No point. What would the grounds of petitioning have been? Unless there's a reason someone isn't qualified to be a licensee or a proposed assignee has outstanding issues with the Commission, the FCC isn't going to do anything other than slightly delay a transaction. The FCC hasn't denied a transaction due to a format change or staffing concerns in over 40 years. You're not going to see a denial based on concentration of ownership, like what happened with Standard General and TEGNA earlier this year, over a company that operates a handful of formats and never pushes the outer limits of ownership either.
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97.1 FM country legends
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No point. What would the grounds of petitioning have been? Unless there's a reason someone isn't qualified to be a licensee or a proposed assignee has outstanding issues with the Commission, the FCC isn't going to do anything other than slightly delay a transaction. The FCC hasn't denied a transaction due to a format change or staffing concerns in over 40 years. You're not going to see a denial based on concentration of ownership, like what happened with Standard General and TEGNA earlier this year, over a company that operates a handful of formats and never pushes the outer limits of ownership either.
The only "outer limit" of ownership would be the number of stations they can own in a single market, and that's never more than 4 or 5 - and even THAT only applies to commercial licenses, anyway.
There's no national ownership cap for radio the way there is for TV.
There doesn't have to be any grounds for filing a Petition to Deny or Informal Objection. Anyone can file one, regardless of standing, grounds, or even mental capacity. Case in point: I understand some wingnut just filed one against that radio station in Lumberton two days ago.
And yet that station’s programming is targeted toward wingnuts. Go figure.
Over the years, I have multiple discussions on this site that had no point. This is the first time I've ever had anyone admit that!
Likely, if they get any calls at all after the first day or two, they will develop a "script" to read to those callers mentioning a variety of online traditional country streams and sources. Likely one of the points would be that the prior owner was not making money with the format and, thus, moved to sell the station to another group which had a better plan for it.
What FCC regulated area does a format change fall under? I have not seen one recently, but years ago when an LA station changed from an Urban derivative to Spanish gold, I saw an FCC form letter that one complainer got. The letter gave some background on the purpose of the FCC and stated that formats are not regulated and are determined by station owners.
Univision did not "LMA it back" from the new owner. The new owner, a group totally devoid of any radio experience, made a deal with Univision to continue programming all the stations they sold for up to a year while the new owner created a staff and structure to do their own programming.
Tejano is not a viable commercial format anywhere. The audience is predominantly over 55 and there is hardly any new music being recorded.
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Shouldn’t that read not viable?
Yes. Corrected a moment ago.
That sounds like a prescription for disaster. If I had millions in the bank, but absolutely no experience in radio, the last thing I would do is buy an AM radio station.
It seemed to do well in San Antonio, on a Univision FM station no less. And they were exporting it to the Houston market via one of 102.9's HD channels, as I recall.
Having read the Informal Objection, I have to agree. But at least it was humorous.
Yes, years ago. They finally moved the Tejano format to an AM several years back and let it die there.
KXTN moved to 1350, with KCOR being retired.
But there are fewer and fewer each year. Dead format.
We have had this discussion before. I believe the consensus was that radio is a business, not a museum.
The format in San Antonio could have still been profitable, but it would have taken a lot of work and retooling. No one in corporate America has time for that. For Univision, it just made more sense to go after bigger, and sure-er fish than to fix up a rusted out Ford Pinto with a sticky clutch.
KXTN was the "original" all Tejano station, and even when it launched the success of Tejano was an accident: they got a huge FM signal and a bad AM daytimer. So they put Tejano on the AM as fill. The FM, using the common Latino AC format of the 80's, was beaten out of the gate by the lousy AM. They swapped formats and the FM became all Tejano.
There was a lot of heritage in the cluster to keep the format, but most of the reasoning for retaining it was community pressure by civic and government leaders. When it moved to AM, billing was horrible. We had tried a variety of different mixes and spent a couple of hundred thousand in research... nothing would keep it from being a 45+ format and nothing would produce new music.
The revenue had dried up. The annual Tejano music awards show went from a huge venue in San Antonio to a crummy night club in Corpus, and most of the artists were older than the listeners. Or dead. The music never caught on outside of Texas, so the labels were abandoning artist development.
And the growth in Hispanic populations in Texas came from migrants from Mexico. Tejano has no popularity in Mexico, so the new residents did not listen.
Outside of the blip-on-the-radar burst of national attention the music got in 1995 when its biggest star, Selena, was murdered. It made the news in all 50 states, and got people in 49 of them curious about who Selena was and what made her such a star. She had one crossover hit, "Dreaming of You," which got considerable adult contemporary airplay.
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Oddly enough, while Tejano itself as a genre is dying, the tejano aesthethic is making a comeback. Superstar group Grupo Frontera's songs borrow a lot from it, and the group is from the Rio Grande Valley.
While it's not worth it to research new songs for the format, if Tejano stations were doing it, I imagine they'd be playing Frontera. They sound right at home in the format. And from what I understand, a lot of norteño groups from Texas, like Intocable, get airplay on these stations.
For those not familiar, that “bad AM daytimer” was previously KBUC 1310, which had been Country for a number of years. KBUC-FM 107.5 was its sister station. Both were flipped under new ownership.
Many Hispanic targeted FMs in Texas totally missed the mark in the 1980s. Here in Houston the old KXKX 106.5 had a sort of international Latin Pop format that never resonated with either recent immigrants or Hispanics that had lived here for several generations. The station eventually morphed into Tejano KQQK.
The KXTN-FM Tejano format did have an imitator in Houston with KXTJ 107.9 in the mid 90’s, which was a direct competitor to KQQK. Both eventually fell under common ownership, and the formats were combined. Tejano eventually fizzled, and both frequencies have gone through several changes over the years, but are still Hispanic targeted.
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