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AMP 103.3 is flipping at 10am on 5/28

Kent said:
I'm now working on my management skills. That's what you have to do to say employed anywhere.
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Ha! Don't count on that. The first thing that happens when new ownership comes in is they replace middle management with their own team.

If I were you, I'd advise to work on your ownership skills. It's harder to fire the owner (although it has happened a few times)
 
TheBigA said:
Ha! Don't count on that. The first thing that happens when new ownership comes in is they replace middle management with their own team.
If I were you, I'd advise to work on your ownership skills. It's harder to fire the owner (although it has happened a few times)
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I work for a public university now. So, I'm a lot more worried about COVID-19 and its impact than I am any changes in leadership or administration. I have the number I have, and layoffs will either impact me or they won't. A lot of people are between me and the door, but that doesn't mean I can't be hit.

I got a good laugh out of the "work on your ownership skills" comment. At least in IT, there's really no such thing. You have to have a lot of money and/or a lot of new ideas and skills to create them. If I'm being honest, I don't have enough of either for that to be a viable option. Those people are born, not made. If I'd had either, I would've started down that road a long time ago!

I'd have to think radio is the same way. The days when you could start with next-to-nothing and build a juggernaut are long gone, if they ever really were. Most of us probably had the dream of owning a station, but we never got the shot. I did once work for an engineer who was lucky enough to build a class A station into a seven station cluster he sold for $38 million about 20 years after he launched that class A. He spent his spare time in his college dorm trying to see which stations he could get when he probably should've been chasing girls. He found that class A could be allotted, petitioned to add it, and won the station in a comparative hearing before you had to have the money to buy them in auctions. He upgraded the station twice, bought a few stations, and got a few others either in auction or through partnering with people who had won auctions after duopoly and the Telecommunications Act. He's almost certainly the exception. The stations in the middle of nowhere that sold spots for a dollar a holler as long as they could until finally going dark are probably the norm.
 
Kent said:
Nobody who worked with me at the local telephone company is still there today.
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The two stations I worked for from 1999-2003 were sold off at the end of 2018. Save for a single account executive, nobody who worked with those two stations when I left 15 years before the sale works for them now, but they're both still on the air.
 
Radio's issues are more about competing with streams with few or no commercials but which program the content for the listener. The issue radio has is reconciling the need to run commercials with listener needs for music with few or no commercials.

As to "no commercials" there is generally a cost, while radio is free. Few or less commercials means radio has to find a commercial load that is both profitable and sustainable. On the other hand, no stream is profitable due to the extreme costs of music rights fees.

The quandary is most likely to be in the area of where radio can be profitable while comparing favorably with streaming services.
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I tip my cap to you, Mr. Eduardo.

In my view, you framed the issue correctly here.

Count me as one of those folks who is a radio user and streamer. I never purchase digital music downloads. I get all of my music from Sirius XM, FM radio and streaming platforms. Lengthy commercial breaks on music oriented FM stations drive me insane. I never use FM radio in the office. In the car, I can easily change the station when I get sick of commercials.
 
MarkW said:
I tip my cap to you, Mr. Eduardo.

In my view, you framed the issue correctly here.

Count me as one of those folks who is a radio user and streamer. I never purchase digital music downloads. I get all of my music from Sirius XM, FM radio and streaming platforms. Lengthy commercial breaks on music oriented FM stations drive me insane. I never use FM radio in the office. In the car, I can easily change the station when I get sick of commercials.
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Thanks for the kind remarks.

Commercial load is hard to control, because one station or group can not usually change the ongoing practices.

Many years ago, I put northern South America's first FM on the air. It was a labor of love, as I had three very profitable AMs to sustain it. It was a hobby. I ran no commercials and did a very localized version of Beautiful Music that played one folk song from nations like Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico and Chile out of every 3-song set. We gave a liner every 10 minutes. After a year, I was asked to buy ads, and to avoid selling them I quoted four times the highest rate in the market... and got a buy! At that point, we became sold out within a month or two and had a huge margin on very low expenses, allowing me to move the site to about 13,000 feet AMSL over the city.

It can be done. If the industry, without engaging in illegal trade practices and price fixing, raises rates and cuts commercials to 6 to 8 minutes an hour, radio can survive and, probably, thrive.

Of course, survival requires remembering that AM and FM are very old distribution systems, and stations need to focus on new media... streams and devices like those from Apple and others... to survive.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Why is that "offensive"? A lower rated station that achieves high billing is not going to be flipped because this is a business.

And a lower-rated station that blocks competition to the whole cluster is also effective. Anyone who has owned a cluster of more than 4 or 5 stations is aware of how their own stations are maneuvered like a fleet of warships, each with a particular function in offensive and defensive situations.

I had a 9 station cluster long ago, and everything I did was based on cluster strategy, not station strategy.
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"Offensive" because it was more often than not used to shoot down anyone's suggestion that AMP should've considered another format.

I've never owned or operated a real radio station, let alone a cluster, but what bothers me about this is that a particular favorite station in a cluster can be sacrificed, if you will, for the good of the Party, er, cluster.

clUSTer - antitrUST: hmmm, same core letters (UST); just saying.
 
TheBigA said:
Do you like what's there now better?

Keep in mind, regardless of what you think, this station is a place of business, and some employees got fired as a result of this change.

This is entertainment for you. But it's also someone's source of income.
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Better now? Nope; there's NOTHING on FM in the Boston area that I listen to.

OK, so maybe my attempt at humor (a parody of "Hit The Road, JACK" - another much-beloved format, NOT!) was lame, but it was also a travesty when the WBCN and WAAF people lost THEIR jobs, not to mention the crew at what was Oldies 103.3.
 
MarkW said:
Nielsen PPM participants most likely are very interested in OTA radio. Hence, there is selection bias! If that is what you're using to assess listening levels for an entire population of millennials, then you are relying on skewed data.

Scroll about one-quarter of the way down this page (to topic #8 in Edison's reverse countdown):
https://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-researchs-top-ten-findings-from-2019-so-far/

I will agree with you on this point:


That's definitely true, but their usage of radio is considerably less than the generations who precede them. On top of that, they almost assuredly aren't going to sit thru a boatload of commercials, unless they are listening to their favorite morning show.
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Again, what MarkW said.
 
nowradioguy said:
I've never owned or operated a real radio station, let alone a cluster, but what bothers me about this is that a particular favorite station in a cluster can be sacrificed, if you will, for the good of the Party, er, cluster.
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You think they'd continue to own a low rated station if it was their only station in town? Because I have no reason to believe that. And I can give examples.

nowradioguy said:
Better now? Nope; there's NOTHING on FM in the Boston area that I listen to.
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So then why did you advocate for format change at AMP? What format did you expect them to flip to?
 
UrbanTeenager said:
The “radio pros” On here are wrong more often than not. That’s fine, what’s bad is they can’t admit it.

Cocky and cocksure for no reason at all.
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Thanks for the support. As I've said before, I'm an "outsider", so WTF could I possibly know about the "business of radio"?
 
TheBigA said:
We know that when a station changes format, a lot of good people lose their jobs.

All you care about is being able to hear your favorite music for free.

If someone loses their job, you don't care.
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Disagree! A lot of GOOD people lose their jobs even when a station DOESN'T change formats. I know we're talking about a MUSIC station here, but I'm probably the most vocal - you might say obsessed - person on this board who cares about the folks who've been booted at WBZ Newsradio 1030.
 
TheBigA said:
You think they'd continue to own a low rated station if it was their only station in town? Because I have no reason to believe that. And I can give examples.



So then why did you advocate for format change at AMP? What format did you expect them to flip to?
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Perhaps I could've been clearer, or I stated it elsewhere: I did NOT advocate for a change of format at AMP 103.3 because I don't listen to anything on the FM band in the Boston market. When WBZ or WRKO, the only two AM stations to which I do listen, air paid programming, I switch on Scott Shannon's True Oldies Channel, or iHeart's Smooth Jazz Channel.
 
nowradioguy said:
Disagree! A lot of GOOD people lose their jobs even when a station DOESN'T change formats.
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I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to someone who wonders why radio people don't advocate format changes at low rated stations.

That is my answer. I don't advocate format change because people lose jobs. And yes you're right about the other point.

If Entercom wants to keep a low rated format, I trust they have their reasons. And I expect they have to defend their reasons every day.
 
WODS, Hazleton.

@RadioInsight tweet:

>>With “Big 103” Boston changing call letters to WBGB, Entercom has parked the WODS calls on 1300 in West Hazleton PA as part of the “WILK” News/Talk network that also includes 910 WAAF Scranton.
 
nowradioguy said:
Again, what MarkW said.
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Except that his premise, that metered households are pro-radio biased, is just totally wrong.

You can defend any argument by using a false premise. That does not make the conclusion correct.
 
nowradioguy said:
"Offensive" because it was more often than not used to shoot down anyone's suggestion that AMP should've considered another format.

I've never owned or operated a real radio station, let alone a cluster, but what bothers me about this is that a particular favorite station in a cluster can be sacrificed, if you will, for the good of the Party, er, cluster.
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Again, it's a business.

If a market finds it makes much more money per square foot on wines than on beers, they will likely reallocate some of the aisle space to the more profitable items.

The same happens with radio. Clusters are adjusted to provide combinations of salable demographics. The best case is LA's "wall of women" with KIIS, KOST and MyFM. The three can sell separately, but they are programmed to be sold in a pair or a trio for more dollars for iHeart.

A station that can't be sold in a cluster package will benefit less from synergy and thus reduce cluster billing.

Going back to supermarkets: which one do you go to... the one that has some of your favorite brands or the one that has them all?
 
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