No... as several people who have posted here have mentioned, it is "hemmed in" by other stations and allocations.
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BREAKING NEWS!...Star 102.5 sold in Buffalo
- Thread starter Tall Thin One
- Start date
Reportedly.
The paywall doesn't block you if you are not a previous visitor to the website and/or don't have the cookies on your device:
End of an era in local radio as Star 102.5 is sold
The long-term job futures of Star 102.5 morning host Rob Lucas and midday host Sue O’Neil are up in the air amid reports that the Audacy-owned station is being sold to a religious radio broadcasting group.
Also it is archived here:
There's nothing in the Buffalo News story that hasn't been discussed here or reported in the trades. It looks like it was cobbled together without even making a phone call or doing an internet search for EMF.Reportedly.
The paywall doesn't block you if you are not a previous visitor to the website and/or don't have the cookies on your device:
End of an era in local radio as Star 102.5 is sold
The long-term job futures of Star 102.5 morning host Rob Lucas and midday host Sue O’Neil are up in the air amid reports that the Audacy-owned station is being sold to a religious radio broadcasting group.buffalonews.com
Also it is archived here:
Grow now, pay later. Big radio's business model.
This board and radio Facebook groups would be "outraged", the general public wouldn't give a crap.
When you consider that the News is far from what it once was as a newspaper, I'm not surprised.
Hell, this board and other places gave me more info on this than that "report" ever did.
That is part of every business model since biblical times.
I believe it was Jack Welch who said... and I paraphrase... "if you can't make a profit using someone else's money, it is not a good business"
In other words, use borrowed money to grow as you can grow faster and stay ahead of the competition as compared to waiting until you accumulate earnings in large enough amounts to expand and grow.
Being an Australian, I note that EMF recently hired Jarrod Graetz who was the GM of my local CCM/Christian teaching station Light FM Melbourne , to manage their streaming content.
Which works until it doesn't. Ask David Field. Or any of the past CEOs of companies that have collapsed under mountains of debt.
Usually this sort of thing happens... in the small percentage of cases where it does... when something else goes wrong that messes with the general success of borrowing to expand.
If this happened too often, banks and investment banks would all be out of business.
Hmm, you took what I said out of context. I added that in each market there was likely a limited audience for "local" and that less music intense/non music formats may be the niche for that. 97 Rock is still pretty local and firmly established already so throwing 92.9 up against that didn't have much chance. WBEN, WGR and WECK may already have a good chunk of the audience looking for localism as well.
I think it is pretty clear we are heading back to there being less stations in many markets. Its happening slowly but gaining steam. AMs being shutdown; AM formats migrating to FM with the AM likely to go away at some point. FMs being sold to non-commercial owners removing competition for ad dollars. If more music intense FMs head to regional/national programming then what local advertising there is will be focused on the stations left having more local presence.
Yeah, "Neutron" Jack Welch ... the man, the myth, the legend. Ahem. A brilliant yet wretched, self-absorbed, bully and con man who left GE, particularly GE Capital, a house of cards, to say nothing about his abhorant stance regarding PCBs and GE's role in deeply polluting the Hudson River, its watershed and tributaries near Albany, NY. But he did create for himself a splendid platinum parachute that became the template for countless CEOs. Ironic how this appropriately folds into a thread about Audacy.
When listeners are asked why they listen to a radio station, very few if any, say "I love the content and the localism." They like certain personalities, some of the time ... at other times they just want to hear the music those personalities play. WBEN and WGR, being talk stations, put localism and content at the fore. Music stations put music at the fore. If the jocks ("air personalities," "hosts," "curators") are lucky enough to talk four times an hour, they might be able to articulate some kind of topicality and localism distilled to 12 seconds which provide content, such as it may or not be understood or appreciated by the listener. About a year ago, I was a passenger in a car driven by a friend who had control of the radio. Within the backsell of a song, the DJ related the lyrics of the song to a road construction project on "the 290" (which is, in itself, a localism.) We were well south of Buffalo. I thought the DJ was being relevant ("good content"), but the driver and person in control of the radio punched out to another FM station (different format), almost simultaneously saying, "that's why I hate the 290 and avoid it." One man's steak is another man's poison. we listened to the second choice for two songs before the driver again punched back to the station he first punched out of. Real world listening in the car.
Maybe yes, maybe no. To play devil's advocate, remember that the reason why there are fewer and fewer stations in many markets and why those AMs are shutting down and FMs are being sold to non-comms, is because its become increasingly difficult for stations to make a go of it financially, even when they've tried to slash costs and go with satellite programming and automation at least some of the time. For the most part, no amount of "local presence" has better enabled them to go on financially. There are fewer and fewer local businesses and mom and pop places than there once were before the days of 'big box stores' and few businesses like car dealerships and grocers which were once cash cows for radio, spend big amounts of money on local radio. Many stations that go dark have been marketed for sale, even at fire sale prices but couldn't find a buyer. There's a reason for all that.
Also, keep in mind that younger folks just don't listen to radio nearly as much as earlier generations once did, and regarding "localism" there are many other ways of doing that now that use newer, some would say better, technologies than OTA broadcast. As an example, one of my nephews goes to high school in a relatively small community, and even there, a few parents have volunteered their time to live stream all their basketball and football games for free on Youtube. They have decent commentary and multi-camera shots, professional-looking graphics and the like. I'm a radio guy, but if you told me to listen to a game on a radio at home, my only 2 choices here would be my wind-up radio I have in my emergency kit, or the tuner that happens to be built into my home theater system and the reception on that is crap, even with an external antenna. However, you tell me a game is on Youtube and I can watch or listen to it from anywhere I I have internet or cell signal.
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In the top 100 markets, there are less than 180 total AM stations that cover 80% or better of the population both day and night.
Some markets have none, some have just one.
The reason that is much greater than audio or programming why AMs are dying is that they have, for the most part, terrible coverage of today's suburban-sprawl markets. Add in increasing man made noise from wall warts, computers, LED bulbs and anything with a CPU and AM is barely viable in some cases.
Yes, there is less revenue... about 60% less in inflation-adjusted dollars than 22 years ago. But AM's problems are much more extreme, and it starts with deficient coverage and is then followed by man-made noise and lousy audio quality.
My last radio job, where I worked part-time, fired all but one of the part-timers in January 2009 when the Great Recession was raging. One of the big reasons for that bloodletting was the two local auto dealers closed down. If you were a regular listener to the station before the local GM dealer shut down, you would've sworn it owned the station it was on so often. It easily dropped six figures a year on us. About six months later, it returned as a DU (dealer used). I don't know if it ever started advertising on the station again, but I doubt it spent the money it used to spend. All the weekenders except one person who was retired and made his living on eBay had other jobs that paid better than full-time radio. So, the station let us go and kept the full-timers.
At the time, my "real" job was working in IT for a company that worked in vehicles and with car dealers and manufacturers. We had always known that there were two or three times more Ford, GM, and Chrysler dealerships than the market really needed. When the Great Recession hit, we found there were actually six to eight times more of those dealerships than the market needed. With about 1/6 the number of new car dealers as there was 20 years ago, auto isn't nearly the business it once was, and, while most of the remaining dealerships still use radio, most markets just don't have enough of them today for them to support local radio like they once did. Some of those markets have added DU's since the new car dealers closed, but those typically spend less on advertising and are concentrated on smaller areas. There are a few exceptions, but the DU's are generally single market sellers while new car dealers tend to be more regional. Most of the new car dealers where I live today are owned by the McLarty Auto Group (though many of them kept their original names before McLarty bought them), which is based out of Little Rock, AR and has dealerships in at least three states. Very few DU's have a reach anywhere near that.
As I mentioned earlier, as strictly a guess (possibly a very good one) Air1 will most likely get tossed on 89.9fm (where K Love airs currently)
The other thing to consider in the automotive space is brand consolidation. Like media consolidation it has been a necessary evil to see some legendary brands survive. That being said, brand considation killed a lot of local brands, internationally, as the parent company struggled to survive. Here in Australia GM's local offshoot was the "Holden" brand that ceased in 2020 after 156 years. Ford also had local models that were slowly fazed out. These days if you go to your local dealer, you will most likely see some or all of the brands owned by one manufacturer, under one roof. Having said that, in Australia each manufacturer (that) has a luxury brand, seems to be able to have them in stand alone franchises, like Toyota/Lexus.
When people ask me about radio, I say all the time because it’s local and free. So your statement is wrong
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