A lot of the music I like is so old I didn't hear it until years after it was popular so that's not how it works for me.
And I didn't like a lot of the music that was popular when I was a teenager and it just continued to get worse from there.
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Are there any big AM music stations anymore?
- Thread starter radiogal
- Start date
And I didn't like a lot of the music that was popular when I was a teenager and it just continued to get worse from there.
Agreed. Songs are bookmarks in time. What I'm suggesting is that the AM radio of today offers nothing of value. Even the old songs we grew up with on AM sound like crap on AM. Honest. The radios don't have what they once had and the AM transmitters and tower sites are undermaintained. I get it. People like what they like? But why do they like it on AM when they can get it elsewhere?
Most ad sales in that sub-market (it is what is called an "embedded" market and is an extract from the full New York Metro Survey Area report) are local and direct. No agencies, and sales are based on results and service, not age.
So in that kind of market a station that gets results, even if the "results" come from older customers, gets the ad budget of local advertisers. It helps that many of them may be listeners, too.
Why? Because it takes me back to when I was way younger, had all my body parts and what's left hurts nowadays. I sometimes tune in online or on my phone but my car is too old for it to have all the fancy doodads to hook up a smart phone to. Could I use a FM transmitter that plugs into my cig. lighter.......ooops......power point nowadays. Trouble is my phone or whatever loses the data stream so I end up having to re-start the stream and since Ohio passed a law giving a driver holding, touching or even glancing at a phone while driving the death penalty, ain't happening anymore.
David - WSM-AM is basically profitable online and that's it. It's no longer a "Nashville" radio station with virtually no interaction in the local market. I could go on a bit more, but there is nothing to really say other than you are over your estimate of sales by over 30% and again, the "profit" is found outside the state of TN. I am unsure that this is a great way to run a business in America's Music City, yet.... AM offers very little in Market #40.
As you know, the market data comes from Miller-Kaplan leaks and several industry data sources. The WSM (AM) estimates come from there. Many stations allocate revenue for M-K differently, with some consolidating combined stream-on air revenue when it is a joint buy.
The main point, though, is that terrestrial AM revenue is very limited in most markets because the available stations are, mostly, not adequate to cover today's big metro areas. Just look at that 50 kw station on 1510!
I'm actually doing that myself. It's obviously not up to the standards of WION, but I think it sounds remarkably good for what it is (it would sound even better if I give my new AM Stereo receiver (a Realistic TM-152; I can't afford anything nice like the Carver set that WION uses, unfortunately) an alignment and upgrade it with wideband filters).
If anyone is interested in taking a look, send me a PM.
c
@vchimpanzee Agreed! That's how I grew up. Listening to standards and oldies on AM radio mostly, with a smattering of everything else because I was curious what there was (I listened to a lot of country for awhile (Froggy 92.9 FM and Young Country 93.3 (the former KYA-FM)), and then I tried on Radio Disney for a bit (1310 AM); I even tried Mexican music from various stations! But I eventually settled on standards (KABL) and oldies (KFRC) because I found I liked them best). I feel like I might as well have grown up in the late 60s and 70s!
Maybe this brouhaha over Ford's decision to remove AM from most of its cars and trucks starting next year will increase people's awareness of AM and actually lead to some renewed interest in attaining good AM sound quality.
c
This is because people went to FM back in the 80s and 90s and left AM to rot. It was able to coast along for awhile, but after almost 30 years of the main station owners not caring so much about quality, cracks are beginning to show, in the form of mediocre sound quality coming from numerous stations, even when the receiver is of decent quality.
Maybe this brouhaha over Ford's decision to remove AM from most of its cars and trucks starting next year will increase people's awareness of AM and actually lead to some renewed interest in attaining good AM sound quality.
c
By 1975, more music listening was to FM than to AM. By 1978, more than half of all listening was to FM.
Back a while, the FCC, who had licensed too many stations too close to each other on adjacent channels had to establish a brick wall cutoff of AM bandwidth at 10 kHz. That meant that the rich harmonic content we hear on FM was made impossible on AM, even with a good new transmitter.
Back in the development stage of HD radio, I heard a presentation at the NAB engineering conferences from Bob Orban showing that in a wide assortment of consumer radios, none was any less than -3 db at around 5 kHz and all were pretty much dead over 6 kHz. So the HD requirement of limiting AM stations to 5 kHz analog bandwidth was not going to be noticed by essentially all AM listeners.
Nobody will buy a "good" new AM radio today because so few AMs have full market signals and the noise level from computers and microchips and wallwarts has made coverage even more reduced for existing stations.
Cuba has no ratings; all stations are operated by the Socialist government.
Cuba is building an extensive FM network of well over 100 stations covering the entire county with the national and regional networks and local stations.
Oldies weren't something I was hearing as a teenager. I liked the easy listening music in most businesses and medical and dental offices, which was always FM. However, the AM station I listened to was playing what would be called oldies now, and a lot of the songs ended up on standards radio too.
Standards were similar to the music I was hearing on TV, especially in variety shows. I remember "High Hopes" by Sinatra on AM radio but don't remember which station or what its format was.
The local AM where I went to high school switched to big band shortly after a concert by our high school band with some big band music in it. The students liked it. I don't know whether there was any connection between the events. And this was a group of students who seemed to like nothing better than "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
But Charlotte got an adult standards station (the term hadn't been invented) when I was in college and it had big band music as well as easy listening contemporary songs. I found out years later it had only been 10 years since that kind of music was on the radio, but WBT had changed to Top 40, which was really adult contemporary, by the time I moved to the area. I had listened to a more easygoing adult contemporary station whose format was described somewhere as "middle of the road", before it went all news. The standards format was also called "middle of the road" by the newspaper, and it was the same station, but it was very different.
I don't recall anyone my age listening to FM when I was a teenager unless it was WROQ, which was album rock. Everyone liked "61 Big WAYS". We may have had some kind of Top 40 on FM in the area but I never heard about it. Then WBCY switched from easy listening music to rock in September 1978, and that was popular. The playlist seemed more like a rock-leaning Top 40, even though Broadcasting Yearbook called it AOR, and WBCY called itself "Charlotte's Best Rock". WROQ, a true album rocker, was called "adult rock".
We got our first FM radio in 1977 and my father liked the easy listening station and so did I.
The FM simulcast acts as translater and is way out in the Hamptons so WABC's owner can get a clear "local" signal at his house.
@vchimpanzee May I ask when were you a teenager? There was a swing revival in the mid 90s, and Big Band music figured into that quite a bit.
I also listened to KFRC, which was basically straight Top 40 oldies, until it went off the air in 2005.
c
Ah, yes. KABL (and later KXBX-AM when I moved to Lake county in 2004) played what was basically a blend of oldies and adult standards, and I listened them quite a bit.
I also listened to KFRC, which was basically straight Top 40 oldies, until it went off the air in 2005.
c
Has any other format died out as rapidly as beautiful music did in the 1980s?
In 1980, I bet every rated market had a beautiful music FM in the top five. By 1990, the format was pretty much dead.
Even the mainly on AM music of your life/adult standards stations that came along in the early 1980s seemed to have more of a gradual decline in the 1990s with many adding more talk or sports.
But beautiful music really disappeared overnight.
In 1980, I bet every rated market had a beautiful music FM in the top five. By 1990, the format was pretty much dead.
Even the mainly on AM music of your life/adult standards stations that came along in the early 1980s seemed to have more of a gradual decline in the 1990s with many adding more talk or sports.
But beautiful music really disappeared overnight.
I was 20 in 1975. That year, a top 40 50,000 FM station took our area by storm, leaving the crumbs for everyone else, including an album-oriented FM. It was located in a brand-new mall, with the dj’s visible behind floor to ceiling plate glass.
I would say oldies died similarly quickly from roughly 2000 to 2006.
4BH's competitor, 4KQ, was the highest rated AM-only music station on the planet.. they averaged a 10.3 over their last year on the air and won over fans worldwide
(The Number One Music AM On Earth - RadioInsight)
(A Listening Guide To 4KQ’s Final Days - RadioInsight)
Yet even with double-digit 10+ shares, 4KQ's demos weren't sell-able enough to justify keeping the format or declining an offer to sell the signal to sports network operators SEN.
4KQ's biggest book was Survey 7, 2021 (Australian metros have 8 surveys per year) Here are the demo breakouts:
10+: 11.3 share
18-24: 0.2
25-39: 0.7
40-54: 4.3
55-64: 19.0
65+: 25.6
4BH/Brisbane and Cruise 1323/Adelaide are now the two highest rated AM only music stations (8.4 and 9.1 shares respectively) and both of their demo breakouts look similar to 4KQ's above.
Is ad buying as focused on younger demos in Australia as it is in the US? The 4KQ sale and flip would seem to indicate that it is.
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