But I haven't gone back to SiriusXM's Radio Classics (I had to look it up to get the name and see if they were still doing it) in the 20 years since because there's always something I'd prefer to hear instead.
The problem with any "outlier" format is that while you'll get sampling from people who weren't around for the original, getting enough of those people to listen long enough, often enough and consistently enough is very nearly impossible.
I think this is what your envisioning. This is a part 15 on 1610 AM. I believe it's run by one of the users of this board.
Antioch OTR
I had no idea this existed.
Everything you need to know is in the right-hand column. They had a goal of $7,500 in donations for 2025 and got $8,100. Good for them!
That wouldn't cover the transmitter power bill for a month for 560.
That's been the case for decades. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, you could still see big numbers for Top 40 and AOR stations at night, but that's been gone for a long time now.
I may have told this story before, but 20 years ago, I was the Director of Programming and Promotion for an independent TV station in Phoenix. I had the budget for an ad campaign, had bought the outdoor and now it was time to buy radio. So I started calling around. KZZP was and is the leading CHR in the market.
I got one of their reps on the phone and asked what the going rate was for spots in the daypart.
"Mike, it's $500 in morning drive, $300 in middays, $400 in afternoon drive and $50 for evenings."
"Hey, I'm sorry---I'm on a cell and you broke up. Say again----what-50 for evenings?"
"No, Mike---fifty---five-zero for evenings."
It might get a few younger listeners, but it almost definitely wouldn't get enough to make the product commercially viable.
The key word is "donate." You don't have to have very many listeners, let alone listeners in an advertiser friendly demographic, if a handful of them donate. That's a model that isn't really viable for a commercial broadcasting operation, especially for one station out of several hundred.
Correction: Market #6.
I mostly agree with you here. AM has been a refuge for bad programming for most of my life, and I turn 51 in a few days. It was a death spiral that was a long time coming. Putting good music programming on AM simply meant a struggling FM would pick it up and steal the audience. In most medium to large markets, AM had a few stations that invested in their niches, got hosts under contract, and ran formats that were too expensive or otherwise not seen as desirable for those struggling FM's to pick up, but the rest of them decided to sustain by picking up cheap programming and bleeding the bigger AM's or by turning to brokered programming. Those strong AM's were aiming for an audience my parents' age or older and never made much of an effort to get younger. Most of the ones that did try to go after a younger audience did so by moving to or simulcasting on FM, and the rest just became irrelevant.
Maybe, but you do commercial radio experiments where your target audience is. That's not AM, and it's increasingly not over the air radio at all. Attempting to drive people to a service they no longer use isn't going to work. You're 40-45 too late if you want to do that on AM, and, even then, you didn't have much time. As I mentioned above, bold commercial radio experiments on AM simply meant FM stations picked up the programming and put the AM's out of business.
Putting old programming on AM to get people my age to listen is futile. No one has done it because it won't work. I could play Martha and the Vandellas for my almost 22 year-old niece. She might say it's not bad and would probably say so honestly, but she won't likely add any of their songs to her music collection and would never build an entire playlist around them.
I can give a classic example of the cycle for AM stations---760 in San Diego.
It was a sleepy also-ran MOR station (KOGO was getting the big numbers) until 1972, when a young General Manager named Paul Palmer hired a morning team from Dallas, Charlie and Harrigan, and made Jack Woods, who was "Charlie", the Program Director.
Jack then took what was then KFMB to Adult Contemporary---which, prior to Mary Catherine Sneed's re-invention of the format with "Soft Continuous Hits" for FM a decade later, meant mostly Top 40 music, minus the 7 or 8 hardest songs, a Gold library that was made up of prior Top 40 hits going back to 1956, production values adopted from Top 40 and pacing only slightly slower.
KFMB began to draw listeners away from the Top 40 stations and become a significant station in the ratings. They were 18-49 where KOGO was increasingly 35-plus.
Those demographics worked for KFMB. They raked in the money. They stole the San Diego Padres broadcasts from KOGO. By the spring 1979 book, they're #1 with an 8.0. But by 1980, there are FM stations that have started playing KFMB's music, with less talk and only eight minutes of commercials an hour.
So KFMB takes the next logical step---make the station about more than the music. They morph into what at the time were known as "full service" stations---yeah, they played some music, but it was about news, sports, weather, traffic.
A logical move, but it ultimately appeals to a 35+ audience, so the attrition of your young adult music audience accelerates.
By the early 90s, it doesn't make sense for KFMB to play music at all, so they go talk. And they're up against an established giant, KSDO, that has been talk for decades.
There's thirty more years of erosion that we could talk about, but let's cut to the chase.
760 is now KGB, it's sports and it has an 0.5.
And with that 0.5, they're still the #2 AM station in the market.
Those are podcasts on someone else’s schedule.
That's interesting, because I've heard them in the past when streaming KDTH.
I enjoyed listening to the old time radio shows when I was much younger. However, as time has marched on and I have been able to listen to them again on the Internet, I've discovered that I find most of them to be cringeworthy now. Some of the values in some of those shows are really striking in that they are 180 degrees away from many of the values we have today. While there are still some I like to listen to (a lot of the mysteries produced by the BBC have aged well as well as "Dragnet" and "Tales of the Texas Rangers,"), they tend to be the exception to the rule.
The other thing about old time radio that you have to remember is that, for the most part, these shows were recorded on poor sound quality discs that haven't aged well either. Even on AM signals, you can often hear record background noises on old recordings of "The Shadow,", "The Lone Ranger," and others.
Finally, my betting is that if you did a 24-hour old-time radio format on AM, it would behave very similarly to how well comedy did as a format. As Michael Hagerty noted above, people would tune to the stations briefly to listen to the inventiveness of the programming and then, sooner or later, (usually sooner) tune back to their preferred music format.
A worthwhile reminder here:
Cumulus almost pulled off the move from 560 to 810. They had a 1.8 in the last full book before the simulcast. In the first month after 560 went dark, they had a better number on 810---a 1.9.
There is no evidence to suggest that the 560 audience didn't move to 810. But the share has dropped every month since then and the trend since July is 1.5-1.3-1.2-1.1-0.8-0.7.
I don't have a logical explanation for that, but the fact is that the #1 non-simulcast AM in San Francisco has a 0.7, and that has absolute implications for anyone considering putting another AM station on the air or putting an old one back on air.
Cumulus almost pulled off the move from 560 to 810. They had a 1.8 in the last full book before the simulcast. In the first month after 560 went dark, they had a better number on 810---a 1.9.
There is no evidence to suggest that the 560 audience didn't move to 810. But the share has dropped every month since then and the trend since July is 1.5-1.3-1.2-1.1-0.8-0.7.
I don't have a logical explanation for that, but the fact is that the #1 non-simulcast AM in San Francisco has a 0.7, and that has absolute implications for anyone considering putting another AM station on the air or putting an old one back on air.
KDTH a very unique station. I have them filed under 'Time Warp Radio'. Stations stuck in time, still doing radio like they did decades ago.
I get a kick out of the late night and overnight program ' Nice N' Easy', 7 hours of B/EZ, instrumentals, crooners. It looks like they don't even have an FM translator.
Even further back in time presentation (yet still successful): KASM Albany, MN (St. Cloud market). It wouldn't surprise me if they had a cooking segment; pretty sure they're still reading obits. And...polka polka polka!
And let me add to what Ted says there:
It'll be fewer people than you expect.
Most people aren't curious about what they don't already know---at least when it comes to entertainment. They use radio to satisfy a desire, not as a means of discovery. It's why Top 40 worked so well for so long---there was no better formula than playing the most successful records of a given time on the radio.
Until we fragmented. There isn't a single Top 40 (CHR) that can cover the bases anymore.
And if it's that bad with what was the ultimate mass appeal format, you can imagine the challenges for a niche format whose original core audience is largely dead.
Your last sentence, Michael, reminds me of an interview I read along time ago ,about with Chuck Southcott (KGIL, KMZT, etc) on the success of the so called syndicated "Music of Your Life" format. He said one of the reasons for the format's success was that it had the "broadest musical appeal". I believe he said that back in the 1980s, and I remember thinking that the majority of the people listening to that music were then well into their 50s and beyond. As you said, today almost all of those folks are gone.
I once ran into Peter Marshall, who was one of the great voices of that format, (in addition to his gig with Hollywood Squares), and asked him why "Music of Your Life" was not heard on any station in Los Angeles. He said didn't have an answer to that other than maybe the people promoting it didn't care.
It's funny, in that apparently all the voices used were talent that lived in the SoCal area.
I once ran into Peter Marshall, who was one of the great voices of that format, (in addition to his gig with Hollywood Squares), and asked him why "Music of Your Life" was not heard on any station in Los Angeles. He said didn't have an answer to that other than maybe the people promoting it didn't care.
It's funny, in that apparently all the voices used were talent that lived in the SoCal area.
The Music Of Your Life used to be on 1150 (KPRZ back then) in the 80's when KMPC left the format for a few years.
I’m curious why commercials for nursing and retirement homes, dentists, medical clinics, restaurants, home nursing, and Medicare Part D and B insurance, along with Investment firms like Fidelity would not benefit from advertising on “oldies stations” with many seniors listening. While some seniors have dementia, most of us 65+ are of sound mind if not body. Compared to other groups, US seniors are wealthier. Many of us are willing to change our spending habits for good bargains. I’m not angry for their writing off seniors—just curious.
Was it actually the syndicated "Music of Your Life" , or was it just an MOR type format?
I just remember they used the Al Hamm MOYL, but had their own hosts that were hired away from KMPC, like Dick Whittinghill, Johnny Magnus, and Gary Owens. At some point KMPC returned with MOR, and by 1985, KPRZ changed format.