This is an upper demo format and it takes awhile to establish an audience. Not enough time has gone by to have a clear picture of the situation.
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Alt 92.3 to Become WINS Simulcast
- Thread starter atthestars
- Start date
I agree. It does take time. As of now, newsradio hasn't grown in listeners in LA. A better analysis would be whether WBBM grew listeners over the last 11 years? Then another analysis would be an examination of the listeners of each market. KNX, WINS, WBBM, and any other station aren't an apples to apples comparison.
FM News is what forced WBBM over to FM.
The month before FM News launched, WBBM on AM-only had Mid 5s in the 6+. It was the #1 station in the market. It jumped about 1 share (Mid 6) for October 2011 with the FM added. It was back down to the Mid-Upper 5s by the end of the year. If you look at their ratings now, they're pretty much exactly the same as where they were back then. Slightly less. Not going to post the exact numbers. I don't believe I am allowed to. But overall it really didn't do all that much with their 6+ numbers.
I'm going to assume some of their listeners simply switched over to the FM while others did not. Any of their downtown listeners likely shifted to FM. AM signal is pretty rough in the downtown area (obviously)
If you're listening to the other stations on AM (WGN, WLS, WIND) you're probably switching between those signals and WBBM-AM. If you're normally listening to other stations on FM and just tuning in for a traffic report, or a play-by-play game, you're probably tuning into the FM.
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When MTV goes back to playing music videos, maybe I'll watch them again.
Thank you for adding in these details. I didn't know this information, but came to the hypothesis that it would be more sound to examine WBBM than KNX, when discussing longevity.
That's highly doubtful since MTV Live plays music videos and you are apparently not watching. There's also MTV Classics, MTVU, MTV Tres...
Actually, the VMA show is the only thing I watch on MTV.
They run them for an hour a week. 8AM Eastern on Saturday.
Aside from the digital networks, they also have a few dedicated channels on Pluto TV, and frequently stream music videos on their Youtube channel. Since Youtube, music videos on TV have pretty much gone nowhere in the ratings for obvious reasons. After dropping their music all together in 2008, they tried to bring music back to MTV about a year later during the morning hours (Usually 3AM-9AM) They tried mixing in older videos from the 80s and 90s. They tried adding weather reports. They played Beatles music videos to promote the re release of their albums that year. They tried news tickers. None of it worked. Was reduced and gone by 2015.
CMT still runs country videos for several hours every morning, which is surprising since there's hardly any country music content anywhere else on the schedule. Gaylord's in-house Circle TV operation seems to have become the landing place for that.
Pluto, Tubi and Xumo all have several music video channels covering several genres. The videos are still being produced and have plenty of outlets for music fans to see them -- many more than they had when it was basically MTV, VH1, TNN and BET 30 years ago.
They're the only one. VH1 Pure Country was also renamed CMT Music
What this move does is maintain the existing audience which is what it sounds like WBBM has more or less done. All News isn’t going to gain new listeners by becoming a younger skewing format on FM although I would think it would garner a younger audience than stations like WABC and WOR. So I expect the ratings to remain about the same, although an FM signal definitely won’t hurt.
Ohhhhh....I'll be sure to drag my ass out of bed after working all night to watch ONE hour of music videos. Might as well play an infomercial.
There was a post on the L.A. board stating that the "New Arrivals HD" channel (heard there on KROQ-HD3) has disappeared.
While this could be just a local L.A. issue, I was wondering if it was still broadcasting over-the-air on 92.3 HD2? (I'm out of market.)
As mentioned in the press release, the current format on the main signal is moving to 92.3 HD2 when the simulcast starts on 10/27 at 9 AM ET, which would bump the New Arrivals HD channel to 92.3 HD3? or gone completely? TBD
While this could be just a local L.A. issue, I was wondering if it was still broadcasting over-the-air on 92.3 HD2? (I'm out of market.)
As mentioned in the press release, the current format on the main signal is moving to 92.3 HD2 when the simulcast starts on 10/27 at 9 AM ET, which would bump the New Arrivals HD channel to 92.3 HD3? or gone completely? TBD
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New Arrivals used to be just 20 songs on a loop. BTW they fixed the smart phone app for Audacy.
105.9 was basically an expendable station for CBS, and made it so easy to undercut FM News right out of the gate. But given how badly the public rejected FM News in both Chicago and NYC, it probably wouldn’t have mattered for WBBM.
How much of a product did FM News ever really get on the air? I remember the one aircheck from Chicago with a guy stumbling through a newscast and going back to music.
That was the launch. It was sloppy. They were doing it from a studio that was not designed for news reporting. They were still using automation from the previous format, the NexGen system was brought in later.
I have a whole bunch of airchecks of it. They started off trying to be more chit chat, trying to target women. That was not working, so in the fall they shifted to a more traditional news, changed the call letters from WWWN to WIQI. There was a period where at the top of the hour they would do a countdown of the top news stories. They also promoted something like "10 minutes of nonstop news" A lot of it was voice tracked, pre recorded. At the very very end before they took it off the air, they started doing longform talk segments.
The staff were pros. Great anchors and reporters. They just made too many overall management mistakes and nobody listened to it.
In Early 2012, Merlin leased the 87.7 frequency to relaunch the Alternative format in Chicago. They brought in a really good staff for that one. Jim Richards, and PJ Kling were the ones programming it at the time. That format was getting slightly better numbers than FM News was, on a signal not every radio could pick up. It was also getting better 6+ ratings than WKQX was getting before they signed off the Alternative format for FM News.. I guess as early as the year they signed off FM News, Cumulus was already interested in relaunching the Alternative format on 101.1. It ran a filler format until 2014.
I think they had a year to get FM News to either be successful or sign off. That's what it seemed like.
Merlin only leased the Chicago stations to Cumulus. They never sold those until a couple years ago. Cumulus had the option to buy, but went into bankruptcy. Randy Michaels was getting impatient. That's how WLUP wound up being sold to EMF. Cumulus was able to buy 101.1 while they were still in bankruptcy while they had the chance.
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