A Radio and Social Salute to You Folks in Market 11 ......

[Steve Green NEPA]

..... from one of those 'effete' Modell's Shoppers World easterners from a WAY back #11 market radio guy who has to marvel at the placement and prestige of the top ten or so Seattle stations I came across while surfing for some Mariners stuff today.
I mean:
a Public station at #1 with numbers that look to've been permanent?
a Classical station* at number 5?
a Christian CHR at a solid number 6, a half-dozen spots above a pair of actual heathen CHR stations?
a sports station that's directional at night away from a big place (Tacoma) that has outperformed its huge co-owned FM News/Talk station**?
a market that seems to regard its AC stations as the fast-food lunchtime roach-coaches we I-95 corridor types otherwise worship -- you know: 'the station at work everyone can agree is better than nothing'

Well, from this native Long Islander who has spent 60 years as a DXer and 26 of those years as a DJ/PD/Music director/Newsman : your recognition and appreciation of culture in such a huge market is much admired. A big tip of the earphones to you folks!

* Never can figure why centuries-old European instrumental music is holding its own in so many markets -- while the great American songbook of Standards (vocals and melody and all) has undergone everything but having the recording masters erased. Maybe it's the fidelity? No one to my knowledge has ever put the Standards on a class B FM .....

** News-Talk to me = Rush-Hannity-Fox. So in a market that's as -- can I use the term 'woke here? How about -- 'aware' as America's Number 11 apparently is, a N/T station with half the numbers of a public station is, well, encouraging.

 

[The New Chico]

Yeah, Steve, we definitely are a different part of the world, radio-wise.

KUOW always has really solid numbers- not always #1 6+, but almost always in the top 5. AND we have KIRO-FM which is a local Class C News Talk that swings both ways. AND KNKX also plays a good chunk of NPR/PRX etc. programming as well. AND the former KOMO AM/rimshot FM does allright as well as "kind of" all-news.. We love our news it seems.

Classical KING is truly an institution. Was once commercial, converted to non-com through a local arts foundation. I cannot get a real Handel on why it thrives like it does, but I think they always go Bach to the basics.

KCMS (the CMS once stood for Christian Music Station) aka Spirit 105.3 has also been a steady eddie since Christ was a carpenter. I would call them more Christian AC, but either way they are personality driven, non threatening, and fit the Seattle laid back mood very well. You might be preached with, but never preached at.

Tacoma can get KIRO 710 just fine at night. There is a bit of a null to the S, but it it not severe. 50kW low on the dial still gets out, and 710 is the Seahawks and Mariners flagship. So depending upon the time of year (and how well those teams are doing) you will see the 6+ go from a 2.5 to a 7. And back. Right now with both teams doing well, it's like Christmas for an AC in December for those guys.

As far as AC goes, WARM 106.9 seems to thrive. It absolutely kills on the Holiday book. But the other ACs have all either died or are not well- see Emma 94.1

KEXP (Non-comm, AAAish, eclectic) is our listen at work station. LOL, but there is some truth to it.

As far as the great American Songbook, that could be an entire separate topic. My personal theory is that the Boomer generation drove the market so hard, and for so long, that it didn't leave any air for music of the previous generation. I am GenX, my folks were pre-war babies. They were largely fans of some of that pre-rock n roll era stuff, along with the more modern purveyors like Neil Diamond, Streisand, Manilow etc. You will not hear Manilow on the radio these days, but by gawd how about another Beatles retrospective?

EDIT- AC doesn't do well in the greater Seattle market, but it DOES do well elswhere in the area. In the Bellingham cluster (80 miles N) the main money maker is the hot AC station. Mix96 dominated the market south of Seattle (Olympia, roughly 60 miles S of Seattle) for decades. Frequent poster and NW radio legend BossBill owns a cluster out on the WA coast, and his main revenue driver is his AC. SO the format is viable, but less so in the city.

 

[bobdavcav]

It wasn't long ago that KCMS was struggling. I can't explain its turnaround. When KTIS in the Twin Cities was setting station records, KCMS was struggling. Now KTIS has fallen off a bit and KCMS has come up. Sure, very different markets, but I'm still not sure why KCMS was so far down several months back. I don't understand the classical thing either, but here in Portland, KQAC does pretty well also.

 

[CTListener]

The artistic skill and genius of the great masters of the genre now known as classical is several orders of magnitude above that of the authors of the "Great American Songbook," IMO. The complexity, the multiple moods, the virtuoso musicianship required to play it -- all push the needle solidly toward classical, at least to my ears. Beethoven's 9th vs. "Over the Rainbow"? Bach's Brandenburg Concertos vs. "Some Enchanted Evening"? Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" vs. "Summertime"? I mean, really, is there an argument to be made otherwise?

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

@CTListener

Points taken. The feeble arguments I can summon in my music director brain (basically a Mario Lanza/3 Dog Night/Poco-oriented factory setting) are that the American standards included lyrics, vocals and the relatively more recent secular use of vocal harmonies. A few dances certainly helped sustain its growth, and, of course, those movies and musicals.
If I may state further: Except for urban Jazz and rural Country-Western -- 3rd car button genres based in limited envoirnments more than mass appeal -- that American songbook had the longest consecutive run in our society as *it*. It lasted some 35 years as an actual product display for radio and a quite profitable one. Rock and roll lasted roughly half that long, arguably about 17 years in its essence. The Album Oriented Rock that usurped its popularity for both genders went about 7 years before it sank into ***hole Oriented Rubbish. The styles and fads that came after ~ 1980 aren't important; rebellious teen music had all been done before power-chord guitar manuals and books of homonyms replaced actual music lessons.
Now, naturally, I ain't saying which form of music is 'better', And apparently the available radio audience consensus certainly says that symphonies* have had more endurance than Gerschwin, Cole Porter and Bacharach. Yet when I read and hear about a curious portion of youth today giving an ear to some of the early forms of Classic Rock (check the demos, too) it makes me wonder how a financially emaciated industry can just keep over three full decades of melody, lyrics, orchestration and harmony jettisoned. Much like a lot of the kids today are doing, I've come to enjoy and respect a lot of my parents' and older relatives' music.
73!

* Fwiw: I like Debussy and VOGner and thought that Mozart wrote some good hooks, lol.

 

[CTListener]

@CTListener

* Fwiw: I like Debussy and VOGner and thought that Mozart wrote some good hooks, lol.

Mozart was marketed relentlessly by his father and his music had to have immediate impact on the concertgoer to make a lasting impression and create public demand for more. His genius was in making commercial music great art as well. I enjoy Mozart, Handel, Telemann, the British composers Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and Russia's Mussorgsky the most. All wrote works that make for great show pieces to this day.

 

[davideduardo]

MI enjoy Mozart, Handel, Telemann, the British composers Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and Russia's Mussorgsky the most. All wrote works that make for great show pieces to this day.

And you can't beat pieces like Holst's "The Planets". It's like an album with each movement a hit song.

 

[bobdavcav]

@CTListener

Points taken. The feeble arguments I can summon in my music director brain (basically a Mario Lanza/3 Dog Night/Poco-oriented factory setting) are that the American standards included lyrics, vocals and the relatively more recent secular use of vocal harmonies. A few dances certainly helped sustain its growth, and, of course, those movies and musicals.
If I may state further: Except for urban Jazz and rural Country-Western -- 3rd car button genres based in limited envoirnments more than mass appeal -- that American songbook had the longest consecutive run in our society as *it*. It lasted some 35 years as an actual product display for radio and a quite profitable one. Rock and roll lasted roughly half that long, arguably about 17 years in its essence. The Album Oriented Rock that usurped its popularity for both genders went about 7 years before it sank into ***hole Oriented Rubbish. The styles and fads that came after ~ 1980 aren't important; rebellious teen music had all been done before power-chord guitar manuals and books of homonyms replaced actual music lessons.
Now, naturally, I ain't saying which form of music is 'better', And apparently the available radio audience consensus certainly says that symphonies* have had more endurance than Gerschwin, Cole Porter and Bacharach. Yet when I read and hear about a curious portion of youth today giving an ear to some of the early forms of Classic Rock (check the demos, too) it makes me wonder how a financially emaciated industry can just keep over three full decades of melody, lyrics, orchestration and harmony jettisoned. Much like a lot of the kids today are doing, I've come to enjoy and respect a lot of my parents' and older relatives' music.
73!

* Fwiw: I like Debussy and VOGner and thought that Mozart wrote some good hooks, lol.

Even though I played violin in middle and high school, I prefer more upbeat stuff than classical. That being said, I agree with you about the younger demos discovering older music. I grew up listening to KBSG and the reincarnated KJR for the first eight or nine years of my life, so I know a lot of the stuff that's really hard to find on radio these days. I do think there should be a place on radio for those songs as more and more younger people are discovering them. I don't see much of a demand outside of maybe movie soundtracks for music before about 1954. True, there will always be music nerds as evidenced by the podcast I listened to last night, but that's what streaming services are for.