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Cumulus Cuts?
- Thread starter scottsan
- Start date
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normhill007
Guest
From what I'm reading between the lines, look for Cumulus to drop live programming for their own syndicated programming. It's cheap and probably won't hit ratings much.
For what it's worth .....
Just yesterday I was buying some stuff at a hardware store in St. Clair PA. For years they had on Magic.
No more. It's Sirius/XM there.
The satellite station that was playing is nowhere near live and certainly not local. But the store did not have a display booth for Sirius/XM, either. Apparently, they just decided to pay to have background shopping music for some reason, rather than have on Magic.
Just yesterday I was buying some stuff at a hardware store in St. Clair PA. For years they had on Magic.
No more. It's Sirius/XM there.
The satellite station that was playing is nowhere near live and certainly not local. But the store did not have a display booth for Sirius/XM, either. Apparently, they just decided to pay to have background shopping music for some reason, rather than have on Magic.
I would guess the hardware store received a visit from a Sirius/XM rep. They go into public business places and remind them that to play a radio station in a public place you need an ASCAP and BMI license. Then they offer a deal for Sirius/XM which comes with a special ASCAP/BMI license for use in a public place. This not so pleasant practice has been going on for a few years.
KF
KF
In addition to the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC licensing package, Sirius XM offers another advantage for businesses: People don't have to wait through the ten minutes of commercials that they hear on Magic 93 to hear the music! A better option for businesses is Muzak, which offers music in a variety of formats (it isn't just sleepy elevator music anymore), with no jocks and with music that is carefully screened for offensive lyrics. Muzak, like Sirius XM, is now delivered via satellite, rather than by SCA subcarriers on FM stations.
Attorneys from BMI have been known to visit businesses, sending the owners threatening letters if the business had a radio playing in the background. It is actually cheaper for a business to subscribe to Sirius XM or Muzak than it is to buy an ASCAP or BMI license.
Of course, if Cumulus keeps firing talented people, screwing with the salespeople's commissions, and replacing seasoned professionals with interns and inexperienced kids, the problem of long stopsets just might go away.
Attorneys from BMI have been known to visit businesses, sending the owners threatening letters if the business had a radio playing in the background. It is actually cheaper for a business to subscribe to Sirius XM or Muzak than it is to buy an ASCAP or BMI license.
Of course, if Cumulus keeps firing talented people, screwing with the salespeople's commissions, and replacing seasoned professionals with interns and inexperienced kids, the problem of long stopsets just might go away.
Yes, the commercial thing can be a problem, especially when you're in a business and you're hearing a spot promoting the same product and a competitor! A for the talent, Magic 93 has some excellent part timers who could easily be full-time. Not sure if they don't want to take that chance or were never offered the opportunity. Seeing what has recently transpired, I'd certainly be satisfied with staying part time and not committing to a company that fires good talented people without cause and for monetary reasons alone.
emo said:
Cumulus would NEVER offer full-time jobs to the part-timers. They are far too cheap to want to pay any benefits and Cumulus takes the word "cheap" to a whole new dimension. While the Citadel people weren't exactly spendthrifts, Cumulus makes the worst of their managers look downright philanthropic. McDonald's probably pays more than what Cumulus pays the part-timers.
Their favorite option is to put syndicated programming on. They already did that on 97.9X after blowing out Bone & Rebecca. There is no cost, other than giving a couple of minutes of spot avails to the syndicator. Since the former ABC Radio Network division is now part of Cumulus and since it offers 24-hour formats and a la carte syndicated shows, Cumulus can now do everything in house. Goodbye localism! Your favorite local radio station will become a satellite dish connected to a little black box in an equipment rack.
As for the few people left at 600 Baltimore Drive: Get your airchecks and résumés up to date and leave that rapidly sinking ship!
Now that Phil is gone from Wilkes Barre/Scranton, who is taking care of their engineering? Hope they're ready to move into WARM when things start falling apart there.
Who is doing the engineering there now that Phil is gone? I hope they're ready to camp out at WARM, the 'trouble'season is fast approaching.
dont know whos doing the engineering at warm, but i doubt if they will find anyone like phil..he put his heart and soul into that station, plus being the p.d. at 590... and he took care of all the other stations at citadel too. the man was on call 24-7 and he got the shaft like so many other people. he also wanted to get warm back as close as he could to the original signal, and sound, but they never had the money to do it.. but they always had money for the fms.. they seemed to forget it was warm that made the money to buy magic and and the other fms..i wish phil well, he loves broadcasting, and hes a good radio guy..
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normhill007
Guest
From what I heard 5 years ago, the ground radials are in "disrepair" as well as other major problems. Heard it would cost about a mil to bring it back. RIP
Can anyone tell me how WARM's signal is today compared to a few decades ago? I know it's not as good, but how much worse is it? Sadly I wasn't alive for WARM in it's glory.
I would say it really is noticeably less powerful in Wilkes-Barre/Wyoming Valley than it was in its heyday in the 1960s. That may have to do with two things I've heard about:
1. a fire at the tower site years ago
2. a discovery that one of the towers was unwittingly on land that wasn't leased to the station. Evidently it hadn't been properly surveyed, requiring a subsequent relocation of one of the towers.
I don't know anything about either of those conditions, or even if they are true.
The signal still does well toward Stroudsburg and toward Tunkhannock, but I don't know if it still "reaches the beaches" the way it used to. Believe it or not, it used to hit Atlantic City!
And btw, I disagree with the "shut it down" philosophy. If it were refurbished, it would be a real contender, imo.
1. a fire at the tower site years ago
2. a discovery that one of the towers was unwittingly on land that wasn't leased to the station. Evidently it hadn't been properly surveyed, requiring a subsequent relocation of one of the towers.
I don't know anything about either of those conditions, or even if they are true.
The signal still does well toward Stroudsburg and toward Tunkhannock, but I don't know if it still "reaches the beaches" the way it used to. Believe it or not, it used to hit Atlantic City!
And btw, I disagree with the "shut it down" philosophy. If it were refurbished, it would be a real contender, imo.
I was able to receive it as far as Jackson, NJ over the summer. Didn't go farther than that so I'm not sure if it still does reach the beach as you mentioned. Without Phil, WARM's signal can only get worse from here on.
ty_kleinle said:
The signal deteriorated badly over the years. In its heyday, WARM put a good signal southeast to the Shore communities in New Jersey and northwest into Binghamton and almost to Syracuse. There are two deep nulls to the northeast and southwest to protect WROW in Albany and WHP in Harrisburg.
I first heard WARM in the mid-1960s, when I was a young kid near Newark, NJ. I had a little RCA 5-tube table radio and tuned a little past WMCA (570), when I heard a station that played music that I liked, together with jingles that sounded like the ones on WABC (the PAMS jingle package). The station was WARM. A few years later, I would lose WARM at night when the Cubans turned up the power on Radio Rebelde, a flamethrower with a transmitter in the Regla section of Havana. That station later moved to 710 to jam WAQI, a Spanish-language talk station from Miami.
WARM needs a new ground system, a redesigned phasor, and a new transmitter. Their current main transmitter is an old Gates unit that is about 40 years old. It might not hurt to replace the four older towers (Tower #5 was built in the 1980s, when one tower in the array had to be moved.) The older towers are crooked and off plumb. They were built in 1949. The top loading used there is also rather "Mickey Mouse", as it consists of a cable strung between pairs of towers, with egg insulators separating the sections used for each tower. With time, those cables would break due to corrosion or icing conditions and that would wreak havoc on that antenna array!
A few years ago, I measured WARM's field strength at several places in the Wilkes-Barre / Scranton area. Under the old FCC rules, an AM station had to deliver 25 mV/m into its city of license. WARM delivered between 6 and 9 mV/m into downtown Scranton. In Pittston, I had 11 mV/m. In downtown Wilkes-Barre, the signal was only about 3 mV/m, which is listenable but not great. In downtown Hazleton, I did not even get half a millivolt! The north lobe seems to be better, as I got 23 mV/m in Tunkhannock.
Unfortunately, the greedmongers at Cumulus will let that legendary station bleed to death. Yes, Citadel was cheap, but Cumulus is the epitome of cheap. There is no local engineer at the Wilkes-Barre cluster. Their engineer in Allentown has to cover from Scranton to Ephrata and his background is better in IT and computers than it is in transmitters and RF. He's going to really have fun when one of our legendary winter storms knocks multiple stations off the air in various parts of the state.
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