Inland Empire’s a different place, though.
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Baffling music selections on KOLA
- Thread starter victorres43
- Start date
And nostalgia is not universal. If those tunes as examples start testing well, more power to them. If they’re not, whatever the underlying reason, you don’t do what your audience has told you they don’t want (whether it seems illogical or not😄)
The one good thing I must say about KOLA, though, is that it is not owned by a company like Townsquare, automated playlists and DJs that sound even more canned than iHeartMedia's Premium Choice.
I just thought it's too early for a Classic Hits format to play anything past 2005, and skipping a large portion of the MTV/TRL age of pop music at the same time. Stations like WCBS and WOGL are slowly expanding their late 90s/early 2000s selections (even playing Mary J Blige), and I think K-Earth 101 is doing the same also, given it's also an Audacy station.
Is the Inland Empire really that less receptive towards 90s teen pop or ballads?
Two of the songs you mentioned -- "Macarena" and "Mambo No. 5" -- were novelties that quickly burned out from overexposure not only on radio but in clubs, at ballparks between innings, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, you name it. I'd be surprised if they're being played on radio anywhere now.
I did hear these two songs at one point when I listened to WLIF in Baltimore back in 2018 or 2019. Macarena gets airplay in some 90s flashback weekends, and I believe some AC stations like WLTW still play Mambo No 5.
This is where you cycle back to David's comments about KRTH's signal strength in the IE. KOLA has to take a different path, if it can, or KRTH will simply accelerate the burnout of KOLA's library.
Someone else can speak to IE musical tastes on a granular level, but it's whiter than L.A., with a lot more shares in Country and Rock than L.A. has. It could well be that the 30-somethings KOLA hopes to attract do have different pop tastes.
It also has a higher percentage of second and later generation Hispanics, although with all the minimum wage distribution center jobs that is changing.
Hispanics overindex in classic hits listening.
But definitely, it is more like Bakersfield than LA.
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Most of the country is more like Bakersfield than LA.
Just to clarify, David, when you say "first generation," you mean born in the United States to parent(s) who were born in another country, right? I've seen some use the term to mean the immigrants themselves.
Classic hits stations in general, or only classic hits stations that include pop/rhythmic elements? Give what you've said about Hispanics and classic rock, I'd doubt that a rock-heavy, whitebread classic hits station as we have here in several New England markets would attract many Hispanic ears. Or does a musical diet of Queen, Journey, Don Henley, Steve Miller Band, Pat Benatar, Bryan Adams, etc. etc. appeal more to Hispanic listeners than one might think? (Those artists have all been played in the last 40 minutes on WROR Boston.)
It's not that KOLA is particularly rock-leaning, country-leaning, or rhythmic-leaning. But KOLA does give artists like Katy Perry some airplay, even though the jury is still out on whether such a singer stands the test of time. They also make peculiar choices, like when they play songs such as Santeria, The Metro, Atomic Dog, and Animal (by the Neon Trees).
When I was a kid (circa 1991), the oldies station played 50s and 60s, with an occasional 70s track.
So here we are, 2021 (30 years later), and KOLA plays (50+30)=80s and (60+30)=90s, with an occasional (70+30)=00s track.
Does it bother me to hear Three Doors Down "Kryptonite" (a high-school jam of mine) on the "oldies" station? Certainly. But that's not KOLA's problem, that's my unwillingness to accept that I'm getting older. As an aside, KOLA really isn't oldies anyway. More a Hot AC playing a lot of recurrents.
So here we are, 2021 (30 years later), and KOLA plays (50+30)=80s and (60+30)=90s, with an occasional (70+30)=00s track.
Does it bother me to hear Three Doors Down "Kryptonite" (a high-school jam of mine) on the "oldies" station? Certainly. But that's not KOLA's problem, that's my unwillingness to accept that I'm getting older. As an aside, KOLA really isn't oldies anyway. More a Hot AC playing a lot of recurrents.
They certainly sound more like an adult hits station a la 95.7 The Spot in Houston than a full-fledged classic hits station like CBS-FM in New York or Q105 in Tampa.
No, Bakersfield-to-Fresno is a real world of its own. It's not like Colorado Springs or Valdosta or Akron. Start with very few Blacks, a much higher percentage than nearly anywhere else in the nation of Asians, and then... 50% or more Hispanic, with second and third generation groups as large or larger than immigrant groups.
And then you have quite low median income levels and the results of that on taxes that support schools and community projects.
So ... a poorer, more Asian San Antonio?
"First Generation" is the term used for immigrants born outside the US. "Dreamers" are first generation, but they arrived as children.
Not really. San Antonio's Hispanic heritage goes back ten, 15 generations. The Tejanos were there first, and they were never "immigrants" back then or now. That group is the bulk of the Hispanic population of San Antonio.
The central CA Hispanic population arrived mostly in the post-WW II period, competing with the "Grapes of Wrath" migrants from the plains states who arrived in the pre-War decade.
As an example, less than one in five Hispanics in San Antonio speaks Spanish well, while in the areas of California being referred to, 50% to 60% are Spanish dominant, and many more speak Spanish as bilinguals or via "kitchen Spanish".
That's true, though almost no place is generic.
If you want to talk about weird cities, I'm from Salt Lake City. It's like really really white, some Hispanic, but with a surprisingly high percentage of pacific islanders (Tongan and Samoan immigrants). Almost no African-Americans. And a religion deeply influences half of the market's listeners.
Is SLC more comparable to Bakersfield or Los Angeles or the Inland Empire or Sacramento? It becomes so apples-and-oranges, it's really difficult to nail it down. Now just replace the first paragraph with *any* metro area/region, and you start to see the mess it makes. (E.g., can you compare Denver with Boise? Spokane with Kansas City?)
And all of this refutes my point how? How are those other places more like LA then Bakersfield? And I never said ALL places, I said most. The original point was really a throwaway observation, but it you're going to argue the finer details of a rather self-obvious point...
Yes, the figure is that just 25% of the metro is Hispanic, Black or Asian. For a large western market, that is unusual.
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