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Comments & Conjecture?

Just noticed the Buffalo Fall Book first phase trends have been posted. Rochester trends are posted too, showing some pleasant surprises for WDKX and Legends. Yes, it's 12+ but are not speculation and conjecture just a few of the things that make this board so compelling? Window for comment is now open.
 
A few quick observations:

Buffalo: What's up with Star? It looks to have taken more of a hit, proportionally, than its clustermate Kiss. And it will be very interesting to see how a downright miserable Bills season will affect the Citadel FMs...and WGR, too.

Rochester: The CHR war between PXY and Kiss is always interesting to watch...but who'd have figured that CC flipping Kiss to its "Premium Choice" satellite-fed lineup for most of the day would yield a statistical dead heat with live'n'local PXY? Yeah, it's only a trend, and it's only 12+...but it would be most interesting to see the demos here. Not a good trend for the Stephens cluster, either - Fickle is falling off the face of the earth, with Zone not far behind, and Warm looks only lukewarm at best, though its imminent flip to Christmas music should help some. And was that really a goose-egg for "ESPN 950," against better than a 1 combined for WHTK-AM/FM?
 
WYSL is pretty close to netting a 1.0 hope Mr. Savage achieves it! I'm also interested in the rather large number of Canadian stations that showed up in Buffalo this trend.
 
Star is likely to rebound with the Christmas format battle against WJYE. Star's biggest problem is that "CHR" Kiss is dayparting heavily, and has an AC morning show. Entercom is competing with itself. When is Janet Snyder going to admit she's middle-aged & move to Star, allowing Kiss to skew younger? Maybe when Roger retires - in 2032 - Janet will go to Star, & Rob will move to mid-days...
 
Rochester's feisty stand-alone WDKX is beating the corporate clones. Mighty, Mighty! Given that WDKX is Urban and reaches a lot of younger demos who also listen to mp3 players and iPods, this is quite an accomplishment. Same for WBLK in Buffalo. The dark lining behind the silver cloud for both stations: How much of the 12+ ratings are derived from HDBA weighted diaries which will disappear once PPM reaches the markets?

WYRK down, but still on top of the heap in Buffalo? So what else is new for the only FM Country format in the market?

WHTT apparently made the right move when it dumped the chick-mix format and returned to Classic Hits. Makes you wonder why the station switched to Mix in the first place. Question is, how will WHTT sustain, rotating 320 songs with only two live personalities? East of Buffalo in Lancaster, Classic Hits 95.3 comes in loud and clear with a wider variety of Classic Hits and some Canadian Content to spice things up. Street chatter says WHTT is considering Truckin' Tom Kent to replace the soporific John Tesh in the syndicated 7-midnight slot. BTW, is Citadel GM-RVP Kevin Legrett on his way back to Rochester to partner in a business venture with one of his former managers at CBS? Talk may be cheap, but it's coming from reliable and well-placed sources.

Star's 12+ is a head scratcher. It's 12+ Phase 1 is lower than the dismal 3.9 that WHTT scored in the Summer book before dumping the Mix format and returning to Classic Hits. All Christmas should remedy Star's loss. Could Star's smash-face compression be the cause for listener fatigue. Dial down the Omni a bit? That Star is tied with Jack indicates something ain't right. Oh that's right, "it's only 12+." Star owns the Women. Jack's simply a thorn-in-the-ass station on life-support designed to screw with 97 Rock and protect WJYE. And Regent is out of compliance with its debt covenant. This is all so tawdry.

Looks like 97 Rock is stuck in the sixes, but this is likely to change with Bills football. Speaking of which, WGR and WEDG drew an ace from the deck when the Bills fired Dick Jauron. Both stations' cume and share must have soared. WGR seemed to be a half step ahead of WEDG, especially when the Edge's usually blunt S&R waffled with a few callers who speculated on the fate of Bills GM Russ Brandon.

WGR and WEDG went "wall to wall" featuring experts and pundits. Both stations did compelling live local radio. WEDG served-up Ruben Brown, John Murphy, Vic Carucci and Daryl Talley. WGR featured Thurman Thomas and ESPN analyst John Clayton. The ex-Bills on both stations sounded surprisingly articulate. Brown and Thomas have improved dramatically over the years, speaking with conviction and articulating clarity of thought without a lot of bombast, which was left to the hosts.

Thomas in particular brought to light the human side of the Jauron's dismissal, "He's still a human being, let's take it easy on him... just because you fire Dick Jauron doesn't mean everything is going to be fine." Ruben Brown offered insight as to how players and coaches react to each other. "It's not rocket science, but it's chemistry." Nice metaphor, especially for a lineman. Maybe these ex-jocks are beginning to take this broadcasting thing seriously.
 
dustintv said:
WYSL is pretty close to netting a 1.0 hope Mr. Savage achieves it! I'm also interested in the rather large number of Canadian stations that showed up in Buffalo this trend.

Personally I believe that WYSL's ratings exceeds what Arbitron is reporting.

I base my belief on statistics I've been shown which incidates WYSL has a larger audience than the .08 shown in this latest ratings book. My guess is that the station's ratings are closer to a 1.5 or even a 2 share.

* Stolen from Scott Fybush handbook: I do work at WYSL Saturday mornings and the opinions on here are my own and not those of the station's management.
 
Mark_Giardina said:
Personally I believe that WYSL's ratings exceeds what Arbitron is reporting.

I base my belief on statistics I've been shown which incidates WYSL has a larger audience than the .08 shown in this latest ratings book. My guess is that the station's ratings are closer to a 1.5 or even a 2 share.

* Stolen from Scott Fybush handbook: I do work at WYSL Saturday mornings and the opinions on here are my own and not those of the station's management.

I never had much faith in Arbitron ratings, especially when books showed the station in Dansville with a larger audience than WYSL. Hell I can't pick up the Dansville station until I'm almost near Geneseo, yet WYSL comes booming into metro Rochester daytime with a strong signal.
 
And at the very bottom of the Rochester page is all sports WROC with a 0. This proves once again it doesn't matter if this station runs conservative talk, liberal talk, sports talk or idle chatter, they will never win with anything they run. Basically, a waste of electricity. Better to get into leased time programming.
 
The Voice of Reason said:
I never had much faith in Arbitron ratings, especially when books showed the station in Dansville with a larger audience than WYSL. Hell I can't pick up the Dansville station until I'm almost near Geneseo, yet WYSL comes booming into metro Rochester daytime with a strong signal.

Good point. I know WBTA from Batavia shows up on the ratings board...I live in Brockport and sometimes get it on a good day, but does anyone in Rochester get it, let alone listen to it? So I can believe if WYSL is actually higher than a 1.0 already then.
 
Couple things about Rochester, for what they're worth....

First, there's a three way battle for hit music listeners and WDKX is winning it hands down. DKX is basically what WBBF and WAXC were back in the day when CHR was an AM format. It rules 12-34 in both the city and the burbs, crossing ethnic and income lines with younger listeners, because they reliably play more of the current hits younger listeners both urban and suburban are downloading or buying in the stores today...and the people who present it all are live, local, likable and accessible. If DKX had a full-market Class B signal it would beat WHAM for the lead in 12+.

PXY has a good lineup as well, but the music mix at least in the daytime seems loaded with softer currents and recurrents, it could accurately call itself Hot AC. It's got to have a lot of overlap with Warm 101 in its listenership.

Kiss 106.7 trails because it clearly is NOT live and local, and also has signal issues beyond the inner-ring suburbs.

The sports radio battle seems like an exercise in futility because there is clearly not more than a 1.5 share audience for the format itself, here or in any market that doesn't have either a major league pro sports franchise or a bigtime NCAA Division 1-A football and basketball program. The format does better in Buffalo because they have the Sabres and Bills (and SUNY Buffalo aspires to bigtime college status) and in Syracuse because of SU. WHTK's signal after sunset is very limited in the burbs but there is now that rimshot FM that fills in the null in the southeast portion of the market, and it shares some staff and expenses with WHAM, so its actual costs to Clear Channel are manageable. WROC, meanwhile, has major signal problems that'll prevent them from winning with any English language format now. Their best bet? Probably to go after the 50,000 people living within their prime contour in Monroe County whose first language is Spanish, before some struggling second or third tier FM beats them to it. They need a concentrated population to superserve with an exclusive format in order to get anywhere now, and that's the one format hole no one's yet filled.
 
Bob1370 said:
DKX... rules 12-34 in both the city and the burbs, crossing ethnic and income lines with younger listeners, because they reliably play more of the current hits younger listeners both urban and suburban are downloading or buying in the stores today...and the people who present it all are live, local, likable and accessible. If DKX had a full-market Class B signal it would beat WHAM for the lead in 12+.

I won't debate that DKX gets points for being live and local, and they are in touch with their audience and responsive to them. However, their numbers are inflated. I've studied enough Arbitron books to be able to tell that there are suburban households where DKX (probably because of that previously mentioned local connection) is reported as listened to almost 24 hours a day by every household member. First, no household listens exclusively to only one station all day long, and there's no household where every member listens to the same thing. Likely, these diaries are filled out by families who would say that "they only listen to DKX" (and have said so for years), but the numbers are reported artificially higher because they just fill out the survey with that perspective without thinking about the actual and real radio usage in their home. DKX deserves recognition for being able to cultivate such a loyal audience (who doesn't want listeners like that!), but when it comes to accurate ratings, DKX doesn't have them. If Rochester ever gets PPM, expect to see DKX take a big hit.
 
"If Rochester ever gets PPM, expect to see DKX take a big hit."

IMHO that might happen IF there were high-energy CHR/pop stations competing with it. But WPXY is sounding more and more like a hot AC (think Star 102 rather than Kiss 98.5 and you've got it). And Kiss 106.7 lacks the local personality and the ability to reflect local musical tastes because by the sound of it, you get the sense it's programmed out of corporate HQ with a NYC-based morning show and other dayparts programmed by automation from God knows where.

DKX is doing a good enough job and tries to appeal broadly enough that it's not likely to take the same hit that other urban stations have taken from CHR competitors in other markets.
 
cee said:
And at the very bottom of the Rochester page is all sports WROC with a 0. This proves once again it doesn't matter if this station runs conservative talk, liberal talk, sports talk or idle chatter, they will never win with anything they run. Basically, a waste of electricity. Better to get into leased time programming.


i might be the only one in rocheste, but i love 950 except the buffalo feed in the afternoon that sucks and i wont listen too it. i was a little disappointed 950 didnt put afternoon playoff baseball on, but overall i love the station.
 
Bob1370 said:
First, no household listens exclusively to only one station all day long, and there's no household where every member listens to the same thing.

I disagree. I've been in plenty of houses where they only listened to one station there. If you like the Active Rock format, it's not like there are a half dozen choices for that in any market. And growing up in the house I grew up in, the radio was always on one channel. No one was allowed top change it. We didn't dare change it.
 
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