It could. But, Bloomberg has $50 million to spend and wants to simulcast on FM? Unless they use 98.7 for all news to compete against WINS it could work. They could definitely take out WCBS
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ESPN 98.7 FM to be no more come August 31, 2024
- Thread starter NYAZSporty
- Start date
It's not like they can sell the transmitter land for 1130 although that would be one nice donation for the wildlife preserve that now surrounds the towers.
Mike Bloomberg has always run 1130 as a vanity project. Ratings do not matter for him, and it's likely because of him that 1130 has even remained on the air.
1130 is not a "vanity project". It is and always was a low cost way to further entrench the Bloomberg image and brand. The objective is to keep people loyal to the Bloomberg Terminal and other services by having a presence with its financial information in multiple places always.
If your target is that 0.01% of New Yorkers who are responsible for contracting Bloomberg services or using them, that is all that matters.
That is a smaller target audience than Country or Alternative.
I’m listening now. If they were to go to fm, they could give WINS a run for their money. this might be worth the investment for Bloomberg. It’s a really polished product. If they could add a reporter, this could work
But the clientele bills so much more than either of those formats ever could.
I wasn't trying to use the phrase in a negative way but in exactly those terms. Still I apologize, it was a poor choice of words.
No, they wouldn't. We are talking about two different stations providing different services and functions, each with well-entrenched audiences. And remember that Bloomberg already provides business news to WINS.
You must have forgotten that WBBR tried a more general news format around the turn of the century, trying to compete with WINS and WCBS. It was short-lived. They've stayed in their lane ever since, and good for them. They don't need ratings to make money.
And, David Gleason is correct when he clarified that WBBR isn't a vanity project. Whereas WABC under Red Apple is, and we certainly don't need more of that.
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I could’ve sworn I'd read Emmis was to get $1.2 million/month in its last year of the LMA. Not that I couldn’t have read it incorrectly or that something couldn't have changed since it was originally signed, but that’s what I remember.
No, it's not a vanity project, it's a brand extension. They have two audiences: the one that consists of Wall Street people, corporate executives, active investors and traders, people running "family offices", foundation leaders, employees of the Fed, execs and higher-level employees of money center banks, and on and on. The other audience is listeners that aren't actively in the former group but aspire to be, or used to be and have retired, or are just hyper-interested in intelligent reportage and conversations about the world of finance and politics (the kind of politics that affects the world of finance, not just the Trump Soap Opera, Mayor Adams' latest shenanigans, who's shooting whom in the Bronx and the like).
To the best of my knowledge, Bloomberg doesn't break out the revenues and earnings of its broadcast division separately, but it's handy to keep in mind that they acquired WNEW-AM in 1992, and have been doing this format since then. And have added stations in Boston, Washington DC and San Francisco to their mini-chain since then, so it must be achieving one or more of its goals.
Although to be fair, the stations in Boston, DC and SF are LMAs. The DC station is owned by Audacy, Boston by Beasley, and the SF station is owned by iHeart.
Bloomberg bought the Newburyport, MA stations north of Boston to extend their reach to the north shore. They LMA WRCA 1330 AM and 106.1 FM from Beasley.
www.bloombergmedia.com
“Bloomberg Radio will take complete ownership of the station from Port Broadcasting pending FCC approval.”
Bloomberg Radio Now Programming WNBP-AM in Newburyport, MA | Bloomberg Media
Intelligence for the new era of business. @BBGMedia
www.bloombergmedia.com
“Bloomberg Radio will take complete ownership of the station from Port Broadcasting pending FCC approval.”
Bloomberg Acquires WNBP Newburyport MA
After leasing 1330 WRCA Watertown/106.1 W291CZ Boston MA from Beasley Media in July, Bloomberg LP is purchasing Port Broadcasting Oldies
radioinsight.com
Reading my post again, I wrote the amount backward. I had $1.2 million/month on the brain but wrote 2.1 million when I did the calculation.
Someone who knows what they are talking about out needs to clarify this for me. Is it a realistic report or mere industry happy talk? I have debated the issue with someone whose opinion I can respect, and they were fairly convinced that the ability of broadcast radio ever being able to attract the under 25 audience was dead and gone. By extension, that means that the future of broadcast radio is over. The points brought up in this series of polls and findings seems to refute that.88%.
Radio Statistics in [y] (Listening & Advertising) - Musical Pursuits
Despite the common belief that radio is dead and not relevant to younger generations, radio...musicalpursuits.com
What we know is they use many forms of media, not just one. They use whatever gets them the content they want.
Although I wager that the 18 - 34 listenership skews heavily to the upper side of that group, there have to be at least some of the younger set there. At the same time, the anecdotal evidence that enthusiasm for radio is not there for the under 25's as it was for previous generations can't be denied. I bet that is because the main product that radio delivers today, long sets of our continuous favorites, is not something they need, especially if it includes proportionately long sets of commercial interruptions. Big615 is the musicradio future.
If 98.7 remains commercial, it will be an opportunity for radio to begin changing what it does and start getting those under 25's back into the fold. I have been told that the young generation has been lost to any one of hundreds of podcasts and ultra-niched music playlists. However, of these, there have to be some that have universal appeal. Those should be playing 'the big time' on broadcast radio.
Radio has strengths that the internet can't easily replicate. Chief among them is the ability to gather a defined audience that an advertiser will appreciate. What kind of money is generated by a podcast? How much do podcasters make from podcasting? Can broadcast radio give a podcaster more money, a bigger audience, and with less distribution headaches? I have been told that Big 615 gets a nice piece of change from Tractor Supply, but compared to broadcast radio, how big?
The limiting factors I have been told of broadcast radio I believe are overblown: "Kids don't listen to the AM/FM radio." No they don't - instead they access their favorite radio stations on their phone or blue tooth app. "Kids don't listen on a schedule, they listen on demand when they want." NPR has already figured this out, with virtually anything they do available on the internet, archived. If commercial broadcast radio can figure out how to weave the sponsorships in within the program without being intrusive, let the listener listen whenever they want after the original broadcast. If audio sound was ever a driving factor as to winning the battle for ears, I'd put a Smartspeaker over earphones any day. And I think it largely negates the basic problem of AM. 1050 WEPN will sound fine where the kids access it - on their phone.
The future for broadcast radio has to be more than music. Speculation on what variety of music will play on 98.7should only be part of the question. What goes on after the morning show ought to have serious thought put to it, and it ought to be more than what DJ and whether it should be commercial free for an hour. Formats need to move more to an appeal for an overall demographic: Black Women, Hispanic Men, White Women, and tailor the programming to meet that group, and make it varied enough that they 'won't touch that dial.' If all they want is music, they will be gone anyway at the first extended commercial block, so trying to fight that is a losing battle. Playing that music game will be easy and cheap to program, but ultimately it will be a losing endeavor.
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Certified statistics by an impartial company. But you can believe whatever you want. And as I said, the meters register people whether they're paying attention or not, whether they're listening in the car, or on their phone. The device doesn't matter. And just because they use a streaming service doesn't mean they don't use anything else. If you read the report, there's a lot of overlap. So 88% may use radio, but as much as 72% stream, and another 80% use social media. So what we see is that people listen to many things, not just one.
At this point, no one knows. I can tell you I use radio a lot more now than I did when I was a kid. I don’t have time to build personal playlists and curate them. Radio is easy. Push a button, and you have music. Don’t like it? Push another button. Granted, I stream radio more often than I listen to it on an actual radio, but it's still radio. There's little doubt that kids today use radio less than my generation did, but they still use it. The question is how much will they, or anyone else, too, really, use radio as they get older. The general population uses it way less than it did 20 years ago, too. Around 2000, roughly 20% of radios were on at any given time between 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM. Today, it's closer to 5%.
Listen to what you’re saying. You're saying, “AM isn’t a problem if you’re not listening to it on the radio.” That might be the best argument yet for knocking down those towers and selling the land those stations are on. Facetious ribbing aside, I have been saying for awhile that radio and the way we perceive it are evolving. It's not going away and is unlikely to ever go away. That doesn’t mean, however, that transmitters aren’t destined to become scrap metal and/or end up residing permanently in landfills. I don’t think it'll happen soon, and I'll probably be dead by the time it happens, but it could well end up that way.
That's basically what Craig Karmazin was saying in the OP. The traditional AM/FM transmission isn't as important as the content.
For that reason, he's also given up on traditional radio ratings. They don't measure what he's doing.
The 88% you replied with is not "white persons," which is what he asked about, is it?
Also, statistics are never impartial. They are always cherry-picked and spun by whoever is using them to try to make themselves look good.
If you want "impartial" you need access to all the raw data and then you can dig into them yourself and see what it really tells you, but this company doesn't give us that, does it?
Finally, this company is not impartial. They are measuring the media they are being paid to measure, and they are presenting the most favorable statistics for that client in a public report like this.
They don't work for the media. They work for the advertisers. That's why they exist. The advertisers don't believe sales people in radio. Do you blame them? So the advertisers insist that radio stations subscribe. If you read the real data (not just the free stuff) you'll see it's not all favorable and it's not all good news. If you pay for the full report, you can see the raw data. But you want everything for free. So that's what you get.
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