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HERE'S WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH WYTS

J

jakej

WYTS has officially stood for We're Your Talk Station. In light of the recent ratings and the controversy that always seems to follow guys like Imus, Savage, and O'Reilly, the letters should now stand for We're Yielding To Sanity, We're Yanking The Slander, and guess what -- We're Yearning To Sing instead! Then Clear Channel turns the station over to me, WYTS beautifully and wonderfully becomes We're Yesterday's Top Secrets, and except for Reds games the fantastic music and I are on the air 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Within six months the station goes from the very bottom of the 12+ chart to the very top. And no, I haven't been drinking.
This is not a joke; this is very real. Or at least it should be.
 
Well, I think it sounds intriguing, and I'm sure I'd end up listening.  Now as for going to #1, I don't think *anything* could accomplish that with 1230's signal, unless maybe they went 100% porn-movie audio and somehow it didn't get yanked by the FCC or Phil Burress.

BTW, I like your ideas for what the WYTS calls should actually stand for now, as well as what it would mean if they adopt your format.
 
Okay, you and Roo may be right, but "We're Yesterday's Top Secrets" would be big. Very big. Maybe not #1 big, but it'd be as big as the limitations of 1230's wattage or whatever would enable it to be. When you have a lot of stations that play the Hits but only one that plays the Top Secrets, then that very special station becomes 1) a lot of people's favorite, and 2) EVERYONE ELSE's second-most favorite. Well, everyone else within earshot of its signal in central Ohio, that is, who likes either oldies, classic rock, or alternative. See, for the most part we'd be "Same Artists/Different Songs". To anyone who likes any form of rock and roll, hey, just name us your ten favorite groups or singers, and you can bet that we'll be playing some incredible stuff by 'em all. Great songs that you haven't already heard on the radio and suffered with over and over and over and over, again and again and again and again.
If, and I know it's a big if, but IF I could get Clear Channel to give me just a small number of billboards, then I guarantee that 100% of the people who see a magical 6-word message on them would have NO CHOICE but to immediately check us out, and a big percentage of them would become instantly hooked. I'd tell you what that 6-word message is, but then someone would steal it, and it wouldn't work half as good for them -- so the whole thing would be nothing but a total tragedy. I will say this -- the message would NOT be written around the curvature of a woman's 38-inch bustline ... but it would be enormously successful anyways.
Hey Al, reading hot CIA and FBI memos sure would be a lot of fun -- and "All the President's Men" has always been a very inspirational movie to me, so I should want to root out the dirtiest truth that there is and expose it to the world -- but I think I'd rather go with a liberal music philosophy than something that hints at liberal talk. Maybe I'm nuts, maybe 1230's signal gets out far worse than I realize, but with the marketing strategies that I have, and with the INCREDIBLE SONGS that the world has, I figure liberal music will outdraw liberal talk by about a 10:1 ratio, and it will also outdraw whatever the mess is that's on WYTS now by about a 20:1 ratio. Where'd these numbers come from? They came to me in a vision ("Network" is also on my Top Ten Most Influential Films list).
I got amazingly irresistible billboards, I got friends at our news and entertainment papers, I'm going to have word-of-mouth that you wouldn't believe (due in part to something linked to my 24/7 presence at the microphone that again, I can't go into more detail about, because it's dog-eat-dog out there but no one's gonna eat THIS dog), and I've got an imaginatively-themed, two-year list of weekly Featured Artist pairings that would send a lot of you into the most exciting cardiac arrest you've ever had if I chose to unload those details at this time. As I wrote in my "Wake Up To This Each Morning And Smile!" initial post, I've got a thirty-minute presentation prepared that covers so many bases that you'd have to put two dozen baseball fields together to see 'em all ... and so UNTIL YOU DO, please try to restrain from putting blinders on my dreams and my (perhaps very slightly) drunken boasts!
I know that I write a lot, and I talk a lot, and I'm sorry about the length of some of these radio-info jags of mine. But I get started and I go and I go and I go and it's all so exciting that I cannot stop. Someday, and I hope that it is someday soon, you will know everything, and you'll understand.
 
Oh...I get it! I get it!

It's called "play the stiffs" radio. Or, "Play The B-sides"

It's been tried dozens and dozens of times. And failed every time.

Recent example: WULM in Springfield (1600 AM). Played, at one time, a 4,000 song oldies library.

It played oldies that even I couldn't recognize (and I have a personal oldies library of well over 10,000
titles).

The station never showed up in any rating book, and is presently in serious financial straits.

And, the tactic "we're everybody's second favorite radio station" also doesn't work. If you're everybody's
second favorite, you have few, if any P-1 listeners. (yes, that's Arbi-speak for people who identify your
station as their favorite.) You need P-1's to get ratings.
 
Now come on, Kevin, that tone isn't anywhere near as friendly as it was in your encouraging "Wake Up To This Each Morning And Smile" post -- what happened?!?!
We wouldn't be "everybody's second favorite radio station"; as indicated in my post we would be "a lot of people's favorite" and "everyone else's second-most favorite" -- there's a big difference there. By "lot of people's favorite" I mean 250,000, which hopefully would be enough P-1's to place us fairly high in the big chart, and by "everyone else's second-most favorite" I mean the remaining 1,172,700 who live in our market. We'd do all right with Arbitron -- the vision told me so.
Nothin' stiff about the songs, which would be A-sides that haven't been played to death as well as, yes, album cuts and B-sides. If it was just smash hits that we played, well, um, that would sort of defeat the purpose of the format, wouldn't it?
No one's tried this concept dozens and dozens of times like I'm going to try it. Springfield isn't Columbus, oldies isn't an oldies/classic rock/alternative combination, and any deejays that WULM had weren't me. No one did for their town what I did for this one during the '80s, no one's ever had all of the ideas that I now have, and that's why 1600 and any other similar risk-takers have flopped. And that's why so many are flopping in Columbus today -- because their general managers and program directors don't have half an hour to listen to me, and/or to give me and my ideas and the music a chance. They'd rather continue to wallow in the lower tiers of the chart.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR POSTING, Kevin and Al and Nu_Roo_2. You're also the only ones who posted under my "Wake Up" topic. Apparently no one else cares, and they're all happy with the garbage they got now. Hey, people out there, constructive criticism is welcome. Or even destructive criticism. I'd greatly appreciate all of the suggestions and/or attacks I can get, so please don't be afraid to respond. I promise not to bite any heads off -- not literally, anyways.
 
Sorry 'bout being testy...I'll try to adopt a nicer tone here.

Not trying to squelch your dreams here, but think this through.

Why do you think some of those "A" sides you mention don't get played? Do you seriously believe that the people who work as Program Directors inside radio stations are totally stupid? Do you really think that there are thousands of great songs out there that radio just flat out ignores, whether due to bias, corporate playlists, payola or...what?

Most songs that don't get played on the radio don't get played because: few people are interested in hearing them. And that is the case the vast majority of the time. If a song is truly popular, radio will find it and play it.

Radio researches everything to a degree that is almost unfathomable. 9 times out of ten, the research is
correct. Now, that one time out of ten might leave the hole for the station you are thinking about. But, that's an awfully big "might". I'm just trying to make you see the size of the gamble you want to take.

You mention cume figures. WNCI gets an average cume of about 325,000 listeners a week. That's on a blowtorch FM station. You have no chance whatsoever to get 225,000 cume on an AM station with a nighttime signal that barely reaches Dublin. Especially with a music format. Music on AM is, virtually, dead.
It can be tough to get 100,000 cume on some of the smaller FM's in Columbus.

There is no difference in the comparisons between Springfield and Columbus. People are people. And they react the same way, whether big city or small. Big market or small. I've worked in both.

Can there be regional differences? Sometimes. There were some local acts the old WCOL-AM played that were big in Columbus and nowhere else. Same happened with the old WCOL-FM (the freeform rocker of the
70's). But big playlists, with lots of "unfamiliar" titles are beaten virtually everytime by "focused" lists of
"familiar/favorite" titles. That's why the old WCOL-FM gave way to Q-FM 96.

Again, no rain on your parade here. Just realize the gamble you'd be taking.
 
Kevin, you seem to imply that everything gets tested.  That's untrue even for a lot old songs that were pretty big hits.  Wasn't that realization one of the major drivers behind Jack/Bob?  While that format has fizzled in a lot of markets, or never got traction in the first place (Columbus included, given that Ted's signal doomed it from Day 1), it's still going really strong in other markets like St. Louis.  I'm not saying that jakej's looking to do Jack/Bob, but sometimes stuff apparently just gets "assumed" to "not work" even when the evidence for that conclusion isn't really there. 

Also, some of the most successful products, from radio to consumer packaged goods, have somehow managed to break all the rules and largely flaunt research, yet still win big and lead the naysayers to say "yes, but..." even as they are feverishly working on their own copycat products.  Sure, the failures outnumber the successes, but when something does break through, it can be big and even transformational.  Many of the big successes come from taking risks.  Look at Brokeback Mountain -- the producers took a big risk but made it work with some brilliant and innovative marketing.  Of course this is harder to do in today's corporate environment.  Gotta get that shareholder return and pay off the debt NOW!  Some of the 70's TV shows that turned out to be huge, classic hits never would have made it past week 13 in today's environment.  Hell, even Seinfeld probably would't have been given the time it needed to get traction had it debuted today. 

I'm a HUGE proponent of research, but I still know that "Play it Safe, Play It Safe, Play It Safe" isn't always the way to go. People often take research too literally...it should be an AID to art and creativity and gut-feel, especially in an emotionally-connected medium like radio).

BTW, many of today's highly-successful AAA's play what were B-Side "COL-FM"-type tunes in their day.
 
I think I'm going on strike until some others chime in with their two cents' worth. But thanks, Kevin and Nu_Roo_2; those are very interesting posts.
 
Nu-roo:

You raise some good points. And, I'm not going to say that there may not be a song or two that falls through the cracks with music testing. It's certainly possible. However, how many songs do you think a station should have to test? I've seen tests that went as high as 900-1200 songs...and when the day is done and you've sorted through it all, it's still tough to get more than about 300-400 songs to test. If you can't get 60% of test audiences to say they like a song...why would you want to play it? (60% is a low figure...most companies want it to be more like 66% or better.)

The Jack/Bob/Steve/Fred stations came on the air very wide. Most have trimmed their playlists by about 300-500 titles. That's when the ratings stabilized. And, agreed, Ted is not a good example...a poorly programmed Adult Hits format on a crappy signal had no chance of success, no matter how many trade ads you put in the Other Paper. (I loved hearing Celine Dion into Van Halen..yeah, right!)

Agreed, though...research is not a be-all, end-all. Some stations go overboard with it, or make judgements with it in an uncareful manner. Others do research, but ask the wrong questions for the wrong reasons. But the stations that do it...and do it right, are the ones that most likely succeed.

And, as it pertains to the question raised: could a wide-list music station not focused on playing hits, but finding "favorites" the other stations never play attract 225,000 listeners a week on a marginal at best AM signal? My heart wants to say yes, but my brain says: no way.
 
what should be done with 1230 is what should be done with all of the ineffective am signals from a bygone era. pull the plug and use the electricity on a more worthwile cause. i was there at the end of 1230s glory days. i witnessed repeated efforts to perform cpr on a dying signal. i watched talented people pour their efforts down a rathole that also consumed a good bit of money. say what you will about what an idiot alex williams was as he drove great trails down the porcelian convience. he did manage to hire some decent talent. but signals like 1230 and 1580 haven't produced ratings or revenues in 30 years and nothing is going to change that short of godalmighty programming them.
 
Sadly, I'm afraid I almost agree with you.

It wouldn't hurt the AM band one bit to turn off about half of the low-powered, 1K or less signals. In fact,
it might improve problems with interference.

Then, if you could get manufacturers to make AM radios that don't roll off at about 3K, maybe, the stations that remained might have an easier time attracting listeners. Perhaps some of them could be granted a decent boost in power.

Then, if we could get the FCC to actually do it's job...oops, sorry, I was getting a bit delusional there.
 
Although I like a station that has allot of depth, playing deep end, and alternate tracks and seldom heard songs, I firmly believe a station needs to have core or focus songs. These would be the songs that do very well in listener surveys like Kevin spoke of. The exception would be if you had unlimited funds to keep the station going, as I don't think you would be able to sustain a large enough market share to charge enough for your ads to keep the station running.

As for what should be done with WYTS, since AM is not good for hi-fidelity music, along with other drawbacks, I could easily see the FCC reclaiming the AM spectrum in the distant future like they are planing on doing with the Analog TV signal. Maybe they will expand the FM frequency to make more room for the growing number of FM stations. Of course all this is long range as the FM radios receivers would have to be enhanced to pick up the signal. What ever the future of AM (WYTS or other) I wouldn't bank allot of money on it. Since Talk is Cheap, I'd say keep it a talk station, or maybe play old time radio shows. At best as a talk station, maybe you can talk about really hot topics that cause listeners to flock to the station (if they know how to get AM on the radio). Ask teenagers if they listen to AM stations, I'm sure the percentage will be less that 20% and that is being generous.

Of course these are just my opinions, yours may vary. ;)
 
CC decides to keep the present format. Reason why is that they don't want another Talk FM station. So much for the free market. Plus their format flipped flopped. Plus WMNI is already have the niche for an AM music station.
 
There's a LOT of stations, both AM and FM, that are "slowly bleeding to death in the ratings" ... and I'll take (almost) any one of 'em!
By the way, Kevin, I'm glad that you understand willcail's post well enough to make that quip about its last sentence. Could you please explain the rest of it to me?
 
I believe WMNI has a good sound for its' format.

But, given what I've seen in the past few rating books...this station (which used to be in the 3 share range pretty consistantly, has now dropped below a 2. They've made significant cutbacks in news programming and local announcers...no doubt a cost cutting move. (No doubt due, in part, to the lame numbers the Blitz has had lately, and the disaster that was (and maybe still is) TED.)

It's tough enough to get ad dollars with a format that is largely a 45+ or 55+ audience. Add to it, ratings in the 1 share range and you have...as I noted...a station that seems to be bleeding to death.
 
No no no -- I meant explaining the rest of HIS post to me, not yours! Willcail, are you out there? If the format flip was a flop, then why stick with it? And can't Clear Channel just completely drop the mess without passing it on to an FM station of theirs, which they of course would be absolutely crazy to do since all of those stations are much, much more successful than 1230? And what's the free market got to do with any of this?
To the rest of you, hey, how about some feedback over on the "WYTS Programming Schedule" topic about gabigley1's recent post, okay? He was nice enough to forward last Thursday's Other Paper article to us for our consideration and discussion, so let's get over there and do it. I, for one, find one of Mr. Collins' comments in the full piece to be rather astonishing ... see if you can guess which one!
 
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