KJCB said:
Let's analyze "the hot talk format is a failure". Well, in LA, it doesn't exactly have huge numbers, although Leykis has the biggest cume. KIIS or KOST or KFI garner more listeners. However, KLSX makes a lot of money. The level of inventory available and the quality of listeners allows it to do so. It's not that millions of people here listen to FH&F, but when you can sell 18 minutes an hour, it helps a lot.
You'll note a few things, 1) I said that FREE-FM/hot-talk does fine in L.A. (and that's about it... Dallas seems to be billing well but no one is listening). 2) This, as you may have noticed, is NOT Los Angeles, Hot-talk is now a 2-time failure here, it was done once in March of 1995 with KHOT and it fell flat on it's face, and it even had the radio juggernaut of Howard Stern in the morning--which was moved immediately to the Edge upon KHOT's failure. I must admit that KHOT was run poorly and given an extremely short leash of about 4.5 months, which is nothing in radio, but I think we could all agree that it wasn't going anywhere. Many markets have dabbled in the arena of hot-talk and in most cases people reject it, for every positive example you quote I can easily give twice as many examples that fail (or more). I really cannot understand why you're such a hot-talk apologist when the writing is very clearly on the wall that it is a disaster.
I acknowledge that a few in the hot-talk arena have talent, and are not pure Stern rip-offs, but most are cheap clones and it's done poorly.
KJCB said:
As to Leykis' show, it's been all of a week, so I don't know why you'd say it'd be picked up. If it fit someone's format, it WOULD be picked up. Even though he did well, you're not going to see him supplanting JD on 550 or even land on KXAM. It would stick out like a sore thumb and kill the entire station. So that argument is a bit unrealistic. Perhaps if Sandusky could come up with an original idea, they'd put him on one of their rock stations in PMD and drive some of their cume duplication over to their two other similar sounding stations.
Lots of shows stick out like soar-thumbs in this market, John J and Rich do a talk show on a station where attention spans are about as long as long as the median age of the target demo... yet the show stays on the air. Loveline is a show targeted at a teenage-20s audience on an active rock station (KUPD) with a slightly older and predominately mail target demo, yet it's still there. Yet everytime the vocally challenged Leykis chokes his way to Phoenix, the station he's on goes under or his show is yanked... sooner or later you have to stop chalking it up to coincidence and say that the show just doesn't work here.
Oh and, by the way, you mention FREE-FM selling 18 minutes/hour in L.A., that's wonderful, in Phoenix the sales staff at KZON would have had a parade had they been able to sell half that, I loved hearing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Lit, and other "FREE ROCK" during the commercial segments on just about every show Free-FM Phoenix had (aside from Adam Carolla where they were able to sell time ironically enough--odd that they could sell ads on the second lowest rated show on the station and not during the so-called #1 male show Tom Leykis in PMD).
KJCB said:
And your argument that anyone who talks about dating, sex, nonsense issues, etc., does indeed indicate that anyone who talks about politics from a conservative position is a Rush wannabe, because that's what Rush does. I don't A-list guests, hot chics rubbing themselves, retards, sidekicks, or the like on any of the non-AMD former FreeFM shows. But by golly, any talk show targeted at men that doesn't talk about George Bush or the LA Dodgers must be a Stern rip-off.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth, but that's not MY contention at all. Shows that talk about nonsense are fine, shows that talk about politics are fine. Simply because someone talks about Sex on the air doesn't make them a Stern clone. You cite one or two bits and say "See? They don't do that on their show, thus they are not rip-offs". If I go out and develop a device where two people are able to communicate through a system of electrical impulses traveling through wires and call it a telephone, then someone else comes along and takes that same device and paints it blue and adds a cute logo to it I guess in your world that makes them originals, okay great. Again, thoguh, you will note that I didn't say "EVERY" hot-talk show is a Stern rip-off, just most of them--in one form or another. Hell, some of them play prank phone calls and parody songs from his show and claim them as their own. Thievery is a common trait in the radio biz, you don't have to do precisely what someone else does to be a thief.
I guess it's all a moot point though as the mighty one-share wonder is off the air, never to return to darken the valley again.
