Easy Listening Radio Station in the New York City area

[nd2023]

It may be #1 6+ in Tampa, but I have a feeling when it comes to billing, it's not close to the top.

It is around 14th in billing, which is also around where they rank in 25 to 54 listening.

It's likely cheap to operate, and bills enough to get a good cash flow, but it is not a good example for NY for a variety of reasons that have already been posted.

Thanks, David. I figured you would know how it's billing.

Although a very lite AC like WDUV probably wouldn't work in most rated markets, it might work in some small non-rated markets. We have a problem now with some of our 50-60 year old advertisers who themselves have aged out of the demos for our Hot AC. They don't like the music, think only kids listen to it, and they're a tough sell for buying advertising... of course, some of them do like our country station.

In small, rural markets like ours, the advertisers often don't want to buy stations if they personally don't like the music. CHR is a very hard sell.

A soft AC would probably bill well in your market

 

[Groove1670]

WFEZ is 10th in 25-54 in Miami, and WDUV is 15th in the Tampa Bay market; they are hardly the top stations in either case.

David, So far has FEZ had the best ratings. I don't think dance and rock did well on the frequency. How did classical do. It has been too long & I can't remember, but I thought it was top 10 6+

 

[klutch00]

The place for an easy listening/standards station is in the non-commercial educational end of the FM band.

Bob Bittner has also been able to carve out a successful niche on the AM band for his commercial-free, listener-supported easy listening/adult standards stations 740 WJIB in Boston (in AM Stereo!) and 730 WJTO in Maine.

Also, don't forget that up the river in Albany, WROW seems to be holding its own. Granted, WKLI was very successful and because of its demise, it seems many disenfranchised listeners were willing to make the switch over to the 'land of the kilohertz.'

 

[WPHA]

...it's called BROADcasting for a reason. Formats need to be broad to reach a broad audience due to limited spectrum. Even while stations need to offer things that will make the medium unique in a fragmented media environment, stations still need to offer something for everyone.

Limited spectrum... yet we have so many stations, all playing THE SAME THING, that it is VERY easy to scan the dial, and hear the same song over and over as you hop from station-to-station. It was a game I played as a kid, and guess what? IT STILL WORKS! Why not? When you have about 20 signals all playing nearly the same 40 songs, sure! Unique? Hardly.

When I run out of fingers AND TOES, counting the "top 40" stations on the FM dial that can be picked up with a CRUMMY car radio, there's something wrong. That's not "variety" by any definition. Not ONE Jazz or BM station in the bunch. Up until 2 months ago, not one Christian A/C station, either. At least we now have THAT!

 

[TimeIsTight]

Limited spectrum... yet we have so many stations, all playing THE SAME THING,

The reason they are all playing the same thing, is that is what the vast majority of advertising desirable listeners prefer to hear, and the representative sample of the public votes with their PPM devices.

Possibly some others can clarify this, but I think there was a time when the FCC was involved in what format a station could offer. But those were also the days of huge ratings for dominant stations, while others were forced to stick with smaller interest groups. Seems WRVR was "stuck" with jazz for a while because that was its "approved" format.

Once the FCC deregulated and decided that radios were just entertainment and information appliances, in the same way that microwave ovens are food heating appliances, variety on the dial was doomed. Then there was the feeding frenzy that made licenses too expensive for all but huge well-funded corporations. And finally cluster strategies that effectively limit format competition, and you wind up with the top three stations in the NY market playing some of the same music, sharing the same core of listeners, and all owned by one company, Clear Channel, which also happens to own the most radio stations in the country.

And, never forget that almost 40% of the NY market is now Black and Hispanic, and those groups are attractive to advertisers too.

Onetime, Beautiful Music stations WPAT, and WRFM, now serve those market segments, and the kind of people who used to have a choice of four beautiful music stations, two commercial classical stations, a commercial jazz station, and a country station or two, now have none of those formats to listen to.

Some would say that is the free market at work, the scare resources of available frequencies have just gone to where they produce the greatest economic benefits for the most people. Majority rules, and people who like country music, jazz, classical and beautiful music are now just tiny minorities too small in number and economically unimportant to deserve a rare frequency to offer what they want to hear.

Hopefully, Internet radios will shortly become standard in cars, and easier to use in houses and as portables, and will come with an almost unlimited choice of programming. Then an entirely different set of market forces will come into play, and what economists call "pure competition" will exist in what has been a somewhat limited competition for the attention of listeners because of limited spectrum.

 

[davideduardo]

Possibly some others can clarify this, but I think there was a time when the FCC was involved in what format a station could offer. But those were also the days of huge ratings for dominant stations, while others were forced to stick with smaller interest groups.

The FCC only got, for a period of time, involved with classical music stations and, amid listener protests, tried to equate classical with listener interests. They held off the changes at several classical stations, and caused others that were wanting to switch formats to help establish classical on, usually, a non-commercial station in the market.

Efforts were made to get the FCC to protect jazz (isolated case), but eventually it was seen that if a format were desirable, it would be offered and if there were not enough listeners it would not. But, convincing the government that neither morality nor taste can be legislated tends to be a tedious process.