Are My Eyes Going Bad???

[normhill007]

Are my eyes deceiving me or are there no more #1 stations in the market with double digits?? Guess I've been in my padded cell too long..How do you sell that to clients who were with you when you had a 12-14 share.."Yeah, we've gotten bad, but not as bad as the next guy"???...If It's any consolation, radio in Greenville/Spartanburg S.C, is as bad. Same cast of idiots owning every piece of property they can get their hands on and only supporting a couple..As for WARM, last I talked to Harry, sometime before Christmas, he said Citadel wanted 2.5 for WARM and would take another quarter of a mil to get the radials and the tower situation half decent. I saw a post that said Citadel wanted a mil. Guess they want to bail "cheap"..

 

[carlvenorden]

It's great to see you on the board Norm!!! You were a fantastic listen back when WARM was warm.
Well, today, that plant is the pitttttttttttts. Sounds like a part 15am station...actually worse.

I'm sad to say that at one time WARM could be heard LOUDLY in Northwest NJ...I actually woke up to Harry and Terry every morning in Wayne County PA over 10 years ago, maybe longer. But you can't hear WARM here anymore.

If they want 250,000 to fix the radials, that seems almost cheap (it's not, but to save the plant it is).
Fact is; they let that plant tank badly and now have an old car to sell and no one wants an old car....especially if she doesn't run.

The mighty 590 is a (less than) fraction of itself.
It may be too late to rebuild it.

 

[The Former Mac Austin]

Every programmer I talk to these days has the same excuse for ratings woes: satellite radio. And it appears that more people are going to "pay for play" stations. Heck, even my technologically challenged father switched to Sirius (and loves it). I'm not certain that is what is causing the #1's to have single digits, but it appears that the folks at the helm believe so.

 

[NigelWick]

Satellite radio is a small part of the picture. It's I-Pods, more stations on the air, more competition, less loyal listeners, and a lot of sampling.

 

[waunderlust]

If you're talking AQH share under double digits, that's the percentage of those listening to radio in the Metro who are listening to a particular radio station. That number is not reflective on the number of people listening to radio, but is a percentage of those that are listening. New technology will not effect that. I've got to agree with Nigel, there's so much going on in this market. Look at it this way, before 103-1 changed to WILK-FM there were 4 or 5 stations doing similar formats AC/soft rock/Adult Hits/Jackish. Though they may not have gotten great numbers, they each picked at Magic's numbers. KRZ has skewed younger. There's 2 rock stations plus the soft rock stations competing. And two (three if you count CTO) country stations.

 

[dmer]

I can tell you from personal experience that I listen to about 3 to 4 different stations and sometimes even to internet radio depending on my mood. I listen to WHLM-FM, the Mountain, WQFM, and I used to listen to EZ 103, and the River until our office moved downtown. A lot of people I know constantly change the station and are not particularly loyal to one station. If a station starts to annoy them (whether it be repetition of music, annoying DJ's, commercials, etc) they change the station without a second thought. Loyalty is really a thing of the past. Most people just want to listen to music they like and quickly flip the station if they don't meet that criteria.

Also, I think people do not feel the radio conglomerates are loyal to them, so why should the listener be loyal to the station. You finally find a station you like and then some bigwig consultant comes in and says to ABC Company that they could do better by changing that station to another simulcast of a station already simulcasted 3 times (see where I'm going here ) and they do it. You can't be loyal when they flip formats every 2 or 3 years.

 

[kfitz]

Mac,

Ratings companies try and keep track of this...Sat radio has only taken a very small piece of the audience; I'm guessing a percent or two (one of you other posters may know the exact number); the real competition is from Ipods, inet radio, cd's in cars, video game systems, etc. Its no one thing taking audience....its a bunch of smaller things together. Also, With Monroe being continually weighted greater and greater more stations from Allentown and NJ pop up and the big dogs in Scr-WBarre get less and less. In the next 5 to 10 years Monroe will likely pass Lackawanna in population.

KF

 

[The Former Mac Austin]

Not disagreeing with any of you. Just passing along what the folks in the biz are telling me.

To be honest, iPods are just different forms of the old Walkman, vehicles have had CD and cassette players for quite a while, video game systems are nothing new ... these have been blamed for years for declining market share.

IMHO, I think that people's attention spans are getting shorter, meaning that they spread their time among several stations rather than listening to just one. I'm a notorious button pusher myself (even was when I was programming stations), so if I got a diary I can just imagine what I would do to the numbers!

 

[crmc]

I believe that satellite is less than 3.5 % of the national average share. The issue on lower share stations at the top of the ranker has more to do with the increased number of stations on the air and clusters programming to own a format or create a spectrum buy( CHR,Country, News /Talk and Rock AA) as an example in a dominant cluster in NEPA.
Plus population shifts in most markets has the metro spreading out and improving the cumes of the suburban signals.