I wanted to ask how weak was the billing of Country Music (format) in New York City's metro area??
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Country Format Billing
- Thread starter BJSteigner
- Start date
But I would bet it would have been enough billing to TRY on 66AM.
1. An intact audience - an experiment would not be starting from ground zero.
2. Talent was already intact, and I imagine some sort of severance was going to be needed anyway if they were simply let go.
3. 66 has the power to reach the audience in north Jersey without much of a fuss.
4. Country listeners are different from Rockers. Listening to an AM in their pick-em'-up trucks would not have been an unbelievable stretch. Market it right, "WNSH - Too Big For FM - Now on 660 and WNSH HD"
5. It could have been a real test of the conventional wisdom (flawed I believe) that it is impossible to get anyone under 40 to listen to AM.
6. The 66 facility is almost certainly unlistened to in the daytime. The country format could be broken for Yankee games and maybe drive times. Audacy needs listeners and advertising opportunities wherever they are. They could have tried without expending too much promotional money.
1. An intact audience - an experiment would not be starting from ground zero.
2. Talent was already intact, and I imagine some sort of severance was going to be needed anyway if they were simply let go.
3. 66 has the power to reach the audience in north Jersey without much of a fuss.
4. Country listeners are different from Rockers. Listening to an AM in their pick-em'-up trucks would not have been an unbelievable stretch. Market it right, "WNSH - Too Big For FM - Now on 660 and WNSH HD"
5. It could have been a real test of the conventional wisdom (flawed I believe) that it is impossible to get anyone under 40 to listen to AM.
6. The 66 facility is almost certainly unlistened to in the daytime. The country format could be broken for Yankee games and maybe drive times. Audacy needs listeners and advertising opportunities wherever they are. They could have tried without expending too much promotional money.
My response to your points:
1. Would the listeners of 94.7 FM have followed? I doubt the majority of them would have done so.
2. No comment.
3. As has been written elsewhere, the AM signal is subject to interference from other electrical devices, more so in much of North Jersey than in the city.
4. As much as I love the sight of a pickup truck, I haven't seen many pickup trucks in the city.
5. I doubt that Audacy would have been willing to take that risk.
6. Listeners of WBUL-FM Lexington, KY seem to tolerate the preemption of country music for Kentucky Wildcats football and men's basketball. Despite the preemptions, 98.1 The Bull remains the number one radio station in Lexington, at least two points ahead of number two. However, this is New York City, not Lexington. I'm sure that country fans in the NY metro area come from many different parts of the country; therefore, not all of them are fans of the New York Yankees. Plus, the number of preemptions on WBUL-FM is low compared to the number that would have been required for the Yankees.
I can't think of a single AM station owned by Audacy that is being used for a music format.
They feel they've addressed the country format issue with the HD-2.
They got about 35% of what their audience share would seem to justify.
In radio we have what is called the "Power Ratio". If a station has a 6 share in the sales demos and gets 6% of the market revenue, then it has a power ratio of 1. If it gets 3% of the revenue, it has a 0.5 ratio. And country did even worse than that.
I feel like we've addressed this many times already.
Cumulus sold the station as a national format. Not just NYC clients. Audacy didn't do that. They run their stations strictly as local sales operations. Even worse, a lot of it was restricted to the five boroughs. That worked great for news & talk. Not good for country.
Decline in market revenue by 35% after the 2008-09 recession, decline in radio rates due to PPM, ad agency buying less deep to move money to new media. Finally, huge decline in radio revenue do to pandemic.
FYI Cumulus launched WNSH in 2013, well after that recession.
But the market was still depressed, and that station never had even a partial recovery.
The market for other stations was equally depressed.
The question is why did revenues drop in half after the sale to Audacy, and it's because of the way the station was sold. David Field said as much when he spoke at the Country Radio Seminar last year.
For Audacy’s David Field, Success Extends Beyond Radio.
“To be competitive today, you need to have great local radio, great digital and great podcasting,” Audacy Chairman, President and CEO David Field told Country Radio Seminar attendees Friday. To
The bankruptcy in 2018 made the sale of the stations to EMF and the trade of WNSH to Audacy inevitable. But the only way a country station in NY worked was if it was done as part of a national strategy, rather than as a strictly local station with an all local staff and all local sales. The other part of this was once the Dickeys were gone in 2015, the national strategy of "NASH" went away.
This again? There's not enough billing period to justify Audacy or any major operator to run music on AM in 2023 (or whenever you first pitched this).
And, while it may have helped a bit in NYC, overall the policies of Dickey and his crew caused many if not most of the company's country stations to decline.
And one of the things many outside managers in New York thought was that the way they reported NYC billings to Miller-Kaplan was to put a very high percentage of network sales against the NYC station with the idea that if it looked successful, it would encourage buyers to favor it.
True, so after they left, the new CEO changed the approach with the hope that increased ratings would lead to increased revenues. While the new approach did improve ratings, the improved revenues didn't follow.
Again, the actual real revenue without "shared dollars" from a network due to favorable allocation may have been no different. The Dickeys were somewhat bizarre operators.
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