Is Pat McMahon "live & local "
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Buffalo 92.9 WBUF Question
- Thread starter Radio-Bored-Op
- Start date
Live as much as any personality will be in 2024 while also handling multiple other functions at their employer. Local in as much he works out of the Buffalo offices and is Brand Manager of WBUF.
This is the realities of radio in 2024. The goal posts have moved and technology allows things to be done differently. Not being live isn't the knock against somebody it was decades ago. You use the tools you're given.
This is the realities of radio in 2024. The goal posts have moved and technology allows things to be done differently. Not being live isn't the knock against somebody it was decades ago. You use the tools you're given.
I just ask _ while everyone on the station is entertaining - he is the only must listen to on air talent I make an effort to listen to almost every day.
Then you are part of a very small group. The ratings for WBUF are embarrassingly bad for such a strong FM signal. The format is obviously not "entertaining" many others...
Without the demographic breakdowns, you have no idea if the numbers are bad among the listeners WBUF and its advertisers are trying to reach. As a rock station, it's going to underperform urban, CHR, AC and country simply because of the decreasing popularity of rock as a genre.
97 Rock is tied for the #2 spot in the market. Not underperforming.
It's a 76,000 Watt FM signal. It's averaging a 1.5 share.
That sucks. Compare their ratings to the Classic Rock and Classic Hits formats in the market. You will see a huge gulf. Perhaps it's underperforming because the content is bad...
It's playing lots of currents and songs less than a decade old. Nostalgia for the '70s through '90s is what's selling rock and classic hits radio now because a much greater percentage of radio listeners during those decades were listening to current/recent rock than has been the case for the last decade or so. '20s rock is splintered beyond repair, it doesn't interest those teens and 20-somethings who now listen to hip-hop and country, and the labels, as TheBigA has pointed out numerous times in multiple threads, aren't even pushing rock to radio anymore to any significant degree.
92.9 WBUF Playlist - Last 50 Songs
With the 92.9 WBUF music playlist, view the last 50 songs played on 92.9 WBUF & buy songs
wbuf.com
Take another look. You will see mostly songs over 30 years old. "CRAZY TRAIN, "COMFORTABLY NUMB ", "JEREMY ", and on and on. It's just another rehash of Classic Rock. The station is not playing many new songs as you claim. It's a mix of what was once called Active Rock or "Butt Rock"...š
OK, you got me. That's a horrible playlist ... but it's the new/recent stuff that's likely keeping listeners away. I listen to this classic rock station here occasionally and I've linked the playlist below. WHDQ is a solid performer in the Nielsens and has adjust its classic rock to include some '00s music. But the focus is still '70s-'90s and no currents get played. If WHDQ tried plugging some of the '10s and '20s bands that WBUF plays between Petty and Mellencamp or even between Eddie Money and Guns N' Roses, three times an hour, the "WTF" factor would likely increase to the point that listeners will start looking for other options -- FM, satellite or streaming.92.9 WBUF Playlist - Last 50 Songs
With the 92.9 WBUF music playlist, view the last 50 songs played on 92.9 WBUF & buy songs
Take another look. You will see mostly songs over 30 years old. "CRAZY TRAIN, "COMFORTABLY NUMB ", "JEREMY ", and on and on. It's just another rehash of Classic Rock. The station is not playing many new songs as you claim. It's a mix of what was once called Active Rock or "Butt Rock"...š
OK, you got me. That's a horrible playlist ... but it's the new/recent stuff that's likely keeping listeners away. I listen to this classic rock station here occasionally and I've linked the playlist below. WHDQ is a solid performer in the Nielsens and has adjust its classic rock to include some '00s music. But the focus is still '70s-'90s and no currents get played. If WHDQ tried plugging some of the '10s and '20s bands that WBUF plays between Petty and Mellencamp or even between Eddie Money and Guns N' Roses, three times an hour, the "WTF" factor would likely increase to the point that listeners will start looking for other options -- FM, satellite or streaming.
There's not a lot of cohesion here. It's all over the place. You've got 70's Arena Rock (Queen, Zeppelin), 80's hair schlock (Bon Jovi, Scorpions, Poison), 90's Alternative (Foo Fighters, RHCP, STP, etc), all in the last 2 or 3 hours.
I don't really get who this is trying to serve. "Mature" listeners, aka boomers, won't consider rock music beyond 1989 (Tom Petty/U2 basically).
Gen Xers have the late 80s and 90s stuff I suppose.
Then there's the "active (butt) rock" nu-metal era represented here with Godsmack (woof), Staind (woof), KoRn (woof), Puddle of Mudd (even worse). I guess some Millennials who never learned what "good" rock music is can harken back to this woeful era of 103.3 The Edge playlist circa 2001.
Then the "new" songs are Blink 182, a band I recognize is still popular but I never particularly cared for. So many better pop punk bands but I get you're mining from a shallow well from bands that really broke mainstream from that sub-genre.
Where are the "good" rock bands? Queens of the Stone Age. Nine Inch Nails. A Perfect Circle. Deftones. Tool. Radiohead. Royal Blood's pretty heavy. I dig Failure, Hum, Shiner a lot but those band will NEVER get on the radio save for a 90's weekend.
See what I mean? Too hard to please everyone and you get "all the hits of the 70's 80's 90s and today (00 - 2024).
You're putting the music into fake categories. People just listen to songs they like. If a radio station can play a bunch of songs people like, they will be successful. The categories don't matter. Categories are for musicologists.
What we're seeing now in country is that people like Post Malone and Cody Johnson. They like pop & traditional. Country radio plays both, so it's successful. If it only played one or the other, they'd lose half of their audience.
Not true. Boomers like a lot of music from the last 20 years. Dave Matthews Band, Wilco, Decemberists, and countless others. The artists that many mature folks like are not available on Commercial Radio.
Management at WBUF must think it's still 1997. They are trying to program for an audience that no longer exists. The current playlist is ratings repellent and the station has no "heritage" to fall back on. Big A says "if they play a bunch of songs people like it will be successful". It's not that simple, but the JACK format actually did that far better...
Larger type, in bold italics.
Categories are for musicologists.
Too much overthinking of music subsets.
I know it costs money but they should go sports. GR is unlistenable
If categories are for musicologists, what of Nielsen categories? The fact is, we live in a world of categories: people, music, demographics, politics, geography, finance, law, entertainment, real estate, businesses and so much more.
Perhaps that's why music radio is holding on to the classic formats so much, because the future won't be as clearly defined. The music is fighting that kind of categorization. You see it every year at the Grammy awards, where the goal is to get the genres to merge. If the music industry is successful in blending the genres, and making formats more difficult to create, then it obviously will have an effect on Nielsen. So then perhaps the next step is to create formats that aren't as dependent on music. We'll just leave that thought there for a moment.
Not sure what you are trying to say. Music Radio formats have been historically rigid. The programming had to fit in a certain "box". As for Rock stations, I remember many that cared about the sound of the station. Segues and flow were important. That era may be over, but it did exist. Great song segues were part of the craft...
The music industry isn't as dependent on radio as it was 30 years ago. So when the music changes, then radio has to decide if it wants to follow, or stay in its box. What we're seeing in country music right now with Post Malone & Shaboozey is that maybe those categories don't matter anymore. The question is: how does CHR react to these changes in music:
The Country Core Artist That Top 40 Gave Away
This is what Country radio friends have been saying about Post Maloneās F-1 Trillion in my Facebook feed: āMind blowing good. A master class in how to crossover to another format.ā ā WKHX Atlanta PD Mike Moore āNever in my life did I think Iād ever say, āPost Malone is going to make a real...
radioinsight.com
But, as the recent slew of song crossovers to multiple formats shows, "categories" are very arbitrary. Thinking of music in terms of types is dangerous as those crossovers show.
In a very distinct case, back around 1995 Spanish AC station KLVE found a song that was "exploding" in Latin America. It was anything but AC. The song was a 90's remake of a Colombian "Vallenato" song from 1938. And Vallenato is the country music of northeastern Colombia... sorta' like Cajun music in parts of Louisiana.
The song was everything but AC. It was rhythmic and KLVE did not play rhythmic songs. It was South American regional folk music, and KLVE programmed for people mostly from Central Mexico. It was way up tempo, and KLVE had the feel of stations like KOST in LA or WLTW in NYC. It had lyrics in rural Colombian Spanish, a dialect and vocabulary unknown in Los Angeles.
Yet there was something about the song that we liked, as it was a fun song insofar as it "feel" was concerned. It smelled like "variety" and "excitement" in a relatively dull format. You can hear it at
We played it. KLVE had intensive weekly callout, and by the second week... unusual for an AC station song to be "felt" before at least 3 full weeks... it was the highest scoring song of all currents. It stayed that way for over 9 months.
So...
Categorizing music is both personal (subject to the pair of ears and intervening brain of the "judge") and imprecise. Nearly 70 years ago, those earlier mid-50's Top 40 stations in most of America played Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire". A country song? No. A hit? Yes.
To much categorization establishes arbitrary borders. While we can determine down to the minute how old a person is or what their income level or educational level is, we really can't do that with any kind of art, whether we are comparing Picasso with Monet or The Beatles with Eminem.